Quotes and Sayings about Software
"Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the second law of thermodynamics; i.e. it always increases."
- Norman Ralph Augustine
(Related: Law, Nothing, Software)
"There is a lot of interest in the arts, music, theatre, filmmaking, engineering, architecture and software design. I think we have now transitioned the modern-day version of the entrepreneur into the creative economy."
- John Baldacci
(Related: Architecture, Design, Music, Economy, Engineering, Interest, Now, Software, Theatre)
"We can provide beta software to our developers in advance of the general public. We can easily link up with external partners, customers, and suppliers."
- Jim Barksdale
(Related: Public, Software)
"We can collaborate with a Netscape employee or partner who's halfway around the world. We can distribute information and software to customers and shareholders, and get their feedback."
- Jim Barksdale
(Related: Information, Software, World)
"I think we're proving ourselves as we go along. The past several months our strategy has been evolutionary - making maximum advantage of our client browser, as well as our enterprise software for people who want to build Web sites."
- Jim Barksdale
(Related: People, Strategy, Months, Past, Software, Want)
"I don't believe in government regulation of the software industry."
- Jim Barksdale
(Related: Government, Software)
"Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
- Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.
(Related: Project, Software)
"It's hardware that makes a machine fast. It's software that makes a fast machine slow."
- Craig Bruce
(Related: Hardware, Machine, Software)
"I really think it is amazing that people actually buy software."
- Bill Budge
(Related: People, Software)
"One of the problems with computers, particularly for the older people, is they were befuddled by them, and the computers have gotten better. They have gotten easier to use. They have gotten less expensive. The software interfaces have made things a lot more accessible."
- Steve Case
(Related: Computers, People, Problems, Software)
"Our technology is very scalable. Our software can accommodate enormous numbers of clients. It's a marvelous opportunity. We'll keep developing products."
- Jay Chiat
(Related: Technology, Opportunity, Clients, Numbers, Software)
"'Authoring tools' are terrible; there is almost no software that can create closed captions for media players. And of course there is no training. TV captioning is bad enough, and this stuff is generally worse."
- Joe Clark
(Related: Media, Software, Tools, Training)
"Reading computer manuals without the hardware is as frustrating as reading manuals without the software."
- Arthur C. Clarke
(Related: Computer, Hardware, Reading, Software)
"We decided that the French could never write user-friendly software because they're so rude."
- Doug Coupland
(Related: Software)
"All software sucks."
- Alan Cox
(Related: Software)
"Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software."
- Greg Egan
(Related: Computers, Now, Software, Years)
"We've been in the Mac software business for more than 20 years. And it's been a great business for us."
- Scott Erickson
(Related: Business, Software, Years)
"I think the most difficult thing had been scaling the infrastructure. Trying to support the response we had received from our users and the number of people that were interested in using the software."
- Shawn Fanning
(Related: People, Software, Support, Trying)
"Well, user feedback was excellent. Even when the software didn't work at all, there were few people who were avid users, and there were people who were just sending excellent feedback and excellent ideas."
- Shawn Fanning
(Related: Work, People, Ideas, Software)
"It's probably fair to say that the ratio of time our Connector developers spend in the debugger versus the Emacs buffer is higher than with most software."
- Nat Friedman
(Related: Time, Software)
"Red Carpet Enterprise has been really well received since one guy can install it in about an hour, and it makes it trivial to deal with software management issues like deploying updates and creating standard package sets for your various machines."
- Nat Friedman
(Related: Management, Machines, Software)
"Twenty-five years ago, the notion was you could create a general problem-solver software that could solve problems in many different domains. That just turned out to be totally wrong."
- Howard Gardner
(Related: Problems, Software, Wrong, Years)
"Since when has the world of computer software design been about what people want? This is a simple question of evolution. The day is quickly coming when every knee will bow down to a silicon fist, and you will all beg your binary gods for mercy."
- Bill Gates
(Related: Design, People, Gods, Computer, Day, Evolution, Mercy, Question, Software, Want, Will, World)
"I'm sorry that we have to have a Washington presence. We thrived during our first 16 years without any of this. I never made a political visit to Washington and we had no people here. It wasn't on our radar screen. We were just making great software."
- Bill Gates
(Related: People, First, Software, Visit, Washington, Years)
"Whether it's Google or Apple or free software, we've got some fantastic competitors and it keeps us on our toes."
- Bill Gates
(Related: Software)
"Why shouldn't we give our teachers a license to obtain software, all software, any software, for nothing? Does anyone demand a licensing fee, each time a child is taught the alphabet?"
- William Gibson
(Related: Time, Nothing, Software, Teachers)
"Our democracy, our constitutional framework is really a kind of software for harnessing the creativity and political imagination for all of our people. The American democratic system was an early political version of Napster."
- Al Gore
(Related: Imagination, People, Creativity, American, Democracy, Software)
"I just became one with my browser software."
- Bill Griffith
(Related: Software)
"We also had good software in the key categories and more focus on the gameplaying capability, so more of the marketing effort was targeted at game customers."
- Trip Hawkins
(Related: Effort, Focus, Key, Marketing, Software)
"None of our competitors have ever made two systems that run the same software."
- Trip Hawkins
(Related: Software)
"From day one our next generation system will run all our exsisting software - so that gives us a head start."
- Trip Hawkins
(Related: Day, Software, Will)
"I got bitten by the free software bug in February of 1998 around the time of the Mozilla announcement."
- Andy Hertzfeld
(Related: Time, February, Software)
"I developed some unique software to public it on the web that I call the Folklore Project."
- Andy Hertzfeld
(Related: Project, Public, Software)
"The software patent problem is not limited to Mono. Software patents affect everyone writing software today."
- Miguel de Icaza
(Related: Software, Today, Writing)
"Our strategy in dealing with patents in Mono is the same strategy that any other software developer would take. In the event of a patent claim, we will try to find prior art to the claim of the patent."
- Miguel de Icaza
(Related: Art, Strategy, Software, Will)
"Every piece of software written today is likely going to infringe on someone else's patent."
- Miguel de Icaza
(Related: Software, Today)
"I was trying to figure out what to do next, I'd been accumulating ideas for productivity tools - software people could use every day, particularly to help organize their lives."
- Mitch Kapor
(Related: People, Ideas, Day, Help, Productivity, Software, Tools, Trying)
"People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."
- Alan Kay
(Related: People, Hardware, Software)
"So far, Indian companies have focused more on customer application. This needs to shift to packaged software for sectors such as banking and financial services."
- Sanjay Kumar
(Related: Financial, Customer, Needs, Software)
"Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable."
- Tim Berners Lee
(Related: Software, Will)
"While the creative works from the 16th century can still be accessed and used by others, the data in some software programs from the 1990s is already inaccessible."
- Lawrence Lessig
(Related: Software)
"By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited."
- Lawrence Lessig
(Related: Time, Machine, Public, Software, Will)
"Most people treat the office manual the way they treat a software manual. They never look at it."
- James Levine
(Related: People, Office, Software)
"I think that the most beautiful thing lately hasn't been in hardware or software per se but collaboration - the idea behind Napster, which uses the distributed power of the Internet as its engine."
- Steven Levy
(Related: Power, Idea, Collaboration, Hardware, Internet, Software)
"The scanning of barcodes, or the reading of RFID transponders, generates data that is used in a software package to provide management or control information."
- Mike Marsh
(Related: Control, Management, Information, Reading, Software)
"Limit use of shareware and public domain software to systems without fixed disks. If you do use them on fixed disks, allocate separate subdirectories... Public domain or shareware software should never be placed in the root directory."
- John McAfee
(Related: Public, Software)
"Now, you can just get a laptop, get some software, put a microphone on it and make a record. You have to know how to do it. It does help if you've had 35 or 40 years of experience in the studio. But, it still levels the playing field so artists can record their own stuff."
- Roger McGuinn
(Related: Experience, Artists, Help, Now, Software, Years)
"So what I was essentially doing was, I compromised the confidentiality of their proprietary software to advance my agenda of becoming the best at breaking through the lock."
- Kevin Mitnick
(Related: Software)
"Back in my day, I would probe by hand. Now you can get commercial software that does the job for you."
- Kevin Mitnick
(Related: Day, Job, Now, Software)
"Software comes from heaven when you have good hardware."
- Ken Olsen
(Related: Hardware, Heaven, Software)
"We're entering a new world in which data may be more important than software."
- Tim O'Reilly
(Related: May, Software, World)
"Venture capitalists are like lemmings jumping on the software bandwagon."
- Adam Osborne
(Related: Software)
"With bundled machines you can throw away the hardware and keep the software, and it's still a good buy."
- Adam Osborne
(Related: Hardware, Machines, Software)
"As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications."
- Dave Parnas
(Related: Work, Software)
"Is it possible that software is not like anything else, that it is meant to be discarded: that the whole point is to always see it as a soap bubble?"
- Alan Perlis
(Related: Software)
"In software systems it is often the early bird that makes the worm."
- Alan Perlis
(Related: Software)
"If Unix could present the same face, the same capabilities, on machines of many different types, it could serve as a common software environment for all of them."
- Eric S. Raymond
(Related: Environment, Machines, Present, Software, Unix)
"Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9."
- Dennis Ritchie
(Related: Work, Mail, Software)
"You know, IBM was almost knocked out of the box by other types of computer software and manufacturing."
- Roy Romer
(Related: Computer, Manufacturing, Software)
"Interactive computers and software will, I think, provide a less costly method of doing some kinds of inquiry, in knowledge acquisition and even reasoning and interaction."
- Roy Romer
(Related: Computers, Knowledge, Software, Will)
"For music, unlike a $500 software program, people are paying a buck or two a song, and it's those dollars and pennies that have to add up to pay for not just the cost of that song, but the investment in the next song."
- Hilary Rosen
(Related: Music, People, Investment, Software, Song)
"I have this hope that there is a better way. Higher-level tools that actually let you see the structure of the software more clearly will be of tremendous value."
- Guido van Rossum
(Related: Hope, Software, Tools, Value, Will)
"The days when you needed amazing Silicon Graphics machines to run animation software are gone now."
- Dave Rowntree
(Related: Animation, Machines, Now, Software)
"Digital art software has empowered both the painterly side of photographers, and the photographer side of painters."
- Buffy Sainte-Marie
(Related: Art, Software)
"Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria."
- Richard Stallman
(Related: Danger, Fighting, Mosquitoes, Software, Will)
"When it comes to software, I much prefer free software, because I have very seldom seen a program that has worked well enough for my needs, and having sources available can be a life-saver."
- Linus Torvalds
(Related: Life, Needs, Software)
"Software is like sex: it's better when it's free."
- Linus Torvalds
(Related: Software)
"People enjoy the interaction on the Internet, and the feeling of belonging to a group that does something interesting: that's how some software projects are born."
- Linus Torvalds
(Related: People, Feeling, Internet, Projects, Software)
"Shareware tends to combine the worst of commercial software with the worst of free software."
- Linus Torvalds
(Related: Software)
"I think it is important for software to avoiding imposing a cognitive style on workers and their work."
- Edward Tufte
(Related: Work, Software, Style, Workers)
"As every new breed of virus is conceived, created and released into the wild, another small change is made to the anti-virus software to combat the new threat."
- Glenn Turner
(Related: Change, Software)
"There is one major problem with anti-virus software: It needs updating. Users cannot be relied upon to have even the anti-virus software in the first place, let alone be able or willing to pay for the updates."
- Glenn Turner
(Related: First, Needs, Software)
"The challenge with Postfix, or with any piece of software, is to update software without introducing problems."
- Wietse Venema
(Related: Challenge, Problems, Software)
"Writing software that's safe even in the presence of bugs makes the challenge even more interesting."
- Wietse Venema
(Related: Bugs, Challenge, Software, Writing)
"When I write software, I know that it will fail, either due to my own mistake, or due to some other cause."
- Wietse Venema
(Related: Mistake, Cause, Software, Will)
"The Postfix security model is based on keeping software simple and stupid."
- Wietse Venema
(Related: Security, Software)
"Qmail out of the box works fine, so people will want to use it regardless of licensing restrictions, even when the software does not ship with their system software."
- Wietse Venema
(Related: People, Software, Want, Will)
"My reply is: the software has no known bugs, therefore it has not been updated."
- Wietse Venema
(Related: Bugs, Software)
"Most of the effort in the software business goes into the maintenance of code that already exists."
- Wietse Venema
(Related: Business, Effort, Software)
"Like all software, Qmail can survive only when it keeps up with changing requirements."
- Wietse Venema
(Related: Software)
"This will surprise some of your readers, but my primary interest is not with computer security. I am primarily interested in writing software that works as intended."
- Wietse Venema
(Related: Computer, Interest, Security, Software, Will, Writing)
"In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems."
- Wietse Venema
(Related: Life, Physics, Safety, Software)
"However, writing software without defects is not sufficient. In my experience, it is at least as difficult to write software that is safe - that is, software that behaves reasonably under adverse conditions."
- Wietse Venema
(Related: Experience, Software, Writing)
"I want to avoid locking people into solutions that work only with Postfix. People should have a choice in what software they want to use with Postfix, be it anti-virus or otherwise."
- Wietse Venema
(Related: Work, People, Choice, Software, Want)
"For many people my software is something that you install and forget. I like to keep it that way."
- Wietse Venema
(Related: People, Forget, Software)
"Defect-free software does not exist."
- Wietse Venema
(Related: Software)
"I think software patents are a bad idea. Many patents are given for trivial inventions."
- Larry Wall
(Related: Idea, Inventions, Software)
"I want people to use Perl. I want to be a positive ingredient of the world and make my American history. So, whatever it takes to give away my software and get it used, that's great."
- Larry Wall
(Related: History, People, Positive, American, Software, Want, World)
"The 1980s will seem like a walk in the park when compared to new global challenges, where annual productivity increases of 6% may not be enough. A combination of software, brains, and running harder will be needed to bring that percentage up to 8% or 9%."
- Jack Welch
(Related: May, Productivity, Running, Software, Will)
"Computers have become more friendly, understandable, and lots of years and thought have been put into developing software to convince people that they want and need a computer."
- Roberta Williams
(Related: Computers, Thought, People, Software, Want, Years)
"You get the software you pay for. In every sense. To the nth degree. That's the way the world works."
- Dave Winer
(Related: Sense, Software, World)
"Software development is technical activity conducted by human beings."
- Niklaus Wirth
(Related: Development, Software)
"Yet, I am convinced that there is a need for high quality software, and the time will come when it will be recognized that it is worth investing effort in its development and in using a careful, structured approach based on safe, structured languages."
- Niklaus Wirth
(Related: Time, Quality, Development, Effort, Software, Will, Worth)
"Indeed, the woes of Software Engineering are not due to lack of tools, or proper management, but largely due to lack of sufficient technical competence."
- Niklaus Wirth
(Related: Management, Competence, Engineering, Software, Tools)
"I'm not saying we purposely introduced bugs or anything, but this is kind of a natural result of any complexities of software... that you can't fully test it."
- Will Wright
(Related: Bugs, Result, Saying, Software)
"Software Engineering might be science; but that's not what I do. I'm a hacker, not an engineer."
- Jamie Zawinski
(Related: Science, Engineering, Software)
"Of course, all of the software I write runs on Linux; that's the beauty of standards, and of cross-platform code. I don't have to run your OS, and you don't have to run mine, and we can use the same applications anyway!"
- Jamie Zawinski
(Related: Beauty, Linux, Software)
"Then people started using it more and more and it became the most downloaded software on the internet."
- Niklas Zennstrom
(Related: People, Internet, Software)