My highlights from the book:

1. The more successful Linux and open source became the least he wanted to talk about it. The accidental revolutionary started Linux beause playing on a computer was fun.

2. Revolutionaries aren't born. Revolutions can't be planned. Revolutions can't be managed. Revolutions happen.

3. Basically it is short and sweet. It won't give your life meaning, but it tells you what's going to happen. There are three things that have meaning for life. They are the motivational factors for everything in your life—for anything that you do or any living thing does: The first is survival, the second is social order, and the third is entertainment. Everything in life progresses in that order.

4. And there is nothing after entertainment. So, in a sense, the implication is that the meaning of life is to reach that third stage. And you're done. But you have to go through the other stages once you've reached the third stage, first.

5. So what this builds up to is that in the end we're all here to have fun. We might as well sit down and relax, and enjoy the ride.

6. I'm famous for zoning out. When I'm sitting in front of the computer, I get really upset and irritable if somebody disturbs me.

7. No fun could compare to computer fun. With the computer at home, it was possible to stay up all night with it. I would fake sleeping, wait for Mom to go away, jump up and sit in front of the computer.

8. Linus has no handlers, doesn't listen to voice mail, and rarely responds to email.

9. I found Linus to be unexpectedly knowledgeable about American business history.

10. Finns are stoic to a fault. Silent suffering and fierce determination might be what helped us survive in the face of domination by Russia, a succession of bloody wars, and weather that sucks.

11. At this time, there weren't very many people I knew who were as involved in computers as I was.

12. There's a reason that games are always on the cutting edge, and why they often are the first programs that programmers create. Partly it has to do with the fact that some of the smartest programmers out there are fifteen-year-old kids playing around in their rooms. (It's what I thought sixteen years ago, and I still suspect it's true.)

13. Now everybody has a book that has changed his or her life. The Holy Bible. Das Kapital. Tuesdays With Maury. Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. Whatever. The book that launched me to new heights was Operating Systems: Design and Implementation by Andrew S. Tanenbaum.

14. As I read and started to understand Unix, I got a big enthusiastic jolt. Frankly, it's never subsided. I hope you can say the same about something.

15. There were two things I did that summer. Nothing. And read the 719 pages of Operating Systems: Design and Implementation.

16. An ugly system is one in which there are special interfaces for everything you want to do. Unix is the opposite. It gives you the building blocks that are sufficient for doing everything. That's what having a clean design is all about.

17. It's the same thing with languages. The English language has twenty-six letters and you can build up everything from those letters.

18. Unix comes with a small-is-beautiful philosophy. It has a small set of simple basic building blocks that can be combined into something that allows for infinite complexity of expression.

19. You should absolutely not dismiss simplicity for something easy. It takes design and good taste to be simple.

20. He is motivated by honest curiosity and a wish to conquer difficulties as they arise, and to do it the right way because that's the way it IS and he won't give up.

21. The problem gets solved by thinking about it.

22. You can do something the brute force way, the stupid, grind-the-problem-down-until-it's not-a-problem-anymore way, or you can find the right approach and suddenly the problem just goes away. You look at the problem another way, and you have this epiphany: It was only a problem because you were looking at it the wrong way.

23. It's still hard to explain what can be so fascinating about beating your head against the wall for three days, not knowing how to solve something the better way, the beautiful way. But once you find that way, it's the greatest feeling in the world.

24. That was the point where I almost gave up, thinking it would be too much work and not worth it.

25. I felt a great sense of satisfaction. I think that was particularly important because I hadn't been doing anything that summer except working on the computer. This is not an exaggeration. I rarely even knew if it was day or night, weekend or weekday.

26. And I didn't feel the least bit pathetic. I was having fun.

27. I was more interested in seeing where people were using Linux. Instead of cash, I preferred postcards. And they poured in-from New Zealand, from Japan, from the Netherlands, from the United States.

28. I felt I was following in the footsteps of centuries of scientists and other academics who built their work on the foundations of others—on the shoulders of giants.

29. While I might be somebody's idea of a folk hero, I've never been the selfless, ego-free, techno-lovechild the hallucinating press insists I am.

30. Much of Linux's success can be attributed to my own personality flaws: 1) I'm lazy; and 2) I like to get credit for the work of others. Otherwise the Linux development model, if that's what people are calling it, would still be limited to daily email messages among a half-dozen geeks, as opposed to an intricate web of hundreds of thousands of participants.

31. I divested myself of things that didn't hold much interest for me.

32. In Finland if a worker is much better than his colleagues, you give him just a little more money and keep it very quiet. In America, you give him a lot more money and it works.

33. Being a father seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

34. I'm a firm believer in sleep. You may lose a few hours of your productive daytime if you sleep ten hours a day, but those few hours when you are awake you're alert, and your brain functions on all cylinders.

35. Benevolent dictator? No, I'm just lazy. I try to manage by not making decisions and letting things occur naturally. That's when you get the best results.

36. Most days I wake up thinking I'm the luckiest bastard alive.

37. Human creativity got a price tag, and it turned out to be quite expensive. Creativity is rare, and as a result it is not just expensive but also extremely lucrative.

38. The way to survive and flourish is to make the best damn product you can.

39. Survive. Socialize. Have fun. That's the progression. And that's also why we chose "Just for Fun" as the title of this book. Because everything we ever do seems to eventually end up being for our own entertainment.

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