Brilliant jerks almost always have a net negative impact on a project when you factor in their adverse effects on their teammates.
The existence of a competing fork might be healthy, though. Having competition can make your priorities a lot clearer.
The existence of a competing fork might be healthy, though. Having competition can make your priorities a lot clearer.
This is the lie people like you keep purporting in those VC money firehoses that have no grounds in the real world.
But note that your parent comment said "almost always", not "always". The Linux project isn't exactly typical.
He really did not.
He simply aged and had kids.
With age everything looks "not important enough to be upset by"
Believe me.
I'm giving him a lot of credit for doing it, that proves he wasn't an abusive person, he just was himself.
It's the World around him that changed and he adapted.
A lot of people do not adapt and think that their sensibilities are other people's problems.
Why would I believe your guess instead of his actual statement?
i.e. until he was ~50 years old, when he stepped aside
his words (Sun, 16 Sep 2018):
This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person and that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of all me. The fact that I then misread people and don't realize (for years) how badly I've judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good. [...] I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately.
Which is the same things Stallman said after they tried to push him out.
Linus is just smarter than Stallman, was preoccupied at the time that Linux development was being taken over, and released a public statement that made people happy, bu also he haven't changed much [1], because, in the end, he is who he is and we should appreciate him for what he's achieved.
[1] a year later he released this statement
people take me seriously in a way they didn't do back in 1994.
And that's absolutely not some kind of complaint about how I wasn't taken seriously back then – quite the reverse. It's more me grumbling that people take me much too seriously now, and I can't say silly stupid crap anymore.
So I'll still call out people (and particularly companies) for doing dumb things, but now I have to do it knowing that it's news, and me giving some company the finger will be remembered for a decade afterwards.
Whether deserved or not, it might not be worth it.
He realized that people were trojan horsing his words against Linux.
But he's Linus Torvalds, he's in the unfortunate position of being the face and image of the most successful OSS project ever, not some guy on a mailing list about Thunderbird, that nobody cares of.
Sure, but as another counterpoint to OP, that was after two decades of producing value (not just Linux but also Git).
I've seen the effect of a brilliant jerk first hand. People leave. I'm sure it's often a net negative.
Btw, calling this discussion a "lie" comes across as overly aggressive.
I don't know how to solve that, if it's real.
It could be a legitimate problem with the underperforming person (that may or may not be fixable), an overreaction to a perceived problem, an interpersonal conflict between two people, a toxic employee, or some combination of the the above.
If you have a toxic person and an underperformer dragging the team morale down, you have two problems that need to be fixed.
A good leader will dig deeper to try to understand what's really going on and act accordingly. In the scenario you've described, digging deeper would mean having the person making the claim present concrete examples and soliciting outside opinions if folks on the team are unwilling to give theirs.
In my experience, things usually fall apart due to a failure to act rather than acting on false positives.
In the end, details like this matter a great deal.
Vim is a highly successful project for decades. And one could correctly attribute much of that success to Bram Moolenaar's driving it.
And yet, once Neovim was created with a much "nicer" and broader leadership team, innovation has absolutely skyrocketed, where it's highly likely that Neovim has almost completely replaced Vim as the preferred editor for most Vim users who take the time to think about their editors, customize them, etc.
I wouldn't be surprised if neovim starts replacing vim in distributions within a couple of years.
> I wouldn't be surprised if neovim starts replacing vim in distributions within a couple of years.
That would be highly disruptive as Neovim isn't compatible with Vim. Plus Vim is still actively developed with no signs of slowing down.
I use regular vim because I don't want to think about my editor, I just want it to work.