Jamie Zawinski

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

Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.

— Jamie Zawinski

I'd just like to take this moment to point out that C has all the expressive power of two dixie cups and a string.

— Jamie Zawinski

Linux is only free if your time has no value.

— Jamie Zawinski

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

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

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

— Jamie Zawinski

I dug in a bit but then the smell of gasoline and burning flesh drove me away.

— Jamie Zawinski

If you're using Windows, go fuck yourself.

— Jamie Zawinski

I've noticed that when I get quoted in files, it's never any of the actual clever things I say all the time. Usually it's something dumb.

— Jamie Zawinski

Browser compatibility problems are nature's way of saying "stop trying to be so fuckin' clever".

— Jamie Zawinski

Professionalism has no place in art, and hacking is art. Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer.

— Jamie Zawinski

[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

Your needs are big because the Internet is big.

— Jamie Zawinski

Nothing comes for free.

— Jamie Zawinski

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

There is a lot of money to be made in the business of secrets, of course.

— Jamie Zawinski

Our focus in the client group had always been to build products and features that people wanted to use. That we wanted to use. That our moms wanted to use.

— Jamie Zawinski

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

But instead I'm stuck inside under fluorescent lights, pushing bits around inside a computer in ways that are only interesting to other nerds.

— Jamie Zawinski