Quote of the Day: Linus Torvalds on Love & Passion

In the late 1990s, as the dot‑com boom inflated everything from stock valuations to corporate certainty, a quieter revolution was spreading through mailing lists and university labs: software built in public, by volunteers, with arguments and patches instead of press releases. That atmosphere, half utopian, half punk, still matters in 2026, when our lives run on code we rarely get to inspect. Which is why Linus Torvalds could land a provocative truth with a joke: “Software is like sex: it’s better when it’s free.”

The line isn’t a frat-house punchline; it’s a warning label. “Free” here isn’t about price tags, it’s about freedom in the practical, civic sense: the ability to see what a program does, to change it when it fails you, and to share improvements so the next person isn’t trapped by the same limitations. In an age of subscription everything, opaque algorithms, and locked-down devices, that freedom is no longer a niche preference. It’s a form of self-defense.

Torvalds’s comparison also smuggles in a second point: the best systems are built on consent and participation. Free software communities thrive because anyone can audit, criticize, and contribute, turning bug fixes into a kind of collective accountability. Closed systems can be elegant, but they concentrate power: a vendor decides what’s possible, what’s permitted, and what’s worth repairing. When the code is open, the user is less a consumer and more a citizen.

Linus Torvalds earned the right to needle the industry: he created Linux, the backbone of much of the internet, and Git, the toolchain that made modern collaboration scalable. His career is a case study in how openness can outcompete exclusivity.

It’s Wednesday, December 31, 2025, New Year’s Eve, when we audit our habits and renegotiate our boundaries. Take the joke seriously: choose tools that respect your agency, support open projects you rely on, and treat humor as a doorway into a harder question, who controls the code that controls you?