Quotes of the week, 2019

Week 40, 2019

"The purpose of a non-free program is to subjugate people. And typically that leads to malicious functionalities. Many of the most widely non-free programs are MALWARE. Now, note that malware is totally different issue, a different consent. The difference between free software and proprietary software is a matter of how the program is distributed to users, on what conditions for instance it's distributed. And the same code, any code, could be distributed as free software, any code could be distributed as proprietary software. Sometimes the same code is distributed both ways in parallel. It's a matter of how the code is distributed. It is not a technical issue, it is not a technical distinction between free and proprietary. Technical distinctions are things like what features does the program have, how does it work, how was the code written? Those are all technical things. This is a social, ethical and political distinction which is why it is so important."

Richard Stallman: Freedom in your computer and in the net (2014-12-29) (10m40s)

Week 41, 2019

"No System Is Safe!"

慕冬亮 (Dongliang Mu) on the Linux Kernel Mailing List on September 26th, 2019

Week 45, 2019

"Please do not stick defines into a function body. That's horrible."

Thomas Gleixner on the Linux Kernel Mailing List August 27th, 2019

Week 46, 2019

"These processors are buggy as hell, and some of these bugs don't just cause development/debugging problems, but will *ASSUREDLY* be exploitable from userland code."

Theo de Raadt Intel CPUs on Jun 27, 2007

Week 49, 2019

"I can't help but point out that if we do this, then we're forcing everyone to pay a price in terms of runtime performance and codesize -- even if they're on a processor where this doesn't matter."

Jeff Law on the binutils mailing list addressing Intel proposals to make a performance-hampering firmware update which works around a design flaw in their CPUs look slightly less bad.

Week 50, 2019

"Quite frankly, this is f*cking moronic. The whole thing seems to be designed around stupid interfaces, for completely moronic reasons. Why should we do this?"

Linus Torvalds on the LKML. February 12st, 2013

Week 51, 2019

"Yes, doing it in the kernel is "more robust". But don't play games, and stop the lying. It's more robust because we have maintainers that care, and because we know that regressions are not something we can play fast and loose with. If something breaks, and we don't know what the right fix for that breakage is, we *revert* the thing that broke."

Linus Torvalds on the LKML. October 3rd, 2012

Week 52, 2019

"I have zero confidence that we understand the real problem, but we do need to do something with this."

Bjorn Helgaas on the Linux Kernel Mailing List
November 19th, 2019

See also: Quotes of the week