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Comment by theorique | Hacker News Reader

Linus gets away with it because he's Linus and people are willing to swim through a river of shit to work closely with him.

Conversely, an average OSS developer will drive people away with this attitude unless the benefit of working with him is so attractive that it outweighs the pain of abuse (in which case he's probably not 'average' at all).

Assholes who really deliver get a pass from (some of) the world. Doesn't mean that you can get their results by being an asshole.

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If you have a popular project, though, or even if you have a crappy project but spend most of your time on work and don't have much time for it - it can be very valuable to drive off people who commit worthless wastes of time like stuff that doesn't compile or pass tests. If I only have time to do one commit or code review per night on my personal project, then I those people are a burden. At Linus' level, his personal project because a full time job and one of the most popular OS in the world, but that doesn't mean it is a good idea for him to start being nice to everyone and getting flooded and not being able to get anything accomplished.

Absolutely wrong. You don't get to choose the skill level of people you drive away by being an asshole and having people let you get away with it.

Linus wasn't always "Linus". It'd be interesting to graph his profanity / other communication metrics over time.

Agreed. I suspect he was always an easily-frustrated, OCD, crabby hacker.

And those aspects of his personality would be exaggerated by the level of communication and questions and input that he's come to receive over the years.

Doesn't make it 'right', or 'kind', but I suppose it gets things done.

You may be interested to peruse some of the dialog of the "Tanenbaum-Torvalds" debate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deba...). Basically, Andrew Tanenbaum, creator and advocate of the MINIX operating system (from which Linus drew some inspiration) got into a debate with Linus in 1987, claiming that the monolithic kernel design was inferior to the microkernel, and that Linux was obsolete from launch. Linus's responses throughout the debate strike me as some of his more respectful and thoughtful rhetoric. (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html)

> Conversely, an average OSS developer will drive people away with this attitude

See the amount of developer churn in the *BSDs and some of the Linux DE projects.

Would we have had Linux on the desktop much earlier if developers used the robustness principle in communicating with their colleagues?

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