Success Quote by Linus Torvalds

Self-mythology, delivered with a programmer’s shrug. When Linus Torvalds says “Making Linux GPL’d was definitely the best thing I ever did,” he’s not praising an elegant line of code; he’s crediting a legal decision for turning a hobby kernel into a global infrastructure project. The verb “making” matters: the GPL isn’t an aesthetic preference, it’s architecture. It builds a kind of gravity into the project, forcing improvements to stay in orbit rather than getting siphoned off into proprietary black holes.

The intent is half confession, half subtle flex. Torvalds is famous for emphasizing engineering over ideology, yet here he admits that the biggest lever wasn’t technical brilliance but licensing. That’s the subtext: in the real world, the rules of collaboration are set less by good intentions than by enforceable terms. “Best thing” also signals an inversion of tech hero narratives. The romantic story is the lone genius writing revolutionary software. Torvalds points to the unglamorous move that made everyone else’s contributions rational: companies could invest, competitors could cooperate, and the commons couldn’t be quietly privatized.

Context sharpens the line. In the early 1990s, Unix culture and the free software movement were colliding with the coming commercial internet. Choosing the GPL placed Linux squarely in the copyleft camp, aligning it with GNU and ensuring a perpetual feedback loop of shared improvements. It’s a statement about incentives: the license didn’t just protect Linux; it manufactured the conditions for Linux to outgrow him.