Businessman

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.

I don't actually go to that many conferences. I do that a couple of times a year. Normally, I am not recognized; people don't throw their panties at me. I'm a perfectly normal person sitting in my den just doing my job.

I do get my pizzas paid for by Linux indirectly.

In open source, we feel strongly that to really do something well, you have to get a lot of people involved.

The thing I love about diving is the flowing feeling. I like a sport where the whole point is to move as little as humanly possible so your air supply will last longer. That's my kind of sport. Where the amount of effort spent is absolutely minimal.

I see myself as a technical person who chose a great project and a great way of doing that project.

No-one has ever called me a cool dude. I'm somewhere between geek and normal.

I used to be interested in Windows NT, but the more I see it, the more it looks like traditional Windows with a stabler kernel. I don't find anything technically interesting there.

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.

Microsoft isn't evil, they just make really crappy operating systems.

Linux has definitely made a lot of sense even in a purely materialistic sense.

Programmers are in the enviable position of not only getting to do what they want to, but because the end result is so important they get paid to do it. There are other professions like that, but not that many.

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.

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.

There are lots of Linux users who don't care how the kernel works, but only want to use it. That is a tribute to how good Linux is.

In many cases, the user interface to a program is the most important part for a commercial company: whether the programs works correctly or not seems to be secondary.

I get the biggest enjoyment from the random and unexpected places. Linux on cellphones or refrigerators, just because it's so not what I envisioned it. Or on supercomputers.

When it comes to software, I much prefer free software, because I have very seldom seen a program that has worked well enough for my needs, and having sources available can be a life-saver.

I think of myself as an engineer, not as a visionary or 'big thinker.' I don't have any lofty goals.

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.