Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

All software sucks.
Alan Cox

Any editing, software work, and mail is done in this exported Plan 9.
Dennis Ritchie

Any good software engineer will tell you that a compiler and an interpreter are interchangeable.
Tim Berners-Lee

As a rule, software systems do not work well until they have been used, and have failed repeatedly, in real applications.
Dave Parnas

As every new breed of virus is conceived, created and released into the wild, another small change is made to the anti-virus software to combat the new threat.
Glenn Turner

'Authoring tools' are terrible; there is almost no software that can create closed captions for media players. And of course there is no training. TV captioning is bad enough, and this stuff is generally worse.
Joe Clark

Back in my day, I would probe by hand. Now you can get commercial software that does the job for you.
Kevin Mitnick

By the time Apple's Macintosh operating system finally falls into the public domain, there will be no machine that could possibly run it. The term of copyright for software is effectively unlimited.
Lawrence Lessig

Computers have become more friendly, understandable, and lots of years and thought have been put into developing software to convince people that they want and need a computer.
Roberta Williams

Computers themselves, and software yet to be developed, will revolutionize the way we learn.
Steve Jobs

Defect-free software does not exist.
Wietse Venema

Diaspora starts about a thousand years from now. Most of human civilisation has moved inside computers; essentially, a major branch of our descendants consists of conscious software.
Greg Egan

Digital art software has empowered both the painterly side of photographers, and the photographer side of painters.
Buffy Sainte-Marie

Every piece of software written today is likely going to infringe on someone else's patent.
Miguel de Icaza

Fighting patents one by one will never eliminate the danger of software patents, any more than swatting mosquitoes will eliminate malaria.
Richard Stallman

For many people my software is something that you install and forget. I like to keep it that way.
Wietse Venema

For music, unlike a $500 software program, people are paying a buck or two a song, and it's those dollars and pennies that have to add up to pay for not just the cost of that song, but the investment in the next song.
Hilary Rosen

From day one our next generation system will run all our exsisting software - so that gives us a head start.
Trip Hawkins

However, writing software without defects is not sufficient. In my experience, it is at least as difficult to write software that is safe - that is, software that behaves reasonably under adverse conditions.
Wietse Venema