Quotes About Open Source

#1. Open source production has shown us that world-class software, like Linux and Mozilla, can be created with neither the bureaucratic structure of the firm nor the incentives of the marketplace as we've known them.

Howard Rheingold

#2. The Internet browser is the most susceptible to viruses. The browser is naive about downloading and executing software. Google is trying to help by releasing the Chrome browser as open source.

Vint Cerf

#3. If you don't have the best product, you're not going to make it in open-source.

Peter Fenton

#4. While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.

Evgeny Morozov

#5. When I first got into technology I didn't really understand what open source was. Once I started writing software, I realized how important this would be.

Matt Mullenweg

#6. 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

#7. Android phones in China are more 'Android open source' rather than Android in the way we are all used to here. So a lot of phones don't have Google Play, etc.

Sundar Pichai

#8. I think, fundamentally, open source does tend to be more stable software. It's the right way to do things.

Linus Torvalds

#9. The power of Open Source is the power of the people. The people rule.

Philippe Kahn

#10. There were open source projects and free software before Linux was there. Linux in many ways is one of the more visible and one of the bigger technical projects in this area, and it changed how people looked at it because Linux took both the practical and ideological approach.

Linus Torvalds

#11. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement.

Richard Stallman

#12. I think the way IBM has embraced the open source philosophy has been quite astonishing, but gratifying. I hope they'll do very well with it.

Larry Wall

#13. ultimately, open source depends on intrinsic motivation with the same ferocity that older business models rely on extrinsic motivation,

Daniel H. Pink

#14. In open-source in general, the power lies in connecting the author of the software directly to users, eliminating the middleman.

Peter Fenton

#15. (In the real world, you'd want to use a custom search system of some sort. Search the Web for open-source full-text search to get an idea of the possibilities.)

Nigel George

#16. The biggest challenge for open source is that as it enters the consumer market, as projects like WordPress and Firefox have done, you have to create a user experience that is on par or better than the proprietary alternatives.

Matt Mullenweg

#17. Intellectual property is an important legal and cultural issue. Society as a whole has complex issues to face here: private ownership vs. open source, and so on.

Tim Berners-Lee

#18. The beauty of open-source is that you can pick up right where someone left off and start right there.

Matt Mullenweg

#19. I only want to work with transparent ideas and accessible technologies that 'spotlight' the individual's role in society through creativity. I try to live an open-source life.

Chris Jordan

#20. Many users of the GNU/Linux system will not have heard the ideas of free software. They will not be aware that we have ideas, that a system exists because of ethical ideals, which were omitted from ideas associated with the term 'open source.'

Richard Stallman

#21. I realized in 1988 that my life as a spy specializing in secrets was not only unproductive, it was in sharp opposition to what we actually need: full access to true information, and consequently, the ability to create Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT).

Robert David Steele

#22. I think open source is an evolutionary idea for humanity, this idea of transparency. It played out for us in the technology world, but it also played out with the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission and Wikipedia.

Megan Smith

#23. Open source is important to our orgs as a talent pool; we need better representation of women.

Jane Silber

#24. I won't sit here and say an Open Source project will do things faster than a closed source, but one of the reasons why is that it sits on a whole lot of things that came before it.

Brian Behlendorf

#25. 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

#26. An open source community arises from the synchronization of the individual interests of many parties.

Simon Phipps

#27. It seems like the web, particularly software as a service, provides ample opportunities for you to flourish economically, completely aligned with the broader open source community.

Matt Mullenweg

#28. The accomplishment of open source is that it is the back end of the web, the invisible part, the part that you don't see as a user.

Mitch Kapor

#29. But you weren't born," I tell him. "I wrote an algorithm based on the Linux operating kernel. You're an open-source search engine married to a dialog bot and a video compiler. The program scrubs the Web and archives a person's images and videos and data - everything you say, you've said before." For

Adam Johnson

#30. Technology innovation is starting to explode and having open-source material out there really helps this explosion. You get students and researchers involved and you get people coming through and building start ups based on open source products.

Tim Berners-Lee

#31. What is al Qaeda? It's an open source religious political movement that works off the global supply chain.

Thomas Friedman

#32. Today I am one of the senior technical cadre that makes the Internet work, and a core Linux and open-source developer.

Eric S. Raymond

#33. EdX will be a creating a platform which will be open source, not for profit, and a portal for a website where universities will offer their courses. For example, MIT courses will be offered as MITx and Harvard courses as HarvardX.

Anant Agarwal

#34. Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane.

Larry Ellison

#35. I never imagined that the Free Software Movement would spawn a watered-down alternative, the Open Source Movement, which would become so well-known that people would ask me questions about 'open source' thinking that I work under that banner.

Richard Stallman

#36. The free sharing and teaching of open source is incompatible with the notion of the solitary genius.

Golan Levin

#37. In open source, you really have to be near the watershed to have an impact on the source code. Customers want to be near the key contributors to the code, not a level removed.

Peter Fenton

#38. A lot of people who work on open-source software don't mind making money elsewhere. They aren't anticommercial.

Jimmy Wales

#39. Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer, I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business.

Jim Allchin

#40. Open Source for the Enterprise

Anonymous

#41. Certainly there's a phenomenon around open source. You know free software will be a vibrant area. There will be a lot of neat things that get done there.

Bill Gates

#42. What's kept Java from being used as widely as possible is there hasn't been an Open Source implementation of it that's gotten really widespread use.

Brian Behlendorf

#43. Many people think that open source projects are sort of chaotic and and anarchistic. They think that developers randomly throw code at the code base and see what sticks.

Mitchell Baker

#44. Like many older fans of Free Software and Open Source, I have discovered that it is really only free in the sense that the time you spend on it is worthless.

Erik Naggum

#45. Let me be clear - Microsoft has no beef with open source.

Craig Mundie

#46. I think a lot of the basis of the open source movement comes from procrastinating students ...

Andrew Tridgell

#47. Writing a patch is the easiest part of open source. The truly hard stuff is all of the rest: bug trackers, mailing lists, documentation, and other management tasks.

Anonymous

#48. People who study primate societies make a distinction between two kinds of cultural interactions, agonic and hedonic. In agonic societies, you gain status by asserting dominance over others. In hedonic societies, you gain status by drawing attention to yourself. Open source is a hedonic culture.

Eric S. Raymond

#49. The GNU GPL was not designed to be "open source".

Richard Stallman

#50. Nathan seemed to have absorbed his sense of journalistic ethics from old movies about newspaper reporters. For Naomi, internet sampling ad scratching was a completely valid form of journalism, presenting no ethical clouds on its open-source horizon.

David Cronenberg

#51. If you want to build an open source project, you can't let your ego stand in the way. You can't rewrite everybody's patches, you can't second-guess everybody, and you have to give people equal control.

Rasmus Lerdorf

#52. There are many examples of companies and countries that have improved their competitiveness and efficiency by adopting open source strategies. The creation of skills through all levels is of fundamental importance to both companies and countries.

Mark Shuttleworth

#53. Philip Greenspun had a huge impact on me. He was the first person I knew of that embraced online communities, created a real business around open source, gave back to the community through education, and inspired me to explore photography.

Matt Mullenweg

#54. In real open source, you have the right to control your own destiny.

Linus Torvalds

#55. If you are in this business long enough, you hear about a thousand things that are going to kill you. Open source? Yeah, we are not dead yet. Cloud? That's not new; it's a new name.

Safra A. Catz

#56. You can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of "open source," and have everything magically work out.

Jamie Zawinski

#57. If you think of the ideas of open source applied to information in an encyclopedia, you get to Wikipedia - lots and lots of small contributions that bubble up to something that's meaningful.

Matt Mullenweg

#58. In true open source development, there's lots of visibility all the way through the development process.

Brian Behlendorf

#59. The main languages out of which web applications are built - whether it's Perl or Python or PHP or any of the other languages - those are all open source languages. So the infrastructure of the web is open source ... the web as we know it is completely dependent on open source.

Mitch Kapor

#60. The question of trademark is pretty unsettled in the open source world. The trademark is important in a consumer product, but there are a few groups who feel it's a restriction they can't live with.

Mitchell Baker

#61. Open platforms historically undergo a lot of scrutiny, but there are a lot of advantages to having an open source platform from a security standpoint.

Sundar Pichai

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

Linus Torvalds

#63. I would love to see all open-source innovation happen on top of Windows.

Steve Ballmer

#64. One of the ways that Microsoft beat Apple way back in the day was that they were a lot more open; today, in the world I come from, the free software and open-source world, Microsoft is not generally viewed as open; they're viewed as proprietary.

Jimmy Wales

#65. Success for open source is when the term 'open source' becomes a non-factor in the decision making process, when people hear about Linux and compare it to Windows NT, and they compare it on the feature set and don't have much of an excuse not to use it.

Brian Behlendorf

#66. Making things open-source brings the cost down.

Peter Diamandis

#67. Adapt and adopt the peer-to-peer and open source models to wider implementation in organisations

Miguel Reynolds Brandao

#68. We do care about control and privacy. It's one of the reasons we are so focused on having our systems be open source, so you or someone technically savvy you know can verify what the software is doing.

Mitchell Baker

#69. I would never jeopardize classified information to be brought out to the public. This information is all open source. There is no reason to worry about classification. It is simply an attempt by bureaucrats to cover their rear ends.

Curt Weldon

#70. only about the Open Source projects. "For developers, LinkedIn profiles does not matter as much as a platform where they can showcase their work, and GitHub is mostly about Open

Anonymous

#71. One of the questions I've always hated answering is how do people make money in open source. And I think that Caldera and Red Hat - and there are a number of other Linux companies going public - basically show that yes, you can actually make money in the open-source area.

Linus Torvalds

#72. Open source isn't about saving money, it's about doing more stuff, and getting incremental innovation with the finite budget you have.

Jim Whitehurst

#73. Huge open source organizations like Red Hat and Mozilla manage the collaboration of hundreds of people who don't know one another and have spent no time hanging around the water cooler.

Margaret Heffernan

#74. Basically, if reverse engineering is banned, then a lot of the open source community is doomed to fail.

Jon Johansen

#75. Open source is a beautiful way of collaborating; but what's happening on the free Internet is more akin to the 'crowdsourcing' of journalists and other content creators by advertisers who no longer have to pay them - only the search engines that parse their articles.

Douglas Rushkoff

#76. Free open-source software, by its nature, is unlikely to feature secret back doors that lead directly to Langley, Va.

Evgeny Morozov

#77. The future is a process, not a destination. Richard Stallman is a guy my age. I sympathize with Richard rather more than I sympathize with Richard's open-source ideas, but the guy's a mortal human being and so is his social movement. Open-source is a means of production.

Bruce Sterling

#78. We have a very active testing community which people don't often think about when you have open source.

Mitchell Baker

#79. It's amazing what you can get on open source now if you actually use the right search engines to find the material.

Gus O'Donnell

#80. We're not done yet, but two things WordPress has been able to exemplify is that open source can create great user experiences and that it's possible to have a successful commercial entity and a wider free software community living and working in harmony.

Matt Mullenweg

#81. Open source can propagate to fill all the nooks and crannies that people want it to fill.

Mitch Kapor

#82. The name Firefox is not part of the open source licence, and that's why it's important to us.

Mitchell Baker

#83. It just makes it even harder for people to even approach the (open source) side, when they then end up having to worry about public humiliation.

Linus Torvalds

#84. My own personal dream is that the majority of the web runs on open source software.

Matt Mullenweg

#85. Open-source code is extremely well-adapted to service-oriented architecture.

Winston Damarillo

#86. 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

#87. There are two main methodologies of open source development. There's the Apache model, which is design by committee - great for things like web servers. Then you have the benevolent dictator model. That's what Ubuntu is doing, with Mark Shuttleworth.

Matt Mullenweg

#88. We should probably figure out a new word for this. For us, "open" means transparent, as in "open source" - you're not locked in to what the original creator did. And in our case "open" also means distributed decision making.

Mitchell Baker

#89. The more money Automattic makes, the more we invest into Free and Open Source software that belongs to everybody and services to make that software sing.

Matt Mullenweg

#90. But the most reliable indication of the future of Open Source is its past: in just a few years, we have gone from nothing to a robust body of software that solves many different problems and is reaching the million-user count. There's no reason for us to slow down now.

Bruce Perens

#91. The "question" is the original open-source code.

Ted Agon

#92. For personal use, I recommend the free and open-source Truecrypt, which comes in flavors for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Barton Gellman

#93. For me, open source is a moral thing.

Matt Mullenweg

#94. Empowerment of individuals is a key part of what makes open source work, since in the end, innovations tend to come from small groups, not from large, structured efforts.

Tim O'Reilly

#95. When my co-founder and I first had the idea for IronPort, an email security company, we triangulated a list of the 20 most relevant people in email - former CEOs, open source technologists, investors and thought leaders.

Scott Weiss

#96. The strategic marketing paradigm of Open Source is a massively-parallel drunkard's walk filtered by a Darwinistic process.

Bruce Perens

#97. Nobody "manages" the open source contributors.

Daniel H. Pink

#98. All of our code is open source, so it can be used for other projects.

Miguel De Icaza

#99. Companies have been trying to figure out what it is that makes open source work.

Brian Behlendorf

#100. Then Frank and Percy burst into the open and began to massacre every source of fiber they could find.

Rick Riordan