P.J. Eby:

The cardinal rule of successful groupware is that those who put information into the system must receive a proportional benefit for their efforts, or those who want to get information out of the system will not see anything coming out.

Peter Norvig:

[Programming] language choice is not as important as all the other choices: if you have the right overall architecture, the right team of programmers, the right development process that allows for rapid development with continuous improvement, then many languages will work for you; if you don’t have those things you’re in trouble regardless of your language choice.

man tar:

The GNU folks, in general, abhor man pages, and create info documents instead. Unfortunately, the info document describing tar is licensed under the GFDL with invariant cover texts, which makes it impossible to include any text from that document in this man page. Most of the text in this document was automatically extracted from the usage text in the source. It may not completely describe all features of the program.

Mark Shuttleworth:

Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are “wrong by default”. It’s the great-granddaddy of racism and sexism. And the most dangerous kind of tribalism is completely invisible: it has nothing to do with someone’s “birth tribe” and everything to do with their affiliations: where they work, which sports team they support, which linux distribution they love.

[…]

Let’s be clear: tribalism makes you stupid.

Guido van Rossum:

Maybe we’ve been too careful with only giving commit privileges to to experienced and trusted new developers. I spoke to Ezio Melotti and from his experience with getting commit privileges, it seems to be a case of “the lion is much more afraid of you than you are afraid of the lion”. I.e. having got privileges he was very concerned about doing something wrong, worried about the complexity of SVN, and so on. Since we’ve got lots of people watching the commit stream, I think that there really shouldn’t need to be a worry at all about a new committer doing something malicious, and there shouldn’t be much worry about honest beginners’ mistakes either – the main worry remains that new committers don’t use their privileges enough. So, my recommendation (which surely is a turn-around of my own attitude in the past) is to give out more commit privileges sooner.

Daniel Dvorkin:

In every field which was once exclusively male, but is now no longer, it’s been claimed first, that no woman can perform alongside men; second, when the first claim is disproven, that hardly any woman can; and third, when the second claim is disproven, that maybe a few women can, but a majority lack the ability or the inclination. And every single time, as the residual sexism fades, the third claim is shown to be false as well. Business, politics, medicine: it’s a familiar pattern. Now math is next on the list.