Linus Torvalds Quotes

Paying isn’t wrong, and being paid isn’t wrong. Trampling other people’s freedom and community is wrong, so the free software movement aims to put an end to it, at least in the area of software.

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.

As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world's ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.

Making things open-source brings the cost down.

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

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

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

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.

A critical factor in its success was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them over the Internet.

Open source can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill.

I've always felt that sort of in the abstract, open-source is the right thing to do for a lot of the kinds of things that we do. There are a variety of issues that make it a very complex discussion as to whether it actually works as a business.

I have really become a huge believer in the power of open source.

I never imagined that the Free Software Movement would spawn a watered-down alternative, the Open Source Movement, which would become so well-known that people would ask me questions about "open source" thinking that I work under that banner.

When I do programming in my free time and for my own enjoyment, I really want to have a kind of protection: knowing that when I improve a program those improvements will continue to be available to me and others in future versions of the program.

Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.

Today many people are switching to free software for purely practical reasons. That is good, as far as it goes, but that isn't all we need to do! Attracting users to free software is not the whole job, just the first step.

The True-GNU philosophy is more extreme than I care for, but it certainly laid a foundation for the current scene, as well as providing real software.

I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way.

I'd like to point out that I don't think that there is anything fundamentally superior in the GPL as compared to the BSD license, for example. But the GPL is what I want to program with, because unlike the BSD license it guarantees that anybody who works on the project in the future will also contribute their changes back to the community.

If the Communists win Europe and a large part of the world, it will not be because they know how to stir up discontent or how to infect people with hatred, but because they know how to preach hope.

In our modern complex world, fundamentalism is dangerous because of its rigidity and its imperviousness to other ideas.

Hating people isn’t a productive way of living. So what’s the point in hating anyone? There’s enough hate in the world as it is, without me adding to it.

I changed the Linux copyright license to be the GPL some time in the first half of 1992. Mostly because I had hated the lack of a cheaply and easily available UNIX when I had looked for one a year before.

There are no barriers to entries. Think of this as Linux in terms of software. Anyone can have part of the operating system so long as you pledge allegiance to the ideas. Previously, if you wanted to join al Qaeda, you had to travel to an al Qaeda safe haven, probably in northern Pakistan or Afghanistan. Now all you have to do is get a gun, choose a target, and carry out an attack.

The reason that the World Trade Center got hit is because there are a lot of people living in abject poverty out there who don't have any hope for a better life.