> There's a whole community of otherwise often cutthroat rivals cooperating somewhat peacefully on a truly giant software infrastructure project for 25+ years.

> There's a whole community of otherwise often cutthroat rivals cooperating somewhat peacefully on a truly giant software infrastructure project for 25+ years. That just appealing to tradition. There are other open source projects with "cutthroat rivals cooperating" who do not insist on keeping archaic systems. It's not like the viral close of the GPL will cease to exist and enforce public contributions of useful projects just because patches are not sent by stripped down emails anymore. > A place where no one even asks about your skin colour, gender, religion or other abilities as long as you can submit correct code in a way that everyone is comfortable with. I'm fairly certain even Donald Trump, bin Laden, a seven year old school girl or a gay albino penguin could all get a patch accepted if the patch was OK. Edit: I'm fairly certain even Iranian and Israelian coders could get patches merged in the same release and nobody would even notice. Maybe it has even happened a number of times already for what I know. Same goes for hardcore Atheists, Buddhists, Catholics, Hindus, and what have you. We can't even know because the kernel people do not keep notes about that. I never made the argument that they reject people based on their ethnic or religious background, why are you even bringing this up? Toxicity is not limited to being xenophobic... > Then there are people coming from the outside trying to insert themselves as authorities not only on what tooling should be used but also as moral authorities down to the level of deciding on what language should be used. That's just appealing to tradition and if we weren't talking about software I would be under the impression I was debating a hardcore conservative renting against "outsiders" but I digress. It's not like critique from the "outside" can't be insightful. And frankly when people immediately become defensive and feel that someone threaten them with their "moral authority" for a simple critique, it only shows that they do not talk from a position of confidence.