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I'm generally a very pragmatic person: that which works, works.

Linus Torvalds

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Linus Torvalds
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 28
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Linus Benedict Torvalds
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More quotes by Linus Torvalds

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The big thing about distributed source control is that it makes one of the main issues with SCM's go away - the politics around who can make changes. BitKeeper showed that you can avoid that by just giving everybody their own source repository.
Linus Torvalds
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Bill Gates really seems to be much more of a business man than a technologist, while I prefer to think of Linux in technical terms rather than as a means to money. As such, I'm not very likely to make the same kind of money that Bill made.
Linus Torvalds
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Before the commercial ventures, Linux tended to be rather hard to set up, because most of the developers were motivated mainly by their own interests.
Linus Torvalds
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On the internet nobody can hear you being subtle.
Linus Torvalds
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I've actually found the image of Silicon Valley as a hotbed of money-grubbing tech people to be pretty false, but maybe that's because the people I hang out with are all really engineers.
Linus Torvalds
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It's a personality trait: from the very beginning, I knew what I was concentrating on. I'm only doing the kernel - I always found everything around it to be completely boring.
Linus Torvalds
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I am pragmatic. That which works, works, and theory can go screw itself. However, my pragmatism also extends to maintainability, which is why I also want it done well.
Linus Torvalds
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What commercialism has brought to Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out.
Linus Torvalds
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Every once in a while an issue comes up where I have to make a statement. I can't totally avoid all political issues, but I try my best to minimize them. When I do make a statement, I try to be fairly neutral.
Linus Torvalds
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Portability is for people who cannot write new programs.
Linus Torvalds
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The Linux philosophy is laugh in the face of danger. Oops. Wrong one. Do it yourself. That's it.
Linus Torvalds
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Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.
Linus Torvalds
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The thing with Linux is that the developers themselves are actually customers too: that has always been an important part of Linux.
Linus Torvalds
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That's what makes Linux so good: you put in something, and that effort multiplies. It's a positive feedback cycle.
Linus Torvalds
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And 1.1.81 is officially BugFree(tm), so if you receive any bug-reports on it, you know they are just evil lies.
Linus Torvalds
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There's innovation in Linux. There are some really good technical features that I'm proud of. There are capabilities in Linux that aren't in other operating systems.
Linus Torvalds
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One of the reasons that I really don't mind that people are selling Linux commercially is exactly because it does make me feel good that people use the product.
Linus Torvalds
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I think people can generally trust me, but they can trust me exactly because they know they don't have to.
Linus Torvalds
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Some people have told me they don't think a fat penguin really embodies the grace of Linux, which just tells me they have never seen an angry penguin charging at them in excess of 100mph. They'd be a lot more careful about what they say if they had.
Linus Torvalds
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When you say 'I wrote a program that crashed Windows,' people just stare at you blankly and say 'Hey, I got those with the system, for free.'
Linus Torvalds