Linux founder not a 'people person'

> but you can't do the job without being good at working with people and getting them do the thing you need them to do

Basically, the "merit-based" structure of an open-source project ensures that people can get away with bare-minimum communication skills. If I'm a BDFL, all I need to convince people to join my project is a good, working product (and Linus had that - Linux). As an enthusiastic programmer, all you need to contribute is ability to send a pull-request.

There are matters like internal politics, but beyond a certain expansion, it becomes almost impossible to justify doing a fork just for egoistical reasons (and most people know that, even the less "people-friendly" or "more geeky" people).

All in all, it is the community/hacker culture that drives an open source project development and takes a life of its own, matters like personal communication skills seem insignificant in front of that larger force.

Another reason Linus could get away with lesser people skills was perhaps because he followed the bazaar style of development which invites literally everyone into the project. This way, if one particular geek didn't agree with Torvalds, he could replace him/her with someone else as the bazaar model ensured a good competition among the geeks.

Richard Stallman, however, followed the cathedral style of development for creating emacs and gnu utils. This model involves just Stallman's chosen few geeks or programmers, so communication and people skills matter a lot here. If you have only a few programmers to do your job, you can't afford to call them bad names and lose them, can you!

On a related note. Git is obviously an extremely powerful program that would arguably be very simple to understand if the interface weren't so complex and (at times) counter intuitive.

The newsworthiness of the piece is probablity in the rarity of Torvalds giving an interview.

Note that the article doesn't say "Legendary programmer", it says "Founder of one of the most deployed piece of software in the world". It speaks to people who aren't tech-savvy, who may be interested in who's behind (part of) the software in their smartphone or in their TV (even though it isn't mentioned in the article, people may have heard of that project more than the man)