"If our customers buy bandwidth from us, and they want to share it with neighbors, or publicly, that doesn't make them bad customers." " Joe Plotkin, Bway.net.

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jul2002/tc2002073_1130.htm

"...the commercial concerns from the very beginning, even when they were small, were really very important. The commercial distributions were what drove a lot of the nice installers, and pushed people to improve usability... I think commercial users of Linux have been very important in actually improving the product. I think all the technical people who have been involved have been hugely important, but I think that the kind of commercial use that you can get with the GPLv2 is also important -- you need a balance between pure technology, and the kinds of pressures you get from users through the market... If you have a purely marketing (or customer) driven approach, you end up with crap technology in the end. But I think that something that is purely driven by technical people will also end up as crap technology in the end, and you really need a balance here."

- Linus Torvalds

Source: http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2007/080907-torvalds-on-linux-ms-softwares.html?page=2

"It's exciting to go to work each day knowing that scads of companies are using your software, then contacting you to get additional value. It's not easy by any stretch, but it's a lot more efficient and productive than the proprietary model."

-Matt Asay

Source: http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9762210-16.html?part=rss&tag=feed&subj=TheOpenRoad