Author: Matt

“Whoever released the code for the Internet probably didn’t understand what they were doing.”

UC-Berkeley intellectual property czar Bill Hoskins, who’s in charge of making sure none of the university’s innovations ever make it out of the lab free of charge, Salon.com, 4 January 2002

“Linux people are always, work, work, work.”

Jacques le Marois, president of French Linux distributor MandrakeSoft, on how labor makes code free, ZDNN, 2 January 2002

“Spam is our number one problem. But it’s hard to say what would have caused the system to filter email from Harvard.”

AOL Time Warner spokesman Nicholas Graham, on the mysterious disappearance of emails informing students that they’d been accepted to Yale’s archrival, USA Today, 2 January 2002

“The only mistake that I would say that I regret is that we got pulled into the whole dot-com frenzy.”

Geraldine Laybourne, on how sorry she is for raising hundreds of millions of dollars by promising TV-Web convergence, only to turn around and pour it into an also-ran cable channel, San Francisco Chronicle, 24 December 2001

“When I look back on it, I wonder did we need to make important strategic decisions at 10 p.m. on Sunday night after another 80-hour week.”

Former Excite@Home CEO George Bell, on rethinking his company’s rush to oblivion, The New York Times, 27 December 2001

“When it comes to decisions, we get whatever data is available and go.”

A pre-crash Bell, on his company’s need for speed, Wired, September 1998