> I don’t believe that the “BDFL” (benevolent dictator for life) model is healthy for a person or a project
It's interesting that the best projects have BDFLs, and that the best BDFLs are skeptical of their own power.
It's interesting that the best projects have BDFLs, and that the best BDFLs are skeptical of their own power.
As compared to people who want to be leaders, for the sake of being known as a 'leader', but have neither the competency nor accountability to be leaders.
The best leaders are interested in being leaders for the betterment of their team/community, not for the clout. But people who are pushed to be leaders without being interested in that, they tend to suck and make life miserable for everyone else. Leadership is a skill, if you treat it differently, you will suck at it.
Meanwhile there's entire landfills of failed projects with single owners who couldn't bend enough. We just don't find this worth discussing.
Of course this won't happen, but a man can dream.
* Keras
* Ruby
* Clojure
* Zig
* OCaml
* Vim
* Elixir
I think all of these have ended up being unusually coherent. I may not agree with their design philosophy, but there clearly is one.
A very widespread system for organising people is to have a single responsible decision-maker, supported, monitored and advised by a committee. We see that through politics and business, and a lot of the best open source projects seem to do the same thing.
Many of those, including Linux as far as I know, simply started as projects that were driven by single authors with a strong vision and remarkable diligence.
Then people flocked to those projects, but with the understanding and appreciation of that vision.
I don’t think any of them wanted to be BDFLs for the sake of power. They were the original authors and _made_ something useful. I don’t think any of them took over an existing project and declared themselves dictators. Ironically they all would be way too opinionated to do so.
Also I've never seen Torvalds "chewing out people on mailing lists for something stupid they said", it's always been someone breaking something or something along those lines. That is: doing stupid. And it's also experienced maintainers Torvalds feels should have know better.
You can like or dislike Torvalds' style, but this little student from Finland created the world's most successful open source project, so I think he's probably doing one or two things right.
He may not be perfect, but being hung up over a few incidents over a 30-year time period is perhaps not too brilliant, and insinuating incompetence over this is quite the take. Imagine every outburst you have is public and pointed to for years to come.
Not only is this a complete lie, but God forbid there's a process in place to catch these things instead of verbally abusing your coworkers for making mistakes, which Linus has done himself.
> Imagine every outburst you have is public and pointed to for years to come
You may be surprised to learn that the rest of us don't talk to anyone like this.
> but being hung up over a few incidents over a 30-year time period
That's a great way to make it sound old but he actually gets angrier as time goes on. https://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1510.3/02866.html
The moral superiority is misplaced:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41017195
But I am not surprised. CoC proponents universally do the same as the people they criticize. Only the application of rules is selective.
Wild that you both made an account for this and dug through my comments just to comment on a comment on an article you didn't read.
You do. By outright claiming that I'm lying when I share what I've seen. Of course with no substance to back it up. Let me tell you: I've seen what I've seen. Have I seen an incomplete picture? Almost certainly. Am I wrong? Perhaps. Am I lying? No. Your post is extremely aggressive, pretty darn toxic, and explicitly the sort of stuff that's not appropriate here.
Do better next time. Doubly so if you want to get all high and mighty.
> Only those instances make the news. And then get repeated time and time again. It's a super-biased view not at all representative of his day-to-day behaviour.
You certainly can't represent your post as "I've only seen what I've seen" with that opener. You were claiming the OP was spreading misinformation. That is the lie. Which is why I provided an instance of Linus's tirades that doesn't match up with what you said.
Don't call someone "super-biased" and then be surprised when people don't roll over for you.
> Your post is extremely aggressive, pretty darn toxic, and explicitly the sort of stuff that's not appropriate here.
It's ironic that my mild comment is upsetting you while you defend a mans right to say his employees should've been aborted. Is it just because he's famous? Or because you think the employees were being stupid? Have you considered that "doing stupid" is a subjective assessment that people use as a cudgel to act poorly? What if I thought you were doing stupid, could I say the things Linus says?
Here's some more for you: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495
Linus doesn't even rant frequently either. People point to the same 10 messages over and over again.
He also tolerates when someone snaps back at him, unlike in projects with double standards like CPython where the old boys can do whatever they like but you are not allowed to criticize back or point out their numerous mistakes, segfaults, threading bugs and generally low code quality.
This extends well beyond OSS projects.