Latest Linus Torvalds Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• The complaints I've had is that GitHub as a development platform - making commits, pull requests, keeping track of issues etc - doesn't work very well at all. It's not even close, not for something like the kernel. It's much too limited.

  Linus Torvalds

  Issues, Track, Development

  Source: www.linux.com

• Github is an excellent hosting service; I have nothing against it at all.

  Linus Torvalds

  Excellent

  "10 Years of Git: An Interview with Git Creator Linus Torvalds". www.linuxfoundation.org. April 6, 2015.

• Generally, the best way to learn git is probably to first only do very basic things and not even look at some of the things you can do until you are familiar and confident about the basics.

  Linus Torvalds

  Looks, Way, Firsts

  "10 Years of Git: An Interview with Git Creator Linus Torvalds". www.linuxfoundation.org. April 6, 2015.

• There's a few historical reasons for why git was considered complicated. One of them is that it was complicated. The people who started using git very early on in order to work on the kernel really had to learn a very rough set of scripts to make everything work. All the effort had been on making the core technology work and very little on making it easy or obvious.

  Linus Torvalds

  Technology, Order, People

  Source: www.linux.com

• You can do a lot of things with git, and many of the rules of what you *should* do are not so much technical limitations but are about what works well when working together with other people. So git is a very powerful set of tools.

  Linus Torvalds

  Powerful, People, Working Together

  "10 Years of Git: An Interview with Git Creator Linus Torvalds". www.linuxfoundation.org. April 6, 2015.

• 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

  Issues, Giving, Going Away

  Source: www.linux.com

• While we ended up having several core maintainers use BitKeeper - it was free to use for open source projects - it never got ubiquitous. So it helped kernel development, but there were still pain points.

  Linus Torvalds

  Pain, Use, Development

  Source: www.linux.com

• I really never wanted to do source control management at all and felt that it was just about the least interesting thing in the computing world .

  Linus Torvalds

  Interesting, World, Management

  Source: www.linux.com

• 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

  Thinking, Microsoft, Tactics

  Source: www.ibiblio.org

• 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.

  Linus Torvalds

  Mean, Men, Thinking

  Source: www.ibiblio.org

• I think that freely available software can not only keep up with the evolution of commercial software, but often exceed what you can do commercially.

  Linus Torvalds

  Thinking, Evolution, Software

  Source: www.ibiblio.org

• I'm not a big believer in revolutions. What people call revolutions in technology were more of a shift in perception - from big machines to PC's (the technology just evolved, fairly slowly at that), and from PC's to the internet. The next "revolution" is going to be the same thing - not about the technology itself being revolutionary, but a shift in how you look at it and how you use it.

  Linus Torvalds

  Technology, People, Perception

  Source: www.osnews.com

• When somebody who is different shows himself to be different in a good way, that's how development happens.

  Linus Torvalds

  Different, Development, Way

  Source: www.osnews.com

• I was never a "big thinker". One of my philosophies in Linux has always been to not worry about the future too much, but make sure that we make the best of what we have now - together with keeping our options open for the future and not digging us into a hole.

  Linus Torvalds

  Philosophy, Worry, Together

  Source: www.osnews.com

• Working in lock-step simply isn't a good idea. Never has been, never will be.

  Linus Torvalds

  Ideas, Locks, Steps

  Source: www.osnews.com

• I don't actually follow other operating systems much. I don't compete - I just worry about making Linux better than itself, not others.

  Linus Torvalds

  Worry, Linux, Operating Systems

  Source: www.osnews.com

• I'm a big non-believer in manual driver and kernel configuration, be it visual or not.

  Linus Torvalds

  Bigs, Non Believer, Drivers

  Source: www.osnews.com

• I actually don't believe that everybody should necessarily try to learn to code. I think it's reasonably specialized, and nobody really expects most people to have to do it. It's not like knowing how to read and write and do basic math.

  Linus Torvalds

  Believe, Writing, Math

  "A Conversation With Linus Torvalds, Who Built The World's Most Robust Operating System And Gave It Away For Free". Interview with Dylan Love, www.businessinsider.com. June 7, 2014.

• The correct form factor for a laptop is obviously 12" and 2 lbs, and I don't understand why everybody gets that wrong.

  Linus Torvalds

  Laptops, Form, Factors

  "A Conversation With Linus Torvalds, Who Built The World's Most Robust Operating System And Gave It Away For Free". Interview with Dylan Love, www.businessinsider.com. June 7, 2014.

• With software, you really can replicate and do a lot of very real and active development in parallel, and actually try it out and see what works.

  Linus Torvalds

  Real, Trying, Development

  "A Conversation With Linus Torvalds, Who Built The World's Most Robust Operating System And Gave It Away For Free". Interview with Dylan Love, www.businessinsider.com. June 7, 2014.

• I made very sure that I did not get involved with any of the commercial Linux companies, exactly so that I would be neutral and not ever seen as "working for the competition".

  Linus Torvalds

  Competition, Would Be, Linux

  "A Conversation With Linus Torvalds, Who Built The World's Most Robust Operating System And Gave It Away For Free". Interview with Dylan Love, www.businessinsider.com. June 7, 2014.

• One of the reasons I like open source is that it allows people to work on the parts they are good at, and I don't mean just on a technical level; some people are into the whole selling and support, and that's just not me.

  Linus Torvalds

  Mean, People, Support

  "A Conversation With Linus Torvalds, Who Built The World's Most Robust Operating System And Gave It Away For Free". Interview with Dylan Love, www.businessinsider.com. June 7, 2014.

• Being open source meant that I could work on the technical side (along with lots of other people), and others who had the interest and inclination could start up companies around it.

  Linus Torvalds

  People, Sides, Source

  "A Conversation With Linus Torvalds, Who Built The World's Most Robust Operating System And Gave It Away For Free". Interview with Dylan Love, www.businessinsider.com. June 7, 2014.

• I think the term "intellectual property" should be avoided, not because it's a bad term, but because it mixes things up that shouldn't be mixed up. There are different forms, and they hardly have anything to do with each other.

  Linus Torvalds

  Thinking, Intellectual, Different

  "A Conversation With Linus Torvalds, Who Built The World's Most Robust Operating System And Gave It Away For Free". Interview with Dylan Love, www.businessinsider.com. June 7, 2014.

• Me trying to make a business around Linux would have been a total disaster.

  Linus Torvalds

  Trying, Linux, Disaster

  "A Conversation With Linus Torvalds, Who Built The World's Most Robust Operating System And Gave It Away For Free". Interview with Dylan Love, www.businessinsider.com. June 7, 2014.