Success Quote by Linus Torvalds

Torvalds is smuggling a whole economic worldview into a deceptively blunt observation: in software, “consumption” isn’t eating; it’s copying. The line hinges on a semantic trap. We import the old, physical intuition of scarcity into a domain where the product doesn’t disappear when you use it. If one person downloads a program and a thousand people download it, the program hasn’t been “used up.” That deflation of the word consumer is the point: it punctures the moral story that buying equals taking.

The subtext is a critique of how markets and copyright law pretend digital goods behave like bread or gasoline. In Linux-land, the marginal cost of distribution trends toward zero, so the traditional justification for pricing based on per-unit scarcity starts to look like theater. Torvalds frames that mismatch without invoking ideology; he makes it feel like basic arithmetic, which is exactly why it lands.

Context matters: Torvalds built Linux under an open-source model that thrives on scale. The more people who “take” it, the more testers, bug reports, and contributors show up, improving the thing everyone shares. So the quote isn’t just about cost; it’s about incentives. Treating users as extractive “consumers” misses the feedback loop that makes networked production powerful.

Calling Torvalds a “businessman” blurs the sharper edge here. He’s arguing from the logic of engineering: replication is cheap, coordination is hard, and value migrates from the copied artifact to services, support, and community. The barb is aimed at anyone still pricing bits as if they were atoms.