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.
Linus TorvaldsRead
I'm interested in Linux because of the technology, and Linux wasn't started as any kind of rebellion against the 'evil Microsoft empire.'
Interpretation
The speaker appreciates Linux for its technological merits, not as an anti-Microsoft statement.
In this quote, Linus Torvalds emphasizes that his motivation for developing and advocating for Linux was rooted in the fascination with technology itself rather than a reactive stance against Microsoft. This highlights the idea that innovation can arise from genuine interest and passion for the subject, rather than an opposition to a competitor.
In practice
During a tech conference discussing the impact of open-source software.
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 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.
Avoiding complexity reduces bugs.
Most of the 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 have an ego the size of a small planet.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
Computers are still technology because we are still wrestling with it: it's still being invented; we're still trying to work out how it works. There's a world of game interaction to come that you or I wouldn't recognise. It's time for the machines to disappear. The computer's got to disappear into all of the things we use.
But there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff, we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908.
It wasn't very long ago when you wouldn't even think about there being health information on the smartphone. There's financial information. There's your conversations; there's business secrets. There's probably more information about you on here than exists in your home.
Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.
In our age of individualism, we see computers as ways through which we can express our individuality. But the truth is that the computers are really good at spotting the very opposite. The computers can see how similar we are, and they then have the ability to agglomerate us together into groups that have the same behaviours.
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