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

Posted May 30, 2024 12:40 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog) by flussence
Parent article: BitKeeper, Linux, and licensing disputes: How Linus wrote Git in 14 days (Graphite blog)

you need a robust set of soft skills to participate in the software industry

I want to give this more visibility, because it's something I see many software developers completely ignore; once a project gets large enough to have multiple developers working on it, your soft skills to get the other developers to work with you, not against you, often outweigh your coding ability. It's better for a project to have 3 developers each splitting their time 50:50 between coordinating work to avoid conflicts and actually coding, than to have 3 developers spending 100% of their time coding, but each undoing the work of the other two to make their code work.

Even at his worst, Linus understood this; his role in Linux for a very long time has been to coordinate developers so that there's a coherent project, rather than to cut code.