Quote of the week [LWN.net]

Quote of the week

Posted Jul 27, 2006 9:26 UTC (Thu) by hingo (guest, #14792)
In reply to: Quote of the week by zooko
Parent article: Quote of the week

Not knowing how things look like on lkml, I found this quote obnoxious and flaming, although in a cleverly subtle way. In essence he is just saying that "I'm right you are wrong" or perhaps more bluntly "you are stupid". Kind of like a kid in kindergarten when others don't want to play his game.

There is an uncomfortable little factoid that is the counterargument to Hans'. He is saying that Linus & co were lucky to get this far but should now relinguish control to him (I assume) since they really don't know what they're doing. The only problem is that Linus with friends are the ones who made what Linux is today, clearly by definition it cannot have overgrown them. If Hans thinks he can make a better Linux than Linus, there is nothing that should stop him really: It's Free Software and all that you know...

I have nothing against Reiser4, it is good to have people trying to do things never done before. But there is no reason to expect that others will always adapt to your wishes.

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Quote of the week

Posted Jul 27, 2006 14:32 UTC (Thu) by kirkengaard (subscriber, #15022) [Link]

Exactly. "You linux people are far inferior in skill to the people that your project, by its own merits, has attracted. However, because of your poor interpersonal skills, and the fact that you simply cannot acknowledge your betters, these clever people are scared away by the requirement that their code must be judged by their inferiors."

The inferiors Hans refers to are the people that have tried to help him get Reiser4 to play nice with the kernel's way of doing things. Their expertise, which he pooh-poohs, is in making things that work within the kernel, or making things to work with the kernel. And genius programmers work in the same C as the rest of the kernel plebes. It is not the case that the kernel developers can't understand good work and high skill. It is definitely the case that the kernel also selects for people of high clue.

The FS developers that Hans refers to -- assuming he isn't being grandiose -- have likely also come in with the same lack of clue if they think that submission review is for the purpose of "powertripping", and that "Fix your code so that it works within the kernel design" is obnoxious.

Quote of the week

Posted Jul 27, 2006 16:49 UTC (Thu) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link]

> Exactly. "You linux people are far inferior in skill to the people that
> your project, by its own merits, has attracted. However, because of
> your poor interpersonal skills, and the fact that you simply cannot
> acknowledge your betters, these clever people are scared away by the
> requirement that their code must be judged by their inferiors."

Funny, one of the clever people supposedly scared away responded to the
thread:

> Both Jim Mostek and I left under our own steam at different times, Jim
> in 2000 and myself in 2003. SGI still has great technology to work on
> and, but the you can only take so many years of bad financial results
> and watching people get layed off.
>
> I still work on Linux, and follow development as much as I can. I keep
> trying to get back to OLS, but circumstances keep conspiring against
> me, maybe next year.
>
> Steve Lord