On Fri, Sep 19, 2014 at 12:05:13PM -0400, Antoine Beaupré wrote:
> Interestingly, that's exactly the point people are making about
> Linux. To paraphrase, the general idea out there seems to be that the
> Linux kernel is Linus' project, so he's allowed to be as brutal and
> abusive as he wants on the mailing lists.
If Linus were brutal and abusive as you appear to think he his, I
don't think Linux would have been successful. In fact, most people
believe Linus was successful precisely *because* Linus is normally
quite reasonable, and his decisions are generally quite pragmatic and
reasonable. Certainly in the early days of Linux (circa 1992), when I
was the serial driver maintainer, I was recruited by both folks from
NetBSD and from Hurd (by Stallman himself) to do similar work on those
systems, and one of the reasons why I chose to continue to work on
Linux was that I infinitely preferred to work with Linus than either
the NetBSD core team or with Richard Stallman. That was my personal
experience, and my choice.
And this was before you could make a living working on Linux; so the
decision I was making was about how I would spend my hobby time, and I
decided that I would much rather Linus be my Open Source "boss" than
to have Stallman as my Free Software "boss".
(And indeed, this choise is still valid today. If people want to go
work with NetBSD or FreeBSD or DragonBSD or OpenBSD or Hurd, their are
plenty of other operating systems kernel projects they can go work
for. And if they want to do so for a job, they can go work for Joyant
and work on Open Solaris.)
> Why is the argument acceptable to ban sensitive people from projects but
> not "thick skin abusers"?
I think the argument is either it should be acceptable for both cases,
or not acceptable for both cases. The people who are arguing for
banning people whom they think are assholes and saying that it's OK to
do that because assholes can found their own projects, are making
exact same argument that normally people who are arguing for political
correctness wring their hands about when it is used regarding people
who are overly sensitive.
Personally, I think the argument is one that I don't find particularly
compelling regardless of which position it is used to try to justify.
Regards,
- Ted
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