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Comment by tophat02 | Hacker News Reader

Anything that moves power away from Ulrich Drepper and back to the community is a good thing. He is a poison to the open source community, and causes so much bad PR I'm amazed that he's still around.

Why is he still around, anyway?

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Ulrich Drepper is a brilliant programmer and an expert on his field, but he cannot work with people. I figure that the former is the only reason why he's still around.

Richard Stallman apparently has the same reputation

Ahhh... an unfortunate - but all too common - collection of personality traits. I propose that those people should be given lots of power but not be promoted to package maintainers. Of course, it's open source, so it's not like we can decree this or anything, but it sure would make many open source projects easier to contribute to.

Of course, it's open source, so it's not like we can decree this or anything

He is employed by RedHat, so they're implicitly making the decision his working style is worth it.

But this is an example of open source at work -- people forked GLIBC due to, in part, dissatisfaction with Depper's (or Redhat's) working style and priorities.

Isn't that fork essentially a logical solution? If RedHat continues to pay Drepper for his work, he will still develop/maintain glibc. Meanwhile every valuable patch can be ported to eglibc (provided the licenses are compatible). It's a win-win scenario... community gains something and Drepper can still do what he does best in his sandbox.

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