Software Quotes

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.

It's probably fair to say that the ratio of time our Connector developers spend in the debugger versus the Emacs buffer is higher than with most software.

I don't believe in government regulation of the software industry.

Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9.

While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible.

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Yet, I am convinced that there is a need for high quality software, and the time will come when it will be recognized that it is worth investing effort in its development and in using a careful, structured approach based on safe, structured languages.

Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn.

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves.

The only thing I understand deeply, because in my teens I was thinking about it, and every year of my life, is software. So I'll never be hands-on on anything except software.

The 1980s will seem like a walk in the park when compared to new global challenges, where annual productivity increases of 6% may not be enough. A combination of software, brains, and running harder will be needed to bring that percentage up to 8% or 9%.

Most of the effort in the software business goes into the maintenance of code that already exists.

My first company, Pure Software, was exciting and innovative in the first few years and bureaucratic and painful in the last few before it got acquired. The problem was we tried to systemize everything and set up perfect procedures.

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

For many people my software is something that you install and forget. I like to keep it that way.

There is one major problem with anti-virus software: It needs updating. Users cannot be relied upon to have even the anti-virus software in the first place, let alone be able or willing to pay for the updates.

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

Then people started using it more and more and it became the most downloaded software on the internet.

In the free/libre software movement, we develop software that respects users' freedom, so we and you can escape from software that doesn't.

Twenty-five years ago, the notion was you could create a general problem-solver software that could solve problems in many different domains. That just turned out to be totally wrong.

In short, software is eating the world.

I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions.

I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, that's great.

Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high.

Human beings either function as individuals or as members of a pack. There's a switch inside us, deep in our spirit, that you can turn one way or the other. It's almost always the case that our worst behaviour comes out when we're switched to the mob setting. The problem with a lot of software designs is that they switch us to that setting.

Proprietary software tends to have malicious features. The point is with a proprietary program, when the users don't have the source code, we can never tell. So you must consider every proprietary program as potential malware.

We have most of the software industry running Autonomy.

Writing software that's safe even in the presence of bugs makes the challenge even more interesting.

It's hardware that makes a machine fast. It's software that makes a fast machine slow.

Software is like sex: it's better when it's free.