Success Quote by Linus Torvalds

Torvalds is doing something quietly radical here: he frames Linux's origin not as a grand ideological crusade, but as a personal aesthetic and ethical refusal. "Never regretted" reads like a preemptive answer to the inevitable question every creator gets once a project gets big: why didn't you monetize earlier? His response is less martyrdom than distaste. The target isn't "commercial software" in general; it's the particular 1990s ecosystem of binary shareware - closed executables, paywalls after a tease, and a user treated as a revenue event rather than a collaborator.

That specificity matters. By calling out "pay for use" and "binary", Torvalds is naming the power imbalance: binaries give you the product without the agency. You can run it, maybe, but you can't see inside it, fix it, or meaningfully extend it. Linux, built in public with source available, makes a different wager: the value is not just in the tool but in the permission structure around the tool. The subtext is almost impolite in its directness: charging for access to something you can't inspect is a bad bargain, and a bad relationship.

The context is the early internet and hobbyist culture where software spread through bulletin boards, FTP servers, and trust. Linux's success wasn't an accident of generosity; it was a distribution strategy aligned with technical reality. Open code travels farther, improves faster, and recruits its own workforce. Torvalds' line is less about purity than about building an ecosystem that couldn't exist under shareware's locked-door economics.