Eric S. Raymond

“Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.”

“Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).”

“You are not a true hacker until you have written a major open-source program that has been used and appreciated by many other people.”

“Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

“The art of programming is the art of organizing complexity.”

“To be a hacker, you have to have a basic attitude: the world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.”

“The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.”

“The best things in life are done by volunteers.”

“When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.”

“Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.”

“Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.”

“Don't just ask 'What problems does this solve?' Also ask 'What problems does this create?'”

“The central enemy of reliability is complexity.”

“Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.”

“The 'user' is not a lower life form.”

“Security through obscurity is a myth.”

“Perhaps in the end the hacker attitude is profoundest not in its rebellion against authority but in its adoration of competence.”

“The social dynamics of a project are at least as important for its success as the quality of the code.”

“Hackers solve problems and build things, and they believe in freedom and voluntary mutual help.”