Thanks to Jim Burke for this link.
“In this excerpt from O’Reilly & Associates’ newly-released
book “Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution,” Linus
Torvalds explains some of the key architectural decisions he made
in bringing the Linux kernel to its present state.”
“When it comes to other things, you have to balance. Is this a
good implementation? Is this really adding a feature that is good?
Sometimes even when the feature is good, it turns out that either
the interface is bad or the implementation of that feature kind of
implies that you can never do something else, now or in the
future.”
“Right now the only vendor that does such a stupid thing is
Microsoft. Essentially, in order to read DOS/Windows files you have
this ridiculous interface where all files had eleven characters,
eight plus three. With NT, which allowed long filenames, they had
to add a complete set of new routines to do the same things the
other routines did, except that this set can also handle larger
filenames. So this is an example of a bad interface polluting
future works.”
http://www.linuxworld.com/linuxworld/lw-1999-03/lw-03-opensources.html