Eric S. Raymond Quotes
The workstation-class machines built by Sun and others opened up new worlds for hackers.
Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow (e.g., given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone).
You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion.
The easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user
When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.
Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.
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.
Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.
The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
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.
Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet.
Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.
The beginnings of the hacker culture as we know it today can be conveniently dated to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.
Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.
If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.
When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
The iPhone brand is in worse shape than I thought was even possible. And the implications of that are huge... The iPhone is in deep trouble.
When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible - and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!
Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer.
A critical factor in its success was that the X developers were willing to give the sources away for free in accordance with the hacker ethic, and able to distribute them over the Internet.
Equally, the Internet interprets attempts at proprietary control as threats and mobilizes to defeat them.
On first blush this looks to be about money, but it is about power. Is power going to go to the information monopolies, or will it go to developers and users?.
Software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry
And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I've got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome.
The central problem of C and C++ is that they require programmers to do their own memory management
It's not all that important that you be able to originate brilliant ideas... The more important talent is to be able to recognize good ideas from other people.