326 Quotes by Linus Torvalds

I don't think commercialization is the answer to anything. It's just one more facet of Linux, and not the deciding one by any means.

When you say 'I wrote a program that crashed Windows,' people just stare at you blankly and say 'Hey, I got those with the system, for free.'

When I do programming in my free time and for my own enjoyment, I really want to have a kind of protection: knowing that when I improve a program those improvements will continue to be available to me and others in future versions of the program.

In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it - but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in the knowledge.

I can mostly laugh at myself and this whole mess called "Linux developers," which means that I get along with most people and most people get along with me.

I like to think that I've been a good manager. That fact has been very instrumental in making Linux a successful product.

Every time I see some piece of medical research saying that caffeine is good for you, I high-five myself. Because I'm going to live forever.

I don't actually go to that many conferences. I do that a couple of times a year. Normally, I am not recognized; people don't throw their panties at me. I'm a perfectly normal person sitting in my den just doing my job.

I'm a huge believer in evolution (not in the sense that "it happened" - anybody who doesn't believe that is either uninformed or crazy, but in the sense "the processes of evolution are really fundamental, and should probably be at least thought about in pretty much any context").