Talk is cheap. Show me the code.
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.
Turtles are very stable and have been around forever. But they have problems adapting. When humans came along, turtles came under serious threat. Biodiversity is good, and I think it is good in technology as well.
Most good programmers do programming not because they expect to get paid or get adulation by the public, but because it is fun to program.
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.
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.
If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won.
I'm perfectly happy complaining, because it's cathartic, and I'm perfectly happy arguing with people on the Internet because arguing is my favourite pastime - not programming.
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.
What I find most interesting is how people really have taken Linux and used it in ways and attributes and motivations that I never felt.
Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.
I personally think of Linux development as being pretty non-localized, and I work with all the people entirely over e-mail - even if they happen to be working in the Portland area.
People enjoy the interaction on the Internet, and the feeling of belonging to a group that does something interesting: that's how some software projects are born.
Software patents, in particular, are very ripe for abuse. The whole system encourages big corporations getting thousands and thousands of patents. Individuals almost never get them.
I've never regretted not making Linux shareware: I really don't like the pay for use binary shareware programs.
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.
Shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software with the worst of free software.
What commercialism has brought into Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out.
Fairly cheap home computing was what changed my life.
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.
