Success Quote by Linus Torvalds

Utility is Torvalds's north star, and he wields it like a blunt instrument against tech's favorite pastime: mistaking elegance for value. "Any program is only as good as it is useful" reads simple, almost obvious, which is the point. It's a rebuke to the cathedral mindset of software-as-art, where purity, cleverness, and ideological correctness get treated as ends in themselves. Torvalds built Linux by privileging what works, what ships, what people can actually run, patch, and improve. In that ecosystem, "good" isn't a moral category or a stylistic compliment; it's a measurement taken in the real world.

The subtext is anti-romantic and quietly anti-authoritarian. Usefulness shifts power away from gatekeepers who decide what's "proper" and toward users who vote with adoption. It also deflates the heroic narrative of the lone genius: a program's worth isn't sealed at release, it's constantly renegotiated by the community's needs, bugs, hardware constraints, and the messy reality of maintenance. If nobody uses it, it doesn't matter how clean the architecture is.

Context matters here. Coming out of open-source culture - and Torvalds's famously unsentimental communication style - the line doubles as a cultural norm: stop arguing about abstractions, show the patch. It's also a warning to businesses that fetishize roadmaps and features. The only scoreboard that counts is whether the software solves a problem for someone, reliably, today.