Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx> writes:
> 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.
There are plenty of successful brutal and abusive people, in fact it
seems like every year Forbes publishes an article about why psychopaths
make great CEOs. I can't accept the premise of your argument, that
brutal and abusive people are not successful, they are actually
manipulative (eg. emotionally), and can be 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.
You can be brutal and abusive while at the same time being 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".
While I accept that these other people may also be difficult to work
with, it doesn't justify Linus' behavior to say "Look! These people are
worse!"
--
Please respect the privacy of this mailing list. Some posts may be declassified
3 years after posting as per http://www.debian.org/vote/2005/vote_002
Archive: file://master.debian.org/~debian/archive/debian-private/
To UNSUBSCRIBE, use the web form at <http://db.debian.org/>.
|
|
