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Comment by badrequest | Hacker News Reader

There are probably a number of people who are attracted to Linus Torvald's attitude and style, but I can assure you the number of people who do not contribute to the Linux kernel because they're turned off by it is significantly larger. It's absolutely in the best interest of the project that he adopt an attitude change permanently or step down.

Just as most sports are 90% mental and only 10% physical, managing a large software project is 90% people skills, and only 10% technical.

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who do not contribute to the Linux kernel because they're turned off by it is significantly larger

I’ve heard a few people now assert that they “would have” contributed to open source if it wasn’t for RMS/Linus/whoever but none of them appear to have contributed to any open source not managed by those guys, or have any independent projects on GitHub, or even be employed as professional programmers.

> I can assure you the number of people who do not contribute to the Linux kernel because they're turned off by it is significantly larger

You can't, actually. This is a deeply false ideological assumption not based on any reality or human psychology.

It depends though, I agree that it sucks to work daily with a jerk but as we see today people get outraged by pronouns, things you maybe said in the past, your private opinion on sexuality, your private opinion on politics.

It would be a pathetic excuse to fire Linus because 25 years ago insulted some BSD guys in an email or some other developer in a different email, the internet was different then and there was no COC to force people to use a specific language.

Mostly because we have enough evidence now to know how those private opinions aggregate to real damage to the people they're arrayed against, systemically.

Let's judge people on what they have done not on what they might do.

And yet somehow, Linux is arguably the most successful open source project in the world.

Perhaps, but we do not know how much better it could be today if potential contributors were not dissuaded by the politics and behavior of the existing participants.

Popularity is only one gauge of success. There are other metrics, such as personal satisfaction, missing features, or other things that the project may have failed or scored less well on.

But you don't know which contributors you'll lose if you change the project. I remember when FreeBSD added in their controversial new code of conduct, and some existing maintainers left. People keep acting like getting rid of a divisive leader will either result in improvements, or the status quo, but it could also cause the project to get worse.

I love it when arguments are so deeply grounded in facts.

Ok, let's assume that kernel developers will accept Ada Ehmke's "The Post-Meritocracy Manifesto", and attract lots of people with great interpersonal skills, with diverse backgrounds. They'll be successful, leading rich, full lives. Oh, they wouldn't depend on exerting all of their energy on contributing to software, but that's just a minor nuisance, right?

Sure, the kernel will become insanely great if this happens, right?!

All those potential GNOME or GIMP contributors that went to contribute to KDE because of RMS....

Next we will blame the lack of diversity in proprietary software on RMS too, I was afraid that it is something much more complicated but now that we found the problem all will be solved /sarcasm

> Perhaps, but we do not know how much better it could be today if potential contributors were not dissuaded by the politics and behavior of the existing participants.

Do you know how many potential contributors you'd lose by forcing adherence to liberal Californian politics? Most of the world does not adhere to them, even to the less objectionable ones.

Yes, it is, and surely Linus has done a great job as a leader overall. Yet, some of his rants absolutely crossed some lines, so there is good reason to critisize him for that.

> Just as most sports are 90% mental and only 10% physical, managing a large software project is 90% people skills, and only 10% technical.

Some evidence for these figures? Or did you just make them up?

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