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
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
That's what makes Linux so good: you put in something, and that effort multiplies. It's a positive feedback cycle. — Linus Torvalds
The interesting thing is when we design and architect a server, we don't design it for Windows or Linux, we design it for both. We don't really care, as long as we're selling the one the customer wants. — Michael Dell
A lot of other people wanted a free production UNIX with lots of bells and whistles and wanted to convert MINIX into that. I was dragged along in the maelstrom for a while, but when Linux came along, I was actually relieved that I could go back to professoring. — Andrew S. Tanenbaum
Linux is only free if your time has no value. — Jamie Zawinski
It feels a little bit funny coming here and telling you guys that Linux and open source are the future of gaming. It's sort of like going to Rome and teaching Catholicism to the pope. — Gabe Newell
If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won. — Linus Torvalds
'Linux is a leprosy' - This statement is not grammatically or factually correct. — Andrew S. Tanenbaum
For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet. — Eric S. Raymond
UNIX is simple and coherent, but it takes a genius (or at any rate, a programmer) to understand and appreciate its simplicity. — Dennis Ritchie
I think the major good idea in Unix was its clean and simple interface: open, close, read, and write. — Ken Thompson
Some consider UNIX to be the second most important invention to come out of AT&T Bell Labs after the transistor. — Dennis Ritchie
From an operating system research point of view, Unix is if not dead certainly old stuff, and it's clear that people should be looking beyond it. — Dennis Ritchie
UNIX does not allow path names to be prefixed by a drive name or number; that would be precisely the kind of device dependence that operating systems ought to eliminate. — Andrew S. Tanenbaum
GNU, which stands for Gnu's Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it. — Richard Stallman
This is the Unix philosophy. Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs that handle text streams, because that is a universal interface. — Douglas McIlroy
I got tired of people complaining that it was too hard to use UNIX because the editor was too complicated. — Bill Joy
I think Linux is a great thing, because Linux is an alternative to Windows, and because, of all the operating systems that are at all relevant today, Unix is the best of a bad lot. — Jamie Zawinski
I think Unix is a great system - especially for running data centers - because it is very mature, very reliable, very scalable. But when I want to go out and populate small devices, I think Java. — Bill Joy
In early 1993, a hostile observer might have had grounds for thinking that the Unix story was almost played out, and with it the fortunes of the hacker tribe. — Eric S. Raymond
Unix was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. — Douglas Gwyn
If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them. — Eric S. Raymond
I remarked to Dennis that easily half the code I was writing in Multics was error recovery code. He said, "We left all that stuff out of Unix. If there's an error, we have this routine called panic, and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, 'Hey, reboot it.'" — Tom Van Vleck
It seems certain that much of the success of Unix follows from the readability, modifiability, and portability of its software. — Dennis Ritchie
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
Most hackers graduate from Unix and Linux platforms. They know them intimately. They don't try to exploit them — Dean Stockwell
Everything that I've learned about computers at MIT I have boiled down into three principles: Unix: You think it won't work, but if you find the right wizard, they can make it work. Macintosh: You think it will work, but it won't. PC/Windows: You think it won't work, and it won't. — Philip Greenspun
Applicants must also have extensive knowledge of Unix, although they should have sufficiently good programming taste to not consider this an achievement. — Hal Abelson
In my experience, telling someone to switch Unix shells for ease of use is like telling him to switch cigarette brands for his health. — Chris Espinosa
C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new. — Dennis Ritchie
Obviously, the person who had most influence on my career was Ken Thompson. Unix was basically his, likewise C's predecessor, likewise much of the basis of Plan 9 (though Rob Pike was the real force in getting it together). And in the meantime Ken created the first computer chess master and pretty much rewrote the book on chess endgames. He is quite a phenomenon. — Dennis Ritchie
It's true that compared with the scene when Unix started, today the ecological niches are fairly full, and fresh new OS ideas are harder to come by, or at least to propagate. — Dennis Ritchie
I am confident that we can do better than GUIs because the basic problem with them (and with the Linux and Unix interfaces) is that they ask a human being to do things that we know experimentally humans cannot do well. The question I asked myself is, given everything we know about how the human mind works, could we design a computer and computer software so that we can work with the least confusion and greatest efficiency? — Jef Raskin
I changed the Linux copyright license to be the GPL some time in the first half of 1992. Mostly because I had hated the lack of a cheaply and easily available UNIX when I had looked for one a year before. — Linus Torvalds
Many say that DOS is the dark side [from Star Wars], but actually UNIX is more like the dark side: It's less likely to find the one way to destroy your incredibly powerful machine, and more likely to make upper management choke. — Lore Sjoberg
I must say the Linux community is a lot nicer than the Unix community. A negative comment on Unix would warrent death threats. With Linux, it is like stirring up a nest of butterflies. — Kenneth P. Thompson
I do believe that in a race, it is naive to think Linux has a hope of making a dent against Microsoft starting from way behind with a fraction of the resources and amateur labor. (I feel the same about Unix. — Kenneth P. Thompson
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