Success Quote by Linus Torvalds

Torvalds slips a small grenade into a sentence that looks like a shrug. “Linux has definitely made a lot of sense” could be read as mild satisfaction from a builder watching his tool get used. The kicker is “even in a purely materialistic sense,” a phrase that drags an entire moral argument onto the table: yes, the open-source thing that sounds idealistic also pays off in the grubbiest, spreadsheet-friendly way.

The intent is twofold. First, it undercuts the persistent caricature of Linux as hobbyist virtue signaling - a monkish alternative to “real” business. Second, it reframes the motive structure of open source: you don’t have to be saintly to participate; you just have to be rational. That “even” does a lot of work, implying that the higher-minded case (collaboration, transparency, user freedom) is already obvious to his audience. He’s addressing the skeptics who only speak in ROI.

The subtext is classic Torvalds: pragmatic, faintly impatient with ideology. He’s not pleading for Linux; he’s noting that it won. In context, Linux’s success wasn’t merely technical elegance; it was a new production model that let companies pool infrastructure costs, avoid vendor lock-in, and build billion-dollar businesses on shared code. Torvalds’ quiet flex is that the revolution didn’t need a manifesto. It just needed incentives.