Linus Torvalds

See, you not only have to be a good coder to create a system like Linux, you have to be a sneaky bastard too.

The Linux philosophy is "laugh in the face of danger". Oops. Wrong one. "Do it yourself". That's it.

Any program is only as good as it is useful.

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.'

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

If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won.

In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny.

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

An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program.

A lot of people want to have market share numbers, lots of users, because that's how they view their self worth. For me, one of the most important things for Linux is having a big community that is actively testing new kernels; it's the only way to support the absolute insane amount of different hardware we deal with.

I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.