Linus Torvalds

1969– · Finnish software engineer (born 1969)

Topics: open source, programming, software engineering, life

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

  — Linus Torvalds

• I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First Linux, now git.

  — Linus Torvalds

• Controlling a laser with Linux is crazy, but everyone in this room is crazy in his own way. So if you want to use Linux to control an industrial welding laser, I have no problem with your using <code>PREEMPT_RT</code>.

  — Linus Torvalds

• Can I just once again state my love for it and hope it gets merged soon? Maybe the code isn't perfect, but I've skimmed it, and compared to the horrors that are OpenVPN and IPSec, it's a work of art.

  — Linus Torvalds

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

  — Linus Torvalds

• Those that can, do. Those that can't, complain.

  — Linus Torvalds

• I will now go back to my cave and continue pulling stuff, I just had to do something else for a while. Some people relax with a nice drink by the pool, I relax by playing around with inline asm.

  — Linus Torvalds

• Software is like sex; it's better when it's free.

  — Linus Torvalds

• Real quality means making sure that people are proud of the code they write, that they're involved and taking it personally.

  — Linus Torvalds

• And no, I am not looking for yes-men, and I like it when you call me out on my bullshit. I say some stupid things at times, there needs to be people who just stand up to me and tell me I'm full of shit.

  — Linus Torvalds

• It has nothing to do with dinosaurs. Good taste doesn't go out of style

  — Linus Torvalds

• You know you're brilliant, but maybe you'd like to understand what you did 2 weeks from now.

  — Linus Torvalds

• It's what I call "mental masturbation", when you engage is some pointless intellectual exercise that has no possible meaning.

  — Linus Torvalds

• 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.

  — Linus Torvalds

• Dijkstra probably hates me.

  — Linus Torvalds

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

  — Linus Torvalds

• I think people can generally trust me, but they can trust me exactly because they know they don't have to.

  — Linus Torvalds

• 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.

  — Linus Torvalds

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

  — Linus Torvalds

• It was such a relief to program in user mode for a change. Not having to care about the small stuff is wonderful.

  — Linus Torvalds