Finnish companies tend to be very traditional, not taking many risks. Silicon Valley is completely different: people here really live on the edge.

No-one has ever called me a cool dude. I'm somewhere between geek and normal.

Helsinki isn't all that bad. It's a very nice city, and it's cold really only in wintertime.

I've been very happy with the commercial Linux CD-ROM vendors linux Red Hat.

I very seldom worry about other systems. I concentrate pretty fully on just making Linux the best I can.

I try to avoid long-range plans and visions - that way I can more easily deal with anything new that comes up.

A consumer doesn't take anything away: he doesn't actually consume anything. Giving the same thing to a thousand consumers is not really any more expensive than giving it to just one.

The thing I love about diving is the flowing feeling. I like a sport where the whole point is to move as little as humanly possible so your air supply will last longer. That's my kind of sport. Where the amount of effort spent is absolutely minimal.

An individual developer like me cares about writing the new code and making it as interesting and efficient as possible. But very few people want to do the testing.

I'm a technical manager, but I don't have to take care of people. I only have to worry about technology itself.

I don't expect to go hungry if I decide to leave the University. Resume: Linux looks pretty good in many places.

Once you start thinking more about where you want to be than about making the best product, you're screwed.

Non-technical questions sometimes don't have an answer at all.

I do get my pizzas paid for by Linux indirectly.

I lose sleep if I end up feeling bad about something I've said. Usually that happens when I send something out without having read it over a few times, or when I call somebody names.

By staying neutral, I end up being somebody that everybody can trust. Even if they don't always agree with my decisions, they know I'm not working against them.

Part of doing Linux was that I had to communicate a lot more instead of just being a geek in front of a computer.

What commercialism has brought into Linux has been the incentive to make a good distribution that is easy to use and that has all the packaging issues worked out.

Hey, I'm a good software engineer, but I'm not exactly known for my fashion sense. White socks and sandals don't translate to 'good design sense'.

The fame and reputation part came later, and never was much of a motivator, although it did enable me to work without feeling guilty about neglecting my studies.

I don't see myself as a visionary at all.

Every once in a while an issue comes up where I have to make a statement. I can't totally avoid all political issues, but I try my best to minimize them. When I do make a statement, I try to be fairly neutral.

What I find most interesting is how people really have taken Linux and used it in ways and attributes and motivations that I never felt.

It's a personality trait: from the very beginning, I knew what I was concentrating on. I'm only doing the kernel - I always found everything around it to be completely boring.