Linus Torvalds Quotes

Ubuntu is doing amazing things, and I think it's going to change the face of the desktop.

A lot of people who work on open-source software don't mind making money elsewhere. They aren't anticommercial.

I think Linux is a great thing, in the big picture. It's a great hacker's tool, and it has a lot of potential to become something more.

While I personally believe strongly in the philosophy and ideology of the Free Software movement, you can't win people over just on philosophy; you have to have a better product, too.

I don't try to be a threat to MicroSoft, mainly because I don't really see MS as competition. Especially not Windows-the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different.

I've never regretted not making Linux shareware: I really don't like the pay for use binary shareware programs.

When it comes to software, I much prefer free software, because I have very seldom seen a program that has worked well enough for my needs, and having sources available can be a life-saver.

I do get my pizzas paid for by Linux indirectly.

Linux is only free if your time has no value.

I think operating systems work best if they're free and open. Particular applications are more likely to be proprietary.

People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi. Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.

Success for open source is when the term 'open source' becomes a non-factor in the decision making process, when people hear about Linux and compare it to Windows NT, and they compare it on the feature set and don't have much of an excuse not to use it.

The thing with Linux is that the developers themselves are actually customers too: that has always been an important part of Linux.

The beauty of open-source is that you can pick up right where someone left off and start right there.

There's a big tendency to gravitate toward a closed and proprietary approach too easily.

Companies have been trying to figure out what it is that makes open source work.

What commercialism has brought into Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out.

Open source production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla, can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we've known them.

Linux has never been about quality. There are so many parts of the system that are just these cheap little hacks, and it happens to run.

Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did.

There were open source projects and free software before Linux was there. Linux in many ways is one of the more visible and one of the bigger technical projects in this area, and it changed how people looked at it because Linux took both the practical and ideological approach.

When I first got into technology I didn't really understand what open source was. Once I started writing software, I realized how important this would be.

When I launched the development of the GNU system, I explicitly said the purpose of developing this system is so we can use our computers and have freedom, thus if you use some other free system instead but you have freedom, then it's a success. It's not popularity for our code but it's success for our goal.

It is the fate of operating systems to become free.

In the free/libre software movement, we develop software that respects users' freedom, so we and you can escape from software that doesn't.