BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog)

In the end, McVoy technically won. He got exactly what he bargained for; nobody dared to tread on him or his crown jewels again, the smelly hippies loitering around his business went away, and whatever became of BitMover after that was entirely his own responsibility. Given that we only hear of his work in museum exhibits nowadays I can make a good guess without looking it up.

He was wrong on the assertion that it was an “open source community problem” that compelled him to burn bridges — the open source community has absolutely no qualms about playing and paying into Microsoft's proprietary ecosystem, to the point where GitHub now dominates the planet in a very real sense. They even let their direct competitors use their service for free. (Microsoft!! Remember what we thought of *them* at the time?)

Unless your audience is mostly government and military, you need a robust set of soft skills to participate in the software industry - those are not things you can tabulate in a spreadsheet, and if you don't make time for them your numbers will end up disastrous and you won't understand *why*, because an entire concept is missing from your vocabulary. Why point this out twenty years after the events in the article? Because organisations involved in FOSS today are still making the same mistake!