On the shoulders of Perens and yet kicking his head [LWN.net]

On the shoulders of Perens and yet kicking his head

Posted Mar 27, 2008 1:07 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Bruce Perens and the OSI board by landley
Parent article: Bruce Perens and the OSI board

From your link:

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge tend to think that they know more than they do, while others who have much more knowledge tend to think that they know less.

I gather that you are accusing Bruce of having little knowledge while thinking he knows a lot. I don't doubt that you have done a lot for Busybox and helped it to be a hit, but you are aware that he started the project, aren't you?

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On the shoulders of Perens and yet kicking his head

Posted Mar 27, 2008 18:07 UTC (Thu) by landley (subscriber, #6789) [Link]

> I gather that you are accusing Bruce of having little knowledge while
> thinking he knows a lot.

No, I'm using the formulation that uses "skill" instead of knowledge.  
You can be a quite well-informed klutz.  Neither programmers nor lawyers 
(similar but distinct skill sets) necessarily make good good advocates 
(essentially a marketing position) or project managers.  (Heck, Transmeta 
made Linus Torvalds a manager and had people reporting to him, and by his 
own admission he sucked at it.  Open source project management and 
corporate middle management are different skills.)

Am I the only one to remember Bruce's tenure at HP?  That he was on the 
OSI board before and that the actions leading to his resignation involved 
describing Tim O'Reilley as "one of the leading parisites (sic) of the 
free software community"?  Did anyone actually read his Debian 
resignation letter (http://lwn.net/lwn/1998/0319/resign.html) in the 
context that A) none of the "more mainstream" distributions he felt 
he "should be working with" paid him any attention, and B) since then 
both Knoppix and Ubuntu have made new mainstream distributions based on 
Debian.

Looking at the past full decade of his attempts at this advocacy thing: 
he's shown much motivation, a reasonable amount of knowledge, and very 
little skill.  This has nothing to do with how well he might program.  Al 
Viro and Cristoph Hellwig are both great programmers, would either of 
them be your first choice for a public relations position?

Rob

Advocacy turned wrong

Posted Mar 27, 2008 23:57 UTC (Thu) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link]

Oh well. That is a massive body of evidence you present: (Bruce tried to advocate for GPLv3 on a mailing list and it backfired on you, whose best man actually did threaten to kill him a decade ago. But let me point out this anecdotal piece of evidence: he has so far convinced 1820 people to sign his online petition, many of which were impartial to his particular plead (at least I know I was).

Wait, and then instead of being hired by a major distro like Ubuntu he has worked for Pixar, HP and founded several companies? What a loser!

I'm feeling this strange urge to wipe out every GPLv2-only package from my hard disk. Anybody know how to turn Debian lenny into Nexenta?... just joking.

On the shoulders of Perens and yet kicking his head

Posted Mar 30, 2008 20:10 UTC (Sun) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Can't say I agree with your tone, Rob, but I do think your message has merit.  UserLinux was
another particularly salient example.