Linus Torvalds on Philosophy

"Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of Minix."

"Lawsuits destroy community. They destroy trust. They would destroy all the goodwill we've built up over the years by being nice."

"The main reason there are no raw devices is that I personally think that raw devices are a stupid idea."

"…the Linux philosophy is "laugh in the face of danger". Oops. Wrong one. "Do it yourself". That's it."

"There are literally several levels of SCO being wrong. And even if we were to live in that alternate universe where SCO would be right, they'd still be wrong."

"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."

"On the internet nobody can hear you being subtle."

"There are "extremists" in the free software world, but that's one major reason why I don't call what I do "free software" any more. I don't want to be associated with the people for whom it's about exclusion and hatred."

"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."

"Really. Give me *one* reason why it was written in that idiotic way with two different conditionals, and a shiny new nonstandard function that wants particular compiler support to generate even half-way sane code, and even then generates worse code? A shiny function that we have never ever needed anywhere else, and that is just compiler-masturbation."