Linus Torvalds Quotes

Talk is cheap. Show me the code.

software is like sex : it's better when it's free..

Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended.

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

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

Only wimps use tape backup. REAL men just upload their important stuff on ftp and let the rest of the world mirror it.

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.

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.

Theory and practice sometimes clash. And when that happens, theory loses. Every single time.

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.

Don't ever make the mistake [of thinking] that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit.

Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is an expert of understatement in his leadership of Linux development community. When eager programmers would ask him, ‘”What part of Linux should I work on?’ his answer would usually be, ‘”Let me know when you find out’ (p.286).

I'd argue that everybody wants to do something that matters

A lot of people believe in working long days and doing dou­ble, triple, or even quadruple shifts. I'm not one of them. Neither Transmeta nor Linux has ever gotten in the way of a good night's sleep. In fact, if you want to know the honest truth, I'm a firm believer in sleep. Some people think that's just being lazy, but I want to throw my pillow at them. I have a perfectly good excuse, and I'm standing by it: You may lose a few hours of your produc­tive daytime if you sleep, oh, say, ten hours a day, but those few hours when you are awake you're alert, and your brain functions on all six cylinders. Or four, or whatever.

I did learn fairly early that the best and most effective way to lead is by letting people do things because they want to do them, not because you want them to. The best leaders also know when they are wrong, and are capable of pulling themselves out. And the best leaders enable others to make decisions for them. Let me rephrase that. Much ofLinux's success can be attrib­uted to my own personality flaws: 1) I'm lazy; and 2) I like to get credit for the work of others.

An ugly system is one in which there are special interfaces for everything you want to do. Unix is the opposite. It gives you the building blocks that are sufficient for doing everything. That's what having a clean design is all about.

For high school graduation in Finland, you wear a fluffy white hat with a black band. There's a ceremony in which they hand out diplomas, and when you come home all your relatives are there with lots of champagne, flowers, and cake. And there's also a party for the entire class at a local restaurant. We did all that, and I guess I had fun, but I don't remember anything special about it. But ask me about the specs on my 68008-chip machine and I can rattle them off with total recall.

I'm a bastard. I have absolutely no clue why people can ever think otherwise. Yet they do. People think I'm a nice guy, and the fact is that I'm a scheming, conniving bastard who doesn't care for any hurt feelings or lost hours of work if it just results in what I consider to be a better system. And I'm not just saying that. I'm really not a very nice person. I can say 'I don't care' with a straight face, and really mean it.

Do no harm

I did learn fairly early that the best and the most effective way to lead is by letting people do things because they want to do them, not because you want them to.

Benevolent dictator? No, I'm just lazy. I try to manage by not making decisions and letting things occur naturally. That's when you get the best results.

The theory behind open source is simple. In the case of an operating system, the source code-the programming instructions underlying the system-is free. Anyone can improve it, change it, exploit it. But those improvements, changes, and exploitations have to be made freely available. Think Zen. The project belongs to no one and to everyone. When a project is opened up, there is rapid and continual improvement. With teams of contributors working in parallel, the results can happen far more speedily and success­ fully than if the work were being conducted behind closed doors.

I want to decide for myself. I'm very much against unnecessary rules imposed by society. I'm a big believer that you should be able to do whatever you want in the privacy of your own home as long as you don't hurt anybody else. Any law saying otherwise is a very, very broken law. And there are laws that say otherwise. I find some scary rules, especially some that are imposed on schools and children. Imagine even thinking of imposing rules about teaching evolution, and taking that into the wrong direction. That I find scary. This is social conscience rearing its ugly head in places it really has nothing at all to do with.

Intellectual property rights are sometimes hailed as the mother of creativity and invention. However, Marshall Brain points out that many of the finest examples of human creativity—from scientific discoveries to creation of literature, art, music and design—were motivated not by a desire for profit but by other human emotions, such as curiosity, an urge to create, or the reward of peer appreciation. Money didn’t motivate Einstein to invent special relativity theory any more than it motivated Linus Torvalds to create the free Linux operating system. In contrast, many people today fail to realize their full creative potential because they need to devote time and energy to less creative activities just to earn a living. By freeing scientists, artists, inventors and designers from their chores and enabling them to create from genuine desire, Marshall Brain’s utopian society enjoys higher levels of innovation than today and correspondingly superior technology and standard of living.

Según se explica en la página web, Ethereum es una plataforma que ejecuta aplicaciones descentralizadas, principalmente contratos inteligentes, «exactamente como están programados y sin posibilidad de pausa, censura, fraude ni interferencia de terceros». Ethereum se parece a bitcoin en que su ether motiva a una red de iguales para que validen las transacciones, protejan la red y creen consenso sobre lo que existe y lo que ha ocurrido. Pero se diferencia de bitcoin en que incluye algunas poderosas herramientas para ayudar a los desarrolladores y demás a crear servicios de software que van desde juegos descentralizados hasta mercados de acciones. Ethereum lo concibió en 2013 Vitalik Buterin, un canadiense de origen ruso que entonces tenía diecinueve años. Les había dicho a los desarrolladores de bitcoin que la plataforma necesitaba un lenguaje de programación más complejo que permitiera desarrollar aplicaciones. Al ver que rechazaban su propuesta, decidió crear su propia plataforma. ConsenSys fue la más rápida y se fundó para crear aplicaciones basadas en Ethereum. Dos años después la analogía es clara: Linus Torvalds es a Linus lo que Vitalik Buterin es a Ethereum.

They are the motivational factors for everything in your life-for any­ thing that you do or any living thing does: The first is survival, the second is social order, and the third is enter­tainment. Everything in life progresses in that order. Everything is moving in the same direction, but not at the same time. So basically sex has reached entertain­ment, war is close to it, technology is pretty much there. The new things are things that are just survival. Like, hopefully, space travel will at some point be an issue of survival, then it will be social, then entertainment. Look at civilization as a cult. I mean, that also follows the same pattern. Civilization starts as survival. You get together to survive better and you build up your social structure. Then eventually civilization exists purely for entertain­ment. Okay, well, not purely. And it doesn't have to be bad entertainment. The ancient Greeks are known for having had a very strong social order, and they also had a lot of entertainment. They're known for having had the best philosophers of their time. So what this builds up to is that in the end we're all here to have fun. We might as well sit down and relax, and enjoy the ride.

Sladkey recalls the first time he found and sent a bug to Linus: "My first contribution was in porting some program, probably one of my smaller personal projects. I discovered a bug. Since Linux came with source, my first inclination as a hacker was to take a look under the hood and see if I could fix the problem. I found that although I had never done any kernel work, that I was able to navigate around the code pretty easily and provide a small patch to correct the problem. "With my heart beating and my palms sweating, I composed the most professional message I could muster and sent it off to linus.torvalds@cs.helsinki.fi describing the bug and including my proposed fix. Minutes later he replied something like, 'Yup, that's a bug. Nice investigation. Thanks. Fixed,' and I was hooked.

Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FUCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?

Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FUCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fuck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?

If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won. (spoiler: it did)

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

My host, GitHub’s CEO, Chris Wanstrath, began by telling me how the “Git” got into GitHub. Git, he explained, is a “distributed version control system” that was invented in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, one of the great and somewhat unsung innovators of our time. Torvalds is the open-source evangelist who created Linux, the first open-source operating system that competed head-to-head with Microsoft Windows. Torvalds’s Git program allowed a team of coders to work together, all using the same files, by letting each programmer build on top of, or alongside, the work of others, while also allowing each to see who made what changes—and to save them, undo them, improve them, and experiment with them.

Откуда я знаю, работает это или нет? Для этого есть бета-тестеры. Я просто это накодил. — Приписывается Linus Torvalds, где-то в открытой переписке)

Бэкап на кассеты — для слабаков! _Настоящие_ мужики заливают важные вещи на ftp и ждут, пока они разойдутся по всему Интернету. — Linus Torvalds

In trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not to a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity: Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three and Linux would not exist.

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 backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords.

There are three things that have meaning for life. They are the motivational factors for everything in your life––for anything that you do or any living thing does: The first is survival, the second is social order, and the third is entertainment. Everything in life progresses in that order.

your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of minix. I can only hope (and assume) that Amoeba doesn't suck like minix does.

PS. I apologise for sometimes sounding too harsh: minix is nice enough if you have nothing else. Amoeba might be nice if you have 5-10 spare 386's lying around, but I certainly don't. I don't usually get into flames, but I'm touchy when it comes to linux :)

This probably also means that if and when we ever meet another intelligent life form in this universe, their first words are not likely to be "Take me to our leader." They're more likely to say "Party on, dude!

La UANL es la verga

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." ~Linus Torvalds

Humans are destined to be party animals, and technology will follow.

Software is like sex: it's better when it's free.” -Linus Torvalds