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

Linus Torvalds

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Linus Torvalds
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: December 28
Blogger
Businessperson
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Inventor
Programmer
Software Developer
Software Engineer
Writer
Helsingfors
Linus Benedict Torvalds
LUS
OH3LUS
Loses
Practice
Happens
Sometimes
Every
Time
Clash
Theory
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More quotes by Linus Torvalds

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To be honest, the fact that people trust you gives you a lot of power over people. Having another person's trust is more powerful than all other management techniques put together.
Linus Torvalds
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Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did.
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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I'm a technical manager, but I don't have to take care of people. I only have to worry about technology itself.
Linus Torvalds
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To be a nemesis, you have to actively try to destroy something, don't you? Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.
Linus Torvalds
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You won't get sued for anticompetitive behavior.
Linus Torvalds
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I've been employed by the University of Helsinki, and that has been paying my bills. Obviously a ''real job'' pays better than most universities will pay, but I've been very happy with this arrangement I get to do whatever I want, and I have no commercial pressures whatsoever doing this.
Linus Torvalds
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I'd much rather have 15 people arguing about something than 15 people splitting into two camps, each side convinced it's right and not talking to the other.
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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I don't think I'm unusual in preferring my laptop to be thin and light.
Linus Torvalds
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I may make jokes about Microsoft at times, but at the same time, I think the Microsoft hatred is a disease.
Linus Torvalds
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If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot of different places, just write a Unix operating system.
Linus Torvalds
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I often compare open source to science. To where science took this whole notion of developing ideas in the open and improving on other peoples' ideas and making it into what science is today and the incredible advances that we have had. And I compare that to witchcraft and alchemy, where openness was something you didn't do.
Linus Torvalds
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I seldom get self-righteous, and even when I am being impolite (almost always on purpose - there's an art to insulting people, too), I tend to try to not be too serious about it. And most of the time it means that I can take criticism constructively, and sometimes just change my opinion on the fly and laugh at myself over having turned on a dime.
Linus Torvalds
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I've never regretted not making Linux shareware: I really don't like the pay for use binary shareware programs.
Linus Torvalds
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I can't say that I like MicroSoft: I think they make rather bad operating systems - Windows NT is just more of the same - but while I dislike their operating systems and abhor their tactics in the marketplace I at the same time don't really care all that much about them.
Linus Torvalds
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Shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software with the worst of free software.
Linus Torvalds
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I'd argue that everybody wants to do something that matters, and the fact that Linux has had a huge impact on the tech market and is used virtually everywhere is obviously very personally satisfying. I think programming is fun, and the community around the kernel is great, but a project has to be relevant too.
Linus Torvalds
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The idea of abstracting away the one thing that must be blindingly fast, the kernel, is inherently counter productive.
Linus Torvalds
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A consumer doesn't take anything away: he doesn't actually consume anything. Giving the same thing to a thousand consumers is not really any more expensive than giving it to just one.
Linus Torvalds