Quotes About Software

#1. I want to avoid locking people into solutions that work only with Postfix. People should have a choice in what software they want to use with Postfix, be it anti-virus or otherwise.

Wietse Venema

#2. Well, software doesn't quite work that way. Rather than construction, software is more like gardening - it is more organic than concrete. You plant many things in a garden according to an initial plan and conditions. Some thrive, others are destined to end up as compost.

Andrew Hunt

#3. Software as an asset isn't stable over time; it needs to be maintained.

Brian Behlendorf

#4. Free software' is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of 'free' as in 'free speech,' not as in 'free beer'.

Richard Stallman

#5. Lisp ... made me aware that software could be close to executable mathematics.

L Peter Deutsch

#6. A lot of people assume that creating software is purely a solitary activity where you sit in an office with the door closed all day and write lots of code.

Bill Gates

#7. In almost every job now, people use software and work with information to enable their organisation to operate more effectively.

Bill Gates

#8. Really successful designs can be created without software produced "special effects." Identities do not NEED bevels, gradations, 3-D imagery, Web 2.Oh-Oh and other oh so "special" treatments to be great design solutions for clients.

Jeff Fisher

#9. Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster.

Al Gore

#10. Those who write software only for pay should go hurt some other field.

Erik Naggum

#11. 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

#12. To use a computer analogy, we are running twenty-first-century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago or more. This may explain quite a lot of what we see in the news.

Ronald Wright

#13. You have to give credit where credit's due. Steve [Jobs] has been probably the single hardware/software forward-looking thinker and executor in our lifetime as an individual. He's quite a brilliant innovator.

Christopher Galvin

#14. The problem is, we're moving to software-as-service, which can be yanked or transformed at any moment. The ability of your PC to run independent code is an important safety valve.

Jonathan Zittrain

#15. 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

#16. Our goal in education should be to foster the ability to use the computer in everything you do, even if you don't have a specific piece of software for the job.

Seymour Papert

#17. If you think about the market that we're in, and more broadly just the enterprise software market, the kind of transition that's happening right now from legacy systems to the cloud is literally, by definition, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Aaron Levie

#18. I've been a software engineer, a novelist, a journalist, and a manager - and managing developers is easily the trickiest thing I've ever done.

Jon Evans

#19. Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

Douglas Adams

#20. With the rise of software patents, engineers coding new stuff - whether within a large software company or as kids writing smartphone apps - are exposed to a claim that somewhere a prior patent is being infringed.

Jonathan Zittrain

#21. To get Windows 10 reliable, I had to lobotomise the installed software and USB devices.

Steven Magee

#22. Microsoft has a division that studies the way people work, to develop efficiency-improving software. (According to Microsoft's research up to 2007, if you're looking for a technological solution to being more efficient, getting a bigger computer screen is one of the few clear winners.)

David Rock

#23. From day one our next generation system will run all our exsisting software - so that gives us a head start.

Trip Hawkins

#24. Video games provide an easy lead-in to computer literacy. They can get you thinking like a video game designer and can even lead to designing since many games come with software to modify the game or redesign it.

James Paul Gee

#25. Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.

Tim Berners-Lee

#26. I really think it is amazing that people actually buy software.

Bill Budge

#27. That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers.

Larry Niven

#28. Transparency is therefore more than an esthetic triumph; it is a victory that will be reflected in lower costs throughout the software's life cycle. 6.2.2

Eric S. Raymond

#29. Whether you are a consumer, a hardware maker, a software developer or a provider of cool new services, it's hard to make a move in the American cellphone world without the permission of the companies that own the pipes.

Walt Mossberg

#30. The only reason we were here was because nobody had yet optimized software for First Contact.

Peter Watts

#31. 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

#32. [Software engineering is the] establishment and use of sound engineering principles to obtain economically software that is reliable and works on real machines efficiently.

Friedrich L. Bauer

#33. There are no secrets on an successful software project. Both good and bad news must be able to move up and down the ptoject hierarchy without restriction.

Steve McConnell

#34. Launch is just another point in software's life. Not the end-all and be-all.

Ka Wai Cheung

#35. Software unification. So that I no longer care what computing device I pick up, whether it's a laptop or desktop, whether it's one I own or one in a public place, whether it has a small screen or a large screen.

David Gelernter

#36. development at leading-edge software organizations, like JavaSoft, Microsoft, and Netscape. He called to chat with a

Michael A. Cusumano

#37. I think the most difficult thing had been scaling the infrastructure. Trying to support the response we had received from our users and the number of people that were interested in using the software.

Shawn Fanning

#38. 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

#39. In software, the chain isn't as strong as its weakest link; it's as weak as all the weak links multiplied together.

Steve McConnell

#40. None of our competitors have ever made two systems that run the same software.

Trip Hawkins

#41. Hiring people to write code to sell is not the same as hiring people to design and build durable, usable, dependable software.

Larry Constantine

#42. If the users don't control the program, the program controls the users. With proprietary software, there is always some entity, the "owner" of the program, that controls the program and through it, exercises power over its users. A nonfree program is a yoke, an instrument of unjust power.

Richard Stallman

#43. I no longer teach meditation, only software design.

Frederick Lenz

#44. The brain is the hardware, and the mind is the software, with the totality always in action, hardware plus software.

Pearl Zhu

#45. Good software designs accommodate change without huge investments and rework. When we use code that is out of our control, special care must be taken to protect our investment and make sure future change is not too costly.

Robert C. Martin

#46. I was writing and developing software for alumnae to be able to connect and communicate.

Biz Stone

#47. There are a variety of techniques for breaking software down into pieces and making software development more efficient. Many of these techniques have been sort of ... and everybody got excited about but very little benefit was actually derived once the thing was put into practice.

Bill Gates

#48. Software is different than other products um, partly because it's, it's not physical and, and partly because of its complexity. You can express in software millions of different cases and making sure that you handle all of them correctly is extremely difficult.

Bill Gates

#49. The software is where the magic is. If you're going to have all this power be simple enough, appealing enough and cool enough, it's going to be because the software is right.

Bill Gates

#50. 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

#51. 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 Torvalds

#52. Software is a reflection of our own mind. And as our software improves it will not only take on the patterns of our minds more closely, but it will also pick up the energy of our minds; in other words, I think that software is alive.

Frederick Lenz

#53. The primary purpose of software estimation is not to predict a project's outcome; it is to determine whether a project's targets are realistic enough to allow the project to be controlled to meet them.

Steve McConnell

#54. Software is usually expected to be modified over the course of its productive life. The process of converting one correct program into a different correct program is extremely challenging.

Douglas Crockford

#55. Games take years to make, and it's important that when we launch, it can't just be a great launch catalog and then a desert for a really long time. To be honest, for a lot of developers, they'd rather not be competing at launch with all this other software.

Palmer Luckey

#56. Good software, like wine, takes time.

Joel Spolsky

#57. Specifically, in the software industry, progress is highly sequential: progress is typically made through a large number of small steps, each building on the previous ones.

Eric Maskin

#58. In software you can't really add people and expect to get more done, because their ability to understand the program and what's going on it would require so much investment and all their work would require so much review that you'd be more likely to slow things down.

Bill Gates

#59. I think there are opportunities outside India as well as in India. In fact, some of the largest projects that most Indian software companies are doing are in India.

N. R. Narayana Murthy

#60. You can mass-produce hardware; you cannot mass-produce software - you cannot mass-produce the human mind.

Michio Kaku

#61. It's my job for Oracle, the number two software company in the world; to become the number one software company in the world. My job is to build better than the competition, sell those products in the marketplace and eventually supplant Microsoft and move from being number two to number one.

Larry Ellison

#62. A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer.

Bill Gates

#63. Well, sounding wise wasn't difficult. It was a lot easier than being intelligent, actually, since you didn't have to say anything surprising or come up with any new insights. You just let your brain's pattern-matching software complete the cliche, using whatever Deep Wisdom you'd stored previously.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#64. I vividly remember going to Google Docs, opening a document at the same time other students were working on it, and seeing their differently colored cursors moving around the screen, typing new words and making edits in real time. It was an epiphany.

Ian Lamont

#65. I developed some unique software to public it on the web that I call the Folklore Project.

Andy Hertzfeld

#66. Software development requires very little capital investment, since it is basically intellectual capital, pure thoughtstuff, expressed in a set of detailed instructions written in a language that machines can understand.

Brent Schlender

#67. I wrote a lot of software to do various kinds of special things, and I loved the idea of composing pieces in an electronic studio.

Paul Lansky

#68. Man is driven to create; I know I really love to create things. And while I'm not good at painting, drawing, or music, I can write software.

Yukihiro Matsumoto

#69. advanced socialbot software, a program to create and operate fake profiles that looked and acted like real people on Circles. Socialbots were designed to befriend real Circles users and dupe them into divulging their sensitive personal and financial information.

Scott Allan Morrison

#70. I think that the most beautiful thing lately hasn't been in hardware or software per se but collaboration - the idea behind Napster, which uses the distributed power of the Internet as its engine.

Steven Levy

#71. 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!

Eric S. Raymond

#72. You get the software you pay for. In every sense. To the nth degree. That's the way the world works.

Dave Winer

#73. Qmail out of the box works fine, so people will want to use it regardless of licensing restrictions, even when the software does not ship with their system software.

Wietse Venema

#74. The finest pieces of software are those where one individual has a complete sense of exactly how the program works. To have that, you have to really love the program and concentrate on keeping it simple, to an incredible degree.

Bill Gates

#75. A lot of the parallel processing software we're currently developing for supercomputers is tantric.

Frederick Lenz

#76. The ever-growing size of software applications is what makes Moore's Law possible: 'If we hadn't brought your computer to its knees, why would you go out and buy a new one?'

Nathan Myhrvold

#77. I can direct dial today a man my parents warred with. They wanted to kill him, I want to sell software to him.

Brad Templeton

#78. America and Japan are the two leading world economies in terms of technology and innovative products. And in software, information-age technology and biotechnology the U.S. has an amazing lead.

Bill Gates

#79. Translation software is not making translators obsolete. Has medical diagnostic software made doctors obsolete?

Nataly Kelly

#80. The great thing about crummy software is the amount of employment it generates.

Jaron Lanier

#81. The engineering is long gone in most PC companies. In the consumer electronics companies, they don't understand the software parts of it. And so you really can't make the products that you can make at Apple anywhere else right now. Apple's the only company that has everything under one roof.

Steve Jobs

#82. Software design as taught today is terribly incomplete. It talks only about what systems should do. It doesn't address the converse - things systems should not do. They should not crash, hang, lose data, violate privacy, lose money, destroy your company, or kill your customers.

Michael T. Nygard

#83. There's only one trick in software, and that is using a piece of software that's already been written.

Bill Gates

#84. At the end of the day, the GPL is not about making software free; it's about destroying value.

Darl McBride

#85. The industries that fall first are the industries that either produce electromechanical items that are now inferior to their software substitutes, or the industries that produce a mechanically created service that's now inferior.

Michael J. Saylor

#86. A word says more than a thousand images. Exercises for the visually inclined: illustrate "appreciation", "humor", "software", "education", "inalienable rights", "elegance", "fact".

Erik Naggum

#87. Your mind is software. Program it. Your body is a shell. Change it. Death is a disease. Cure it. Extinction is approaching. Fight it.

Peter Thiel

#88. In fact, my main conclusion after spending ten years of my life working on the T E X project is that software is hard. It's harder than anything else I've ever had to do.

Donald Knuth

#89. For most software startups, this translates to keep growing. For hardware startups, it translates to don't let your ship date slip.

Sam Altman

#90. Can't we do better with Applicant Tracking System (ATS) software?

Miles Anthony Smith

#91. For systems in which you already have a lot of hardware and software, change is difficult. That's why apps are so popular.

Vint Cerf

#92. The Software You will have to buy Microsoft Office, which contains PowerPoint, or you can download the freeware OpenOffice, which contains Impress. Once you understand the basics of how to use these programs to create the book cover, you may prefer to use some other presentation software. Both

Jimmy Clay

#93. I obviously 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

#94. Limit use of shareware and public domain software to systems without fixed disks. If you do use them on fixed disks, allocate separate subdirectories ... Public domain or shareware software should never be placed in the root directory.

John McAfee

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

Linus Torvalds

#96. About three million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

Bill Gates

#97. It gives you great pleasure to know that millions of developers, day to day, make their living using the software that you created.

Anders Hejlsberg

#98. As the commercial confrontation between [free software] and software-that's-a-product becomes more fierce, patent law's going to be the terrain on which a big piece of the war's going to be fought. Waterloo is here somewhere.

Eben Moglen

#99. The scanning of barcodes, or the reading of RFID transponders, generates data that is used in a software package to provide management or control information.

Mike Marsh

#100. The most important driver of user satisfaction is usefulness, which is largely reflected in the interaction design. The interaction design has to be incorporated at the deepest level of the software architecture and it is often the most expensive to change late in the process.

Arnie Lund