Some much truth to this. Those that think Linus or RMS are abrassive have obviously never met Drepper.
I once had the (dis)pleasure of meeting him once at a former company when he came onsite and he came across as every bit the condescending asshole as he does on bigzilla. Didn't really get the chance to get to know him as a person, but as they say, first impressions... I get that he's in a tough spot maintaining glibc, but a bit of tack in correspondence would go a long way.
I'm not saying he hasn't made contributions to the community. He surely has made more than I have, and very valuable ones at that. I'm just saying interacting with him is not pleasant.
I figured that the reason the Linux kernel gained popularity originally was because Torvalds was so open about accepting contributions. This compared to BSD which had "standards".
I get where either were coming from (BSD was open-sourcing an established codebase, Linux was a from-scratch effort), but it does seem like that foundational culture persisted.
I see where you're going, but I don't agree we're at the same endpoint. One should generally be accepting of changes, but they should be worthwhile.
Theo de Raat doesn't suffer any fools. He calls bullshit as soon as he sees it (ok, Linis does too) and is fairly uncompromising when it comes to code quality and security regardless of whether it's kernel or userspace.
Seems to me, Linus is primarily focused on kernel space being secure and as long as kernel changes dont break userspace, hes cool.
I appreciate both views, but tend to like Theo's better.
The API was being added to Unix libcs left and right, giving it wide adoption and validation, making it an informal or de facto standard. He was dismissing it as some "dumping ground" code and sarcastically saying "ok, nice work, that would go great in your own project ..."
