Linus On Diversity and Niceness In Open Source

An anonymous reader writes "Linus Torvalds has sent a lengthy statement to Ars Technica responding to statements he made in a conference in New Zealand. One of his classic comments in NZ was: "I'm not a nice person, and I don't care about you. I care about the technology and the kernel — that's what's important to me." On diversity, he said that "the most important part of open source is that people are allowed to do what they are good at" and "all that stuff is just details and not really important." Now he writes: "What I wanted to say — and clearly must have done very badly — is that one of the great things about open source is exactly the fact that different people are so different", and that "I don't know where you happen to be based, but this 'you have to be nice' seems to be very popular in the US," calling the concept of being nice an "ideology"."

Comments

Re:Don't care?

[bmajik]

Do you have any evidence of this? At all?

Because here's what I see:

Linux has remade the software world in its own image. I'd hardly call that "failing". Real actual super computer companies (e.g. Silicon Graphics) stopped developing their own OS and started shipping Linux.

Microsoft, the arch nemesis of Linux and Open Source, is shipping kernel patches and releasing code under open source licenses.

What does "success" look like to you?

And lest you say "that's just a singular case", we can look at Theo and OpenBSD. OpenBSD has been wildly successful, both as a BSD fork, but also in its broader mission to cultivate a software culture of excellence and correctness, with results that speak for themselves.

Linux and OpenBSD are two of the oldest open source projects around, with two pretty intense personalities at the helm.

I see no evidence to support your claim whatsoever.