Jamie Zawinski Quotes

Quotes about:

• Linux is only free if your time has no value.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Time, Funny Inspirational, Linux

  Interview for themes.org, www.jwz.org. June 1998.

  51 Copy quote

• Your "use case" should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?

  Jamie Zawinski

  College, Years, Use

  "Groupware Bad". www.jwz.org. 2005.

  16 Copy quote

• To a database person, every nail looks like a thumb. Or something like that.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Design, Nails, Looks

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• You can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Inspirational, Successful, Two

  "Opinion: Who invited the pirates to the Linux party?" by J.S. Kelly, www.cnn.com. February 03, 2000.

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• Any time someone says "that's it, I'm leaving" I ask them whether they'd prefer to live under US domestic policy, or US foreign policy. As bad as things get inside an empire, they're usually worse in the protectorates.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Leaving, Empires, Foreign Policy

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• Today, I use Linux as my primary OS (on an x86 PC, and on a Thinkpad), and I also use Irix (on an SGI O2). Linux has improved a great deal since I wrote this, specifically with respect to its ease of installation.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Use, Ease, Today

  "Mouthing off about linux". www.jwz.org. 2000.

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• The real bug here is that the design of the system even permits this class of bug. It is unconscionable that someone designing a critical piece of security infrastructure would design the system in such a way that it does not fail safe.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Real, Class, Design

  "The awful thing about getting it right the first time is that nobody realizes how hard it was". www.jwz.org. April 27, 2014.

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• Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Science, Engineering, Might

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• C has all the expressive power of two dixie cups and a string.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Two, Cups, Dixie

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• If you want to do something that's going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

  Jamie Zawinski

  People, Use, World

  "Groupware Bad". www.jwz.org. February 15, 2005.

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• Why should someone have to retrain themselves to use a new application that does the same basic thing as the old application, just because something as trivial as the operating system changed out from under them?

  Jamie Zawinski

  Doe, Use, Corny

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• If you give a hacker a new toy, the first thing he'll do is take it apart to figure out how it works.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Giving, Firsts, Toys

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• These people also tended to pretend to care deeply about the blind and otherwise disabled. I am sympathetic to the needs of those users, but I can't help but think that those who claimed to speak for the blind were being more than a little disingenuous, just like those Hemp people who present their arguments in terms of their deep and abiding care for the textile industry, when their real motives are ... something else entirely.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Real, Thinking, People

  "The Markup Wars". www.jwz.org. 2003.

  4 Copy quote

• Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Mail, Program, Programming

  "Law of Software Envelopment",

  7 Copy quote

• [Perl] combines all the worst aspects of C and Lisp: a billion different sublanguages in one monolithic executable. It combines the power of C with the readability of PostScript.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Different, Aspect, Worst

  Usenet article "Perl and XEmacs", groups.google.com. August 16, 1997.

  8 Copy quote

• My one purpose in life is to serve as a warning to others.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Purpose, Warning, Life Is

  "Wherein a warning is delivered" by Jamie Zawinski, www.dnalounge.com. April 18, 2004.

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• I use a really simple calendar program on my computer.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Simple, Use, Calendars

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• I think Linux is a great thing, in the big picture. It's a great hacker's tool, and it has a lot of potential to become something more.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Thinking, Tools, Linux

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Dust, Work Out, Magic

  "Resignation and postmortem". www.jwz.org. March 31, 1999.

  4 Copy quote

• Your needs are big because the Internet is big.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Needs, Internet, Bigs

  Extract from interview with themes.org, www.jwz.org. 1998.

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• I find that getting something on the screen as soon as possible really helps focus the problem for me. It helps me decide what to work on next. Because if you're just looking at that big to-do list it's like, eh, I don't know which one I should do—does it matter which one I do? But if there's something you can actually look at, even if it's just the debug output of your mailbox parser, it's like, OK, there!

  Jamie Zawinski

  Focus, Doe, Looks

  "Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming". Book by Peter Seibel, September 16, 2009.

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• Convenient though it would be if it were true, Mozilla [Netscape 1.0] is not big because it's full of useless crap. Mozilla is big because your needs are big. Your needs are big because the Internet is big. There are lots of small, lean web browsers out there that, incidentally, do almost nothing useful. But being a shining jewel of perfection was not a goal when we wrote Mozilla.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Jewels, Goal, Perfection

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Alternatives, Today

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• I dont get much sense of reward from having discovered how to get the Foo card to coexist with the Bar card.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Bars, Cards, Rewards

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• On the other hand, there would be some value in different folks getting together to share expertise and technology; but to the listener, it wouldn't necessarily seem like a single station in the traditional sense.

  Jamie Zawinski

  Technology, Hands, Together

  8 Copy quote

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