Eric Allman Quotations

The intellectual property situation is bad and getting worse. To be a programmer, it requires that you understand as much law as you do technology.

This is like the telephone problem - no one wants to have the first one. But we are seeing a lot of people who want some sort of technology to solve the spam problem.

Personally, one of the down sides of founding a company is that there is always too much work to do, and sadly I find I don't have much time to code any more.

I like to eat good food. I cook and collect wine. I like going for long walks when I can.

Lots of large commercial vendors are getting into this market, and they have not shown dedication to the standards-based approach or to free access to the essential technology.

My guess is you'll see stuff coming out this year, but it will go on longer than that.

From the corporate perspective, open source is a means, not an end, and if you confuse those you're going to have problems.

It is definitely true that having a common foe does give you something to shoot at. I'm just hoping that we don't fall into a pattern of simply playing catch-up with Microsoft, which is a danger.

We started up the company with a goal of building a real company, unlike so many Internet Bubble startups that seemed to take the attitude of "let's get mind share, and we'll figure out a way to make money later.

You get a certain amount of cachet. The more people that know about your stuff, the better.

To me, Microsoft has behaved like the clear-cutters of the computer software industry.

This is like the telephone problem--no one wants to have the first one. But we are seeing a lot of people who want some sort of technology to solve the spam problem.

People optimize locally - that is, they do what's best for themselves.

Unix gives you just enough rope to hang yourself - and then a couple of more feet, just to be sure.

There is some sort of perverse pleasure in knowing that it's basically impossible to send a piece of hate mail through the Internet without its being touched by a gay program. That's kind of funny.

I used to be enamored of object-oriented programming. I'm now finding myself leaning toward believing that it is a plot designed to destroy joy.