Quotes from Eric S. Raymond

Thompson and Ritchie were among the first to realize that hardware and compiler technology had become good enough that an entire operating system could be written in C, and by 1978 the whole environment had been successfully ported to several machines of different types.

If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them.

For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.

In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe.

People who study primate societies make a distinction between two kinds of cultural interactions, agonic and hedonic. In agonic societies, you gain status by asserting dominance over others. In hedonic societies, you gain status by drawing attention to yourself. Open source is a hedonic culture.

As a Facebook user, do I have control of the data Facebook keeps about me? Concretely: can I examine and modify that data using tools of my choosing which are built for my needs?

Does Facebook act as though I own my online life, or as though it does? Concretely: Can I control what data it shares with other users, with advertisers, and with business partners?

Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer.

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developers personal itch.

If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.

Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.

Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.

The ARPAnet was the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network.