Quotes by Linus Torvalds

“Talk is cheap. Show me the code.”

“I am not a visionary. I'm an engineer. I'm happy with the people who are wandering around looking at the stars but I am looking at the ground and I want to fix the pothole before I fall in.”

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

“Shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software with the worst of free software.”

“Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.”

“I often compare open source to science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples' ideas and making it into what science is today and th...”

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

“My name is Linus, and I am your God.”

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

“I actually think that I'm a rather optimistic and happy person; it's just that I'm not a very positive person, if you see the difference.”

“Hey, I'm a good software engineer, but I'm not exactly known for my fashion sense. White socks and sandals don't translate to 'good design sense'.”

“By staying neutral, I end up being somebody that everybody can trust. Even if they don't always agree with my decisions, they know I'm not working against them.”

“The cyberspace earnings I get from Linux come in the format of having a Network of people that know me and trust me, and that I can depend on in return.”

“To be honest, the fact that people trust you gives you a lot of power over people. Having another person's trust is more powerful than all other management techniques put together.”

“I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm also not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbi...”

“The Linux philosophy is 'Laugh in the face of danger'. Oops. Wrong One. 'Do it yourself'. Yes, that's it.”

“Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.”

“I'm interested in Linux because of the technology, and Linux wasn't started as any kind of rebellion against the 'evil Microsoft empire.'”

“I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.”

“Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their own device drivers?”