Eric S. Raymond Quotes & Sayings

“For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.”

“In the beginning, there were Real Programmers.”

“Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“When are programmers happy? They're happy when they're not underutilized - when they're not bored - and also when they're not overburdened with inappropriate specifications or meaningless bureaucracies. In other words, programmers are happiest when they're working efficiently. This is a general preference in creative work.”

“Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion. That becomes more true the higher the skill level gets.”

“People are happiest when they're the most productive. People enjoy tasks, especially creative tasks, when the tasks are in the optimal-challenge zone: not too hard and not too easy. To some extent, that has always been true. But it becomes even more true as work becomes more about brains and creativity.”