Quotes from Linus Torvalds

An individual developer like me cares about writing the new code and making it as interesting and efficient as possible. But very few people want to do the testing.

Once you start thinking more about where you want to be than about making the best product, you're screwed.

I don't doubt at all that virtualization is useful in some areas. What I doubt rather strongly is that it will ever have the kind of impact that the people involved in virtualization want it to have.

No-one has ever called me a cool dude. I'm somewhere between geek and normal.

What I find most interesting is how people really have taken Linux and used it in ways and attributes and motivations that I never felt.

I'd much rather have 15 people arguing about something than 15 people splitting into two camps, each side convinced it's right and not talking to the other.

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.

Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it.

I lose sleep if I end up feeling bad about something I've said. Usually that happens when I send something out without having read it over a few times, or when I call somebody names.

The economics of the security world are all horribly, horribly nasty and are largely based on fear, intimidation and blackmail.

I get the biggest enjoyment from the random and unexpected places. Linux on cellphones or refrigerators, just because it's so not what I envisioned it. Or on supercomputers.

I don't expect to go hungry if I decide to leave the University. Resume: Linux looks pretty good in many places.

I've been employed by the University of Helsinki, and they've been perfectly happy to keep me employed and doing Linux.

Every once in a while an issue comes up where I have to make a statement. I can't totally avoid all political issues, but I try my best to minimize them. When I do make a statement, I try to be fairly neutral.

I don't have any authority over Linux other than this notion that I know what I'm doing.

I don't think I'm unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light.

Most of the good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.

The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children.

Any program is only as good as it is useful.

Finnish companies tend to be very traditional, not taking many risks. Silicon Valley is completely different: people here really live on the edge.

I've actually found the image of Silicon Valley as a hotbed of money-grubbing tech people to be pretty false, but maybe that's because the people I hang out with are all really engineers.

The fame and reputation part came later, and never was much of a motivator, although it did enable me to work without feeling guilty about neglecting my studies.

In open source, we feel strongly that to really do something well, you have to get a lot of people involved.

I've felt strongly that the advantage of Linux is that it doesn't have a niche or any special market, but that different individuals and companies end up pushing it in the direction they want, and as such you end up with something that is pretty balanced across the board.