Linus Torvalds Quotes

I've actually felt slightly uncomfortable at TED for the last two days, because there's a lot of vision going on, right? And I am not a visionary. I do not have a five-year plan. I'm an engineer. And I think it's really -- I mean -- I'm perfectly happy with all the people who are walking around and just staring at the clouds and looking at the stars and saying, "I want to go there." But I'm looking at the ground, and I want to fix the pothole that's right in front of me before I fall in. This is the kind of person I am.

Get rid of it. And I don't *ever* want to see that shit again.

Christ, people. Learn C, instead of just stringing random characters together until it compiles (with warnings).

We don't merge kernel code just because user space was written by a retarded monkey on crack.

I am a lazy person, which is why I like open source, for other people to do work for me.

I don’t care about you.

On the internet nobody can hear you being subtle.

I may be a huge computer nerd, but even so I don't think education should be about computers. Not as a subject, and not as a classroom resource either.

[GPL] version 3 was not a good "here we give you version 2" and then we try to sneak in this new rules and try force everyone to upgrade; that was the part I disliked. The FSF did really sneaky stuff, downright immoral in my opinion.

One of the things, none of the distributions have ever done right is application packaging [...] making binaries for linux desktop applications is a major fucking pain in the ass.

I don't respect people unless I think they deserve the respect. There are people who think that respect is something that should be given, and I happen to be one of the people who is perfectly happy saying no; respect should be earned. And without being earned, you don't get it. It's really that simple.

Lookie here, your compiler does some absolutely insane things with the spilling, including spilling a *constant*. For chrissake, that compiler shouldn't have been allowed to graduate from kindergarten. We're talking "sloth that was dropped on the head as a baby" level retardation levels here.

XML is crap. Really. There are no excuses. XML is nasty to parse for humans, and it's a disaster to parse even for computers. There's just no reason for that horrible crap to exist.

Because if you want me to "act professional", I can tell you that I'm not interested. 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. Because THAT is what "acting professionally" results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.

That's the spirit. Greg has taught you well. You have controlled your fear. Now, release your anger. Only your hatred can destroy me. Come to the dark side, Sarah. We have cookies.