Friday, October 12, 2007

Ten Funny Quotes By Linus Torvalds

  • "Dijkstra probably hates me"
  • (in kernel/sched.c)
  • "How should I know if it works? That's what beta testers are for. I only coded it"
    (somewhere in a posting)
  • "I'm an idiot.. At least this one [bug] took about 5 minutes to find.."
    (in response to a bug report)
  • "If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot of different places, just write a Unix operating system."
    (source unknown)
  • "Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect." (NewYork Times interview)
  • "An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
    (source unknown)
  • "Hey, maybe I could apply for a saint-hood from the Pope. Does somebody know what his email-address is? I'm so nice it makes you puke."
    (taken from Linus's reply to someone worried about the future of Linux)
  • "When you say "I wrote a program that crashed Windows", people just stare atyou blankly and say "Hey, I got those with the system, *for free*"
    (source unknown)
  • "Other than the fact Linux has a cool name, could someone explain why I should use Linux over BSD? No. That's it. The cool name, that is. We worked very hard on creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and it certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just to be able to say "OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a cool name". 386BSD made the mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird abbreviations into the name, and is scaring away a lot of people just because it sounds too technical."
    (Linus Torvalds' follow-up to a question about Linux)
  • "The day people think linux would be better served by somebody else (FSF being the natural alternative), I'll "abdicate". I don't think that it's something people have to worry about right now - I don't see it happening in the near future. I enjoy doing linux, even though it does mean some work, and I haven't gotten any complaints (some almost timid reminders about a patch I have forgotten or ignored, but nothing negative so far). Don't take the above to mean that I'll stop the day somebody complains: I'm thick-skinned (Lasu, who is reading this over my shoulder commented that "thick-HEADED is closer to the truth") enough to take some abuse. If I weren't, I'd have stopped developing linux the day ast ridiculed me on c.o.minix. What I mean is just that while linux has been my baby so far, I don't want to stand in the way if people want to make something better of it."
    (source unknown)

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