7 ms·

Ending the cults of personality in free software

64 points by Who828 14y ago

TeMPOraL 14y ago
What nnq said [0] plus some more: As the IT industry matures I can see a tendency to make everything Serious, Business Responsible, Grownup, etc. I don't like this development of things. Open Source started as a fun place. People were coding to Have Fun, in the broad hacker meaning of fun. See that recent (and reoccuring) flame against Crockford's "not for Evil" licence. Why are we denying people right to do that? It was a joke, he did it for fun. Hackers like jokes. Fun is a part of FLOSS. I believe that Open Source community needs not to become adult. It needs place for fun, humour, role models, rockstars, religious preachers; place to agree or disagree, to judge people on their merits and just plainly do whatever one wants. It's how creativity is born. [0] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4769230 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4769230
- Avshalom 14y ago
  >As the IT industry matures I can see a tendency to make everything Serious, Business Responsible, Grownup, etc. I don't like this development of things. uh... no. to steal a joke: it used to be a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie. IT used to be serious people with post grad degrees working with multimillion dollar machines. it keeps moving towards not away from cargo shorts, flip flops and "rockstar code ninjas"
- edanm 14y ago
  "As the IT industry matures I can see a tendency to make everything Serious, Business Responsible, Grownup, etc. I don't like this development of things" I guess it depends on your point of view, but I personally love the fact that: a) my field is becoming more grown up, which means more recognition of its importance to the world, and b) the field is growing up, meaning the people who nowadays hold huge amounts of power over many other people, are taking this power more seriously. I also don't think it's a problem to still have fun in our field - but there should be professional limits. When some engineers get together to build an engine that goes into a car, I'm all for them having fun while doing it, and making jokes, etc. But I also want them to be professional and for the end product to do its job. Usually the two don't conflict. In cases like the "nor for Evil" license, some people think they did conflict. Perfectly valid for Crockford to do it, perfectly valid for other people to say "this kind of humor means we can't use your product, much as we'd like to".
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    Replying to this post and its parent: In the world of distributions there is CentOS/RHEL for the blue shirted suit wearers and me on week days. Then there is Arch/Antix/Absolute and the truly wonderful #! and Puredyne/Dynebolic (which both appear to have died a death) as well as blag linux for the ones who want to do slightly mad stuff. I suppose over time, we will have the same split in applications and services. All of 'em will use the project that Torvalds manages, which is why I imagine he lets off steam in irrelevant directions.
kinleyd 14y ago
Doing what the OP challenges us to do: I don't care what Linus Torvalds uses on his computer. It's easy. And I particularly don't like KDE Plasma, even if Linus does. But I do like Linus Torvalds. He's a straight talking guy who has consistently walked his talk, even if some don't like what he has to say. AFAIK there is no cult of personality as far as he's concerned. Historically cults of personality are nurtured by the personality involved. Linus has done nothing of that sort.
forgottenpaswrd 14y ago
I believe Linus know something about software, and specially software for geeks. Trying to discredit Linus opinions is a new low. If you don't agree with someone you don't need to discredit him, because something he is saying could be right. What I'm not that much sure about knowing what they are doing is the GNOME guys, it seems nobody could criticize their actions, and they keep doing strange things only pleasing their selves. Total onanism. It is obvious to me that they can't listen to the outside world, they support each other in their actions like the Kodak execs before bankruptcy still believing that "film was still the future".
- mercurial 14y ago
  But Aaron is not trying to discredit Linus' opinion, he is trying to put the importance of his opinion in perspective, that's completely different. He doesn't even say he disagrees with Linux.
  - stcredzero 14y ago
    > But Aaron is not trying to discredit Linus' opinion I think the main point is that: People should think for themselves, and just because someone famous acts a certain way doesn't mean we should follow blindly
nnq 14y ago
...people like when they are being noticed and when their opinions are valued more than those of others ...it's a reward mechanism absolutely necessary for OS, and taking this away would make the OS world seem like a washed and grey socialist cooperative with no joy in it ...people like rockstars, and some people even deserve to become ones, so don't try to take this away from them!
keithpeter 14y ago
Do I need to write a Web page with the title Ending the cult of the 'normal user' in Interface Design? The short version of such a Web page would contain a Venn diagram with a large number of intersecting circles representing the needs of different users. Under the diagram would be a simple question: "Are you designing for the intersection or the union set?". What I actually think would be really neat is a UI authoring kit aimed at interested people and not requiring huge coding experience. Such a kit would gently encourage users/UI authors to think about the flow of activities and would mirror the limitations of the widget libraries. Something visual working a bit like puredata. That would get some interesting alternatives out there, it would let people who want something different design it for themselves, and it would give a wider range of people an insight into UI design principles.
- CodeMage 14y ago
  Do I need to write a Web page with the title Ending the cult of the 'normal user' in Interface Design? Actually, that would be a great idea. The industry in general doesn't seem to have cottoned on to that idea.
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    I suspect they have cottoned on but design for the mass audience and assume that niche needs will be covered by applications or that people will tweak.
- lnanek2 14y ago
  Honestly, academia is constantly coming up with visual design tools and they don't do much at all for the world of software development. Maybe they help bridge students into using real IDEs and writing real programs, but they are failures, pretty much. Well I'm sure they've gotten a lot of people doctorates for writing them, so actually they accomplished their purpose.
math 14y ago
Linus is a smart guy - if he offered an opinion on "rocket ships, film production, oil recovery techniques, sociology, religious history or automobile engineering" that opinion would influence my own opinion on the subject, and I think for good reason. I.e. I think a model whereby the credibility of a person is specified by a single measure has value. The model could be improved by measuring credibility on multiple axes, but a single measure model is still useful. Linus would clearly have a positive credibility by pretty much any measure you would reasonably want to use. Perhaps the author's complaint is really that this measure is elevated way beyond where it should be due to his celebrity status. But how do you measure credibility of relative nobodies? Without good information on credibility, it is pretty rational for the casual observer to overweight the general opinions of people like Linus in forming their own opinions. We are working very hard on this problem and more at backrecord.com. We don't have a go-live-notification list set up, but if you'd like to know when we make the website live, feel free to send me an email at the address in my profile.
- batgaijin 14y ago
  Credibility is an amalgamation of measured predictions.
viseztrance 14y ago
Personally I blame A. Seigo for having a large role in the mess that KDE 4 was. Linus was a big proponent of KDE, that is, until the big rewrite. That's not to say that Seigo doesn't have some fair points, but as far as I'm concerned, everything coming from him on this subject just doesn't hold any value. If anything, it just emphasis just how out of touch the KDE devs are with their users.
borplk 14y ago
Great article. I see this cult-like behaviour quite a lot. Particular examples, when it comes to open source and free software and gnu/unix, vim emacs etc... It feels like most people just follow the cult's teachings and hold the same opinions that they saw. I'm sure you guys all think open source software is fantastic and can give me 10 reasons and examples in support of your opinion. But how much of it is truly your own conclusion and your findings vs just repeating what you were told before and what everyone else seems to be saying? Have you ever stopped for a second and asked yourself about it? Have you tried to challenge the popular opinions of the cult? What would you be doing, if every other hacker was bashing open source today and praising proprietary software? There's a factor in here that I call 'Bandwagon Threshold Theory'. People react negatively to new and disrupting ideas until a critical mass of people start admiring it. By then they jump on the bandwagon and start preaching and telling everyone about how cool this thing is. If you look around you can see it everywhere. Older ideas and technologies have already established their bandwagon and therefore there's strong resistance and hesitance in saying anything negatively about them. Don't believe me? just say something negative about open source and see how religiously people will defend it. I guarantee you, the majority of those defenders will simply be doing so not as a result of deep understanding and knowledge but because of the teachings of the cult. I have previously written a short rant here as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4601593 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4601593 PS: I just used the open source examples etc to make a point. My comment is general about the cult-like behaviour in the industry not about something specific. In summary, I think we should all stop worrying about standing out and start challenging the things we take for granted as a result of being surrounded and constantly fed a set of accepted and popular beliefs and opinions.
- icebraining 14y ago
  For a cult, we're not very good followers. There's barely anyone who doesn't use proprietary software, even if there are OSS solutions, as long as the closed version is sufficiently better.
- muuh-gnu 14y ago
  > But how much of it is truly your own conclusion You can not make an informed opinion on _everything_. There is too much information out there to fact check all bits of it. Sooner or later you will have to take somebody elses opinion on faith, i.e. to trust that he has fact checked something so you dont have to.
davidkatz 14y ago
I find this unconvincing. People who are smart enough to create something of great value will often have valuable input on other things as well. My favorite example is Richard Feynman. No matter what he says, it makes me wiser. 'But Feynman only has expertise in Physics'. Well. A more accurate picture might be: Feynman is a hell of a smart guy, he chose to dedicate most of his time to Physics, but that doesn't make him any less smarter when he talks about other things.
Nikaido 14y ago
While there are some particularly bad examples of cult of personality in free software, I wouldn't say this is one of them. I think that people are relaying Linus's opinion on desktops so much because he's sharing our thought process and gives us an opportunity to spread our own opinion through his fame, rather than just following everything he says just because of his kernel expertise. Look at the reaction people had when Gnome 3 was introduced, and Unity in Ubuntu. People didn't wait for Linus to complain against those changes driven by UI designers gone insane. Lots, and lots of linux users had the SAME reaction Linus had, BEFORE he even publicly talked about it. I went to Gnome 2 from the KDE4 transition since I liked KDE3 but hated KDE4, and went to Xfce after the Gnome 3 and Unity debacle. And I didn't wait for Linus to talk about his thoughts on the linux desktop to switch everytime something bugged me. Aaron Seigo is asking us to not care about Linus opinion ? But we don't give a crap about yours, man, you're the reason why KDE4 went to hell, the man behind Plasma. After so many years acting like you know better what your users want than they do you're getting all hurt when people listen to someone like Linus instead of you ? the thing about Linus is, he's just a user like the rest of us rather than a desktop developer, but with his fame he can make his opinion reach your ears and it seems you don't quite like what regular users think of your "innovations".
- keithpeter 14y ago
  "Look at the reaction people had when Gnome 3 was introduced, and Unity in Ubuntu. People didn't wait for Linus to complain against those changes driven by UI designers gone insane." Not insane, just designing for a model of a user that does not include many here. I think the 'shock of the new' plays a part. I've been using GS 3.6 on the Gnome Ubuntu Remix (12.10) on the desktop for a bit and it isn't slowing me down much at all, but I'm basically an end user...
icebraining 14y ago
Let's step to the side and consider this from a different angle: Imagine that someone made Linus' perfect desktop environment. Something that satisfied him entirely and which he could happily talk about whenever he felt like it. Would that environment be interesting and useful for the general public, or would it be something great for kernel developers and grumpy-heads like Linus? I don't care about the general public. I'm not part of it (regarding Desktop Environments) nor do I develop DEs for them. I'm a developer who actually likes some of the same tools as Linus does, including those he developed (Git), so yes, he's position is potentially useful to me. This idea that software isn't useful unless my mother can use it is a really annoying meme. It's like farmers claiming that reviews on combine harvesters aren't useful because they can't help uncle Tom harvest the tomatoes in his garden.
eternalban 14y ago
Open source is not "Free Software". The Free Software movement is a political movement and requires leadership. The OP's critique of Linus (regardless of its merit) is entirely irrelevant to a discussion of Free Software Movement and the clear necessity for uncompromising and visionary leadership.
sathishmanohar 14y ago
<quote>as meaningful as his opinions on rocket ships, film production, oil recovery techniques, sociology, religious history, automobile engineering or any of the other topics he has no meaningful expertise in.<endquote> I completely disagree with this line of argument that, you have to have worked as something before giving a valid opinion, I wish it were true in some case of tech journalists, but, in my opinion if you've been a user of a technology, then you can give an opinion. On the flipside, positive case for cult of personality may be, a simple use of two words and middle finger can affect the decisions of major corporation like nVidia.
aristidb 14y ago
"We must change fundamental human nature!" Yeah right. Also, it's not like Linus does not provide reasoning for his opinions, and deriding him for not being a desktop developer is unfair.
antirez 14y ago
I'm a bit more concerned about the hordes of unexperienced, never-accomplished-something-worthwhile, Ruby / Javascript programmers that are ready to discredit work done by others, and to discredit people like Linus or RMS that provided us with an incredible amount of value. Linus trying to express his own opinions on software is not a problem at all. EDIT: oh and even worse, discredit others usually writing meaningless trolling tweets without any actual argument.
recoiledsnake 14y ago
For context, the author Aaron Seigo is the project lead and developer of Plasma for KDE 4. I suspect he has been irritated by people taking Linus seriously in the matters of desktop Linux.
mariuolo 14y ago
Most OSS contributors work for free: if you remove both money and vanity, what remains as motivator?
Xcelerate 14y ago
I get kind of tired of comments like this: "His opinion on desktop software is as meaningful as his opinions on rocket ships, film production, oil recovery techniques, sociology, religious history, automobile engineering or any of the other topics he has no meaningful expertise in." His opinion on desktop software is valuable to me. Why? Because he's obviously a very smart person. And I listen to smart people a lot more closely than I listen to just anyone. I would trust a physicist giving his opinions on the state of medical care more than I would a guy who believed the earth was flat.
- ekianjo 14y ago
  It's not because someone is an expert at one thing that their opinion on a totally different subject matters at all. that's the point the articles wants to make, and I totally agree with that principle. We see a bunch of artists taking political stances, for example, and I do not even bother listening to any of them because they just see thing through a very narrow window. Just like Linus when he says the default desktop resolution should be Retina-like, he completely ignores the effect of scale, the fact that you need new lines to make such screens, and that there will be a lag from the time it becomes standard. And he simply does not consider the fact that someone who buys a low to mid-end Laptop does not care about resolution at all. They just want something that works. If they cared about screen resolutions or even screen quality, then no laptop PC in the 500 dollars range would sell at all. But they do. And it's not Linus who buy them, so he does not understand these people and his opinion is only valid for his personal use case.
lnanek2 14y ago
I'd actually benefit a lot from Linus being more listened to. After all, he gets pissed when desktops remove features coders need to be productive, and I'm a coder. Should Linus have written git to be useful by non-techies? It wouldn't have been powerful enough to compete with CVS and Subversion and the like and many of us would still be stuck on centralized version control. Making stuff for the general public only is all well and good, but it's not all that's out there. In fact, it is kind of anti-open source since open source is all about being able to adapt software to your needs, and our desktops now are ripping out all the options waving the flag of needing to appeal to the general public.
- jordigh 14y ago
  Git having a horrible interface is orthogonal to it being a successful DVCS. In fact, I'm quite convinced that it's precisely due to the article's subject, cult of personality of Linus, that git took off. Mercurial is a good example of a powerful DVCS (it can do everything git can) and yet a sane user interface that is easier to teach. Almost nobody "non-techie" that I know about learns git's command line. It's a horrible mess! Instead they rely on GUIs (Git Tower, gitk) or WUIs (Github). But almost anyone can learn hg's command line, since they go through great pains to make sure they pick user-facing names and words and concepts that map to familiar ideas.
  - kstenerud 14y ago
    A thousand times this. Linus may be amazing at the low level, but he absolutely SUCKS at user interfaces. Git's CLI is a prime example of this. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. It takes strength of character to acknowledge where you're weak, and it takes strength of will to follow only the good examples of those we admire.
  - brendoncrawford 14y ago
    > Almost nobody "non-techie" that I know about learns git's command line. That is fine. Those people are not Git's target market.
    - 14y ago
olalonde 14y ago
I think the "cult of personality" is a major reason why many people chose Python over Ruby/Rails. There are way too many strong personalities, strongly held opinions, drama and alpha geeks within the Ruby community. See http://web.archive.org/web/20080103072111/http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080103072111/http://www.zedshaw...
stcredzero 14y ago
> Of course, it goes even further than that. These cults of personality encourage others to mimic people like Linus when it comes to things like communication style. I've met a number of personality cultists in tech who use the example of Steve Jobs as a justification to be a jerk. I find this to be inversely correlated with their actual insight and intelligence. (I am an iOS developer and owner of several Apple devices.)
smoyer 14y ago
You're not going to end the "cults of personality" in free software for the same reason it won't end in other types of software, in software companies, in companies in general or in the government (a really big company but without the fiscal constraints of having to be profitable). The culture in these places, for better or worse, are initially driven by some small number of charismatic leaders who can create either a good culture or a bad culture. Entropy demands that well-maintained culture must tend towards chaos as an organization grows. At this point, inertia helps prolong the original culture initially, but then provides a huge barrier to reclaiming a favorable lost culture. Finally, the organization's reliance on oral history (we're horrible at really documenting these things) fails as older members of the tribe leave and are replaced with idealistic whippersnappers. The cycle is complete when these young'ins become resigned to their position as a "cog-in-the-machine" and stop trying to effect change. I'm not pessimistic ... I've just been around this cycle a few times.
pasbesoin 14y ago
On the one hand, I dislike this "cult of personality" trend in general culture. (Not infrequently discussed with family and friends.) On the other hand, even and especially in the conservative, corporate cultures I've experienced, there has been a small minority of people who are an order of magnitude smarter and more capable than their peers. And... this tends to generalize. They have their assignments. But sit down with them for a more general discussion, and they often have a better idea than most of what is going on and of its value or cost, in areas well outside their formal assignments. Further, when they -- one way or another -- end up responsible for addressing something "farther afield", they often do so better, quicker, and more insightfully than the dedicated, "expert" staff assigned to it. That's why I pay attention to people like Linus. In my experience, when people like him address a topic, even casually, they've often been paying better attention than many others, and/or their ability and experience enables them to quickly cut through the crap and see to the heart of the matter. Even when they are wrong, their thinking often brings up some very interesting and relevant points.

64 points by Who828 14y ago

What nnq said [0] plus some more: As the IT industry matures I can see a tendency to make everything Serious, Business Responsible, Grownup, etc. I don't like this development of things. Open Source started as a fun place. People were coding to Have Fun, in the broad hacker meaning of fun. See that recent (and reoccuring) flame against Crockford's "not for Evil" licence. Why are we denying people right to do that? It was a joke, he did it for fun. Hackers like jokes. Fun is a part of FLOSS. I believe that Open Source community needs not to become adult. It needs place for fun, humour, role models, rockstars, religious preachers; place to agree or disagree, to judge people on their merits and just plainly do whatever one wants. It's how creativity is born. [0] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4769230 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4769230

Avshalom 14y ago
>As the IT industry matures I can see a tendency to make everything Serious, Business Responsible, Grownup, etc. I don't like this development of things. uh... no. to steal a joke: it used to be a syntax error to write FORTRAN while not wearing a blue tie. IT used to be serious people with post grad degrees working with multimillion dollar machines. it keeps moving towards not away from cargo shorts, flip flops and "rockstar code ninjas"
edanm 14y ago
"As the IT industry matures I can see a tendency to make everything Serious, Business Responsible, Grownup, etc. I don't like this development of things" I guess it depends on your point of view, but I personally love the fact that: a) my field is becoming more grown up, which means more recognition of its importance to the world, and b) the field is growing up, meaning the people who nowadays hold huge amounts of power over many other people, are taking this power more seriously. I also don't think it's a problem to still have fun in our field - but there should be professional limits. When some engineers get together to build an engine that goes into a car, I'm all for them having fun while doing it, and making jokes, etc. But I also want them to be professional and for the end product to do its job. Usually the two don't conflict. In cases like the "nor for Evil" license, some people think they did conflict. Perfectly valid for Crockford to do it, perfectly valid for other people to say "this kind of humor means we can't use your product, much as we'd like to".
- keithpeter 14y ago
  Replying to this post and its parent: In the world of distributions there is CentOS/RHEL for the blue shirted suit wearers and me on week days. Then there is Arch/Antix/Absolute and the truly wonderful #! and Puredyne/Dynebolic (which both appear to have died a death) as well as blag linux for the ones who want to do slightly mad stuff. I suppose over time, we will have the same split in applications and services. All of 'em will use the project that Torvalds manages, which is why I imagine he lets off steam in irrelevant directions.

kinleyd 14y ago

Doing what the OP challenges us to do: I don't care what Linus Torvalds uses on his computer. It's easy. And I particularly don't like KDE Plasma, even if Linus does. But I do like Linus Torvalds. He's a straight talking guy who has consistently walked his talk, even if some don't like what he has to say. AFAIK there is no cult of personality as far as he's concerned. Historically cults of personality are nurtured by the personality involved. Linus has done nothing of that sort.

forgottenpaswrd 14y ago

I believe Linus know something about software, and specially software for geeks. Trying to discredit Linus opinions is a new low. If you don't agree with someone you don't need to discredit him, because something he is saying could be right. What I'm not that much sure about knowing what they are doing is the GNOME guys, it seems nobody could criticize their actions, and they keep doing strange things only pleasing their selves. Total onanism. It is obvious to me that they can't listen to the outside world, they support each other in their actions like the Kodak execs before bankruptcy still believing that "film was still the future".

mercurial 14y ago
But Aaron is not trying to discredit Linus' opinion, he is trying to put the importance of his opinion in perspective, that's completely different. He doesn't even say he disagrees with Linux.
- stcredzero 14y ago
  > But Aaron is not trying to discredit Linus' opinion I think the main point is that: People should think for themselves, and just because someone famous acts a certain way doesn't mean we should follow blindly

nnq 14y ago

...people like when they are being noticed and when their opinions are valued more than those of others ...it's a reward mechanism absolutely necessary for OS, and taking this away would make the OS world seem like a washed and grey socialist cooperative with no joy in it ...people like rockstars, and some people even deserve to become ones, so don't try to take this away from them!

keithpeter 14y ago

Do I need to write a Web page with the title Ending the cult of the 'normal user' in Interface Design? The short version of such a Web page would contain a Venn diagram with a large number of intersecting circles representing the needs of different users. Under the diagram would be a simple question: "Are you designing for the intersection or the union set?". What I actually think would be really neat is a UI authoring kit aimed at interested people and not requiring huge coding experience. Such a kit would gently encourage users/UI authors to think about the flow of activities and would mirror the limitations of the widget libraries. Something visual working a bit like puredata. That would get some interesting alternatives out there, it would let people who want something different design it for themselves, and it would give a wider range of people an insight into UI design principles.

CodeMage 14y ago
Do I need to write a Web page with the title Ending the cult of the 'normal user' in Interface Design? Actually, that would be a great idea. The industry in general doesn't seem to have cottoned on to that idea.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  I suspect they have cottoned on but design for the mass audience and assume that niche needs will be covered by applications or that people will tweak.
lnanek2 14y ago
Honestly, academia is constantly coming up with visual design tools and they don't do much at all for the world of software development. Maybe they help bridge students into using real IDEs and writing real programs, but they are failures, pretty much. Well I'm sure they've gotten a lot of people doctorates for writing them, so actually they accomplished their purpose.

math 14y ago

Linus is a smart guy - if he offered an opinion on "rocket ships, film production, oil recovery techniques, sociology, religious history or automobile engineering" that opinion would influence my own opinion on the subject, and I think for good reason. I.e. I think a model whereby the credibility of a person is specified by a single measure has value. The model could be improved by measuring credibility on multiple axes, but a single measure model is still useful. Linus would clearly have a positive credibility by pretty much any measure you would reasonably want to use. Perhaps the author's complaint is really that this measure is elevated way beyond where it should be due to his celebrity status. But how do you measure credibility of relative nobodies? Without good information on credibility, it is pretty rational for the casual observer to overweight the general opinions of people like Linus in forming their own opinions. We are working very hard on this problem and more at backrecord.com. We don't have a go-live-notification list set up, but if you'd like to know when we make the website live, feel free to send me an email at the address in my profile.

batgaijin 14y ago
Credibility is an amalgamation of measured predictions.

viseztrance 14y ago

Personally I blame A. Seigo for having a large role in the mess that KDE 4 was. Linus was a big proponent of KDE, that is, until the big rewrite. That's not to say that Seigo doesn't have some fair points, but as far as I'm concerned, everything coming from him on this subject just doesn't hold any value. If anything, it just emphasis just how out of touch the KDE devs are with their users.

borplk 14y ago

Great article. I see this cult-like behaviour quite a lot. Particular examples, when it comes to open source and free software and gnu/unix, vim emacs etc... It feels like most people just follow the cult's teachings and hold the same opinions that they saw. I'm sure you guys all think open source software is fantastic and can give me 10 reasons and examples in support of your opinion. But how much of it is truly your own conclusion and your findings vs just repeating what you were told before and what everyone else seems to be saying? Have you ever stopped for a second and asked yourself about it? Have you tried to challenge the popular opinions of the cult? What would you be doing, if every other hacker was bashing open source today and praising proprietary software? There's a factor in here that I call 'Bandwagon Threshold Theory'. People react negatively to new and disrupting ideas until a critical mass of people start admiring it. By then they jump on the bandwagon and start preaching and telling everyone about how cool this thing is. If you look around you can see it everywhere. Older ideas and technologies have already established their bandwagon and therefore there's strong resistance and hesitance in saying anything negatively about them. Don't believe me? just say something negative about open source and see how religiously people will defend it. I guarantee you, the majority of those defenders will simply be doing so not as a result of deep understanding and knowledge but because of the teachings of the cult. I have previously written a short rant here as well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4601593 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4601593 PS: I just used the open source examples etc to make a point. My comment is general about the cult-like behaviour in the industry not about something specific. In summary, I think we should all stop worrying about standing out and start challenging the things we take for granted as a result of being surrounded and constantly fed a set of accepted and popular beliefs and opinions.

icebraining 14y ago
For a cult, we're not very good followers. There's barely anyone who doesn't use proprietary software, even if there are OSS solutions, as long as the closed version is sufficiently better.
muuh-gnu 14y ago
> But how much of it is truly your own conclusion You can not make an informed opinion on _everything_. There is too much information out there to fact check all bits of it. Sooner or later you will have to take somebody elses opinion on faith, i.e. to trust that he has fact checked something so you dont have to.

davidkatz 14y ago

I find this unconvincing. People who are smart enough to create something of great value will often have valuable input on other things as well. My favorite example is Richard Feynman. No matter what he says, it makes me wiser. 'But Feynman only has expertise in Physics'. Well. A more accurate picture might be: Feynman is a hell of a smart guy, he chose to dedicate most of his time to Physics, but that doesn't make him any less smarter when he talks about other things.

Nikaido 14y ago

While there are some particularly bad examples of cult of personality in free software, I wouldn't say this is one of them. I think that people are relaying Linus's opinion on desktops so much because he's sharing our thought process and gives us an opportunity to spread our own opinion through his fame, rather than just following everything he says just because of his kernel expertise. Look at the reaction people had when Gnome 3 was introduced, and Unity in Ubuntu. People didn't wait for Linus to complain against those changes driven by UI designers gone insane. Lots, and lots of linux users had the SAME reaction Linus had, BEFORE he even publicly talked about it. I went to Gnome 2 from the KDE4 transition since I liked KDE3 but hated KDE4, and went to Xfce after the Gnome 3 and Unity debacle. And I didn't wait for Linus to talk about his thoughts on the linux desktop to switch everytime something bugged me. Aaron Seigo is asking us to not care about Linus opinion ? But we don't give a crap about yours, man, you're the reason why KDE4 went to hell, the man behind Plasma. After so many years acting like you know better what your users want than they do you're getting all hurt when people listen to someone like Linus instead of you ? the thing about Linus is, he's just a user like the rest of us rather than a desktop developer, but with his fame he can make his opinion reach your ears and it seems you don't quite like what regular users think of your "innovations".

keithpeter 14y ago
"Look at the reaction people had when Gnome 3 was introduced, and Unity in Ubuntu. People didn't wait for Linus to complain against those changes driven by UI designers gone insane." Not insane, just designing for a model of a user that does not include many here. I think the 'shock of the new' plays a part. I've been using GS 3.6 on the Gnome Ubuntu Remix (12.10) on the desktop for a bit and it isn't slowing me down much at all, but I'm basically an end user...

icebraining 14y ago

Let's step to the side and consider this from a different angle: Imagine that someone made Linus' perfect desktop environment. Something that satisfied him entirely and which he could happily talk about whenever he felt like it. Would that environment be interesting and useful for the general public, or would it be something great for kernel developers and grumpy-heads like Linus? I don't care about the general public. I'm not part of it (regarding Desktop Environments) nor do I develop DEs for them. I'm a developer who actually likes some of the same tools as Linus does, including those he developed (Git), so yes, he's position is potentially useful to me. This idea that software isn't useful unless my mother can use it is a really annoying meme. It's like farmers claiming that reviews on combine harvesters aren't useful because they can't help uncle Tom harvest the tomatoes in his garden.

eternalban 14y ago

Open source is not "Free Software". The Free Software movement is a political movement and requires leadership. The OP's critique of Linus (regardless of its merit) is entirely irrelevant to a discussion of Free Software Movement and the clear necessity for uncompromising and visionary leadership.

sathishmanohar 14y ago

<quote>as meaningful as his opinions on rocket ships, film production, oil recovery techniques, sociology, religious history, automobile engineering or any of the other topics he has no meaningful expertise in.<endquote> I completely disagree with this line of argument that, you have to have worked as something before giving a valid opinion, I wish it were true in some case of tech journalists, but, in my opinion if you've been a user of a technology, then you can give an opinion. On the flipside, positive case for cult of personality may be, a simple use of two words and middle finger can affect the decisions of major corporation like nVidia.

aristidb 14y ago

"We must change fundamental human nature!" Yeah right. Also, it's not like Linus does not provide reasoning for his opinions, and deriding him for not being a desktop developer is unfair.

antirez 14y ago

I'm a bit more concerned about the hordes of unexperienced, never-accomplished-something-worthwhile, Ruby / Javascript programmers that are ready to discredit work done by others, and to discredit people like Linus or RMS that provided us with an incredible amount of value. Linus trying to express his own opinions on software is not a problem at all. EDIT: oh and even worse, discredit others usually writing meaningless trolling tweets without any actual argument.

recoiledsnake 14y ago

For context, the author Aaron Seigo is the project lead and developer of Plasma for KDE 4. I suspect he has been irritated by people taking Linus seriously in the matters of desktop Linux.

mariuolo 14y ago

Most OSS contributors work for free: if you remove both money and vanity, what remains as motivator?

Xcelerate 14y ago

I get kind of tired of comments like this: "His opinion on desktop software is as meaningful as his opinions on rocket ships, film production, oil recovery techniques, sociology, religious history, automobile engineering or any of the other topics he has no meaningful expertise in." His opinion on desktop software is valuable to me. Why? Because he's obviously a very smart person. And I listen to smart people a lot more closely than I listen to just anyone. I would trust a physicist giving his opinions on the state of medical care more than I would a guy who believed the earth was flat.

ekianjo 14y ago
It's not because someone is an expert at one thing that their opinion on a totally different subject matters at all. that's the point the articles wants to make, and I totally agree with that principle. We see a bunch of artists taking political stances, for example, and I do not even bother listening to any of them because they just see thing through a very narrow window. Just like Linus when he says the default desktop resolution should be Retina-like, he completely ignores the effect of scale, the fact that you need new lines to make such screens, and that there will be a lag from the time it becomes standard. And he simply does not consider the fact that someone who buys a low to mid-end Laptop does not care about resolution at all. They just want something that works. If they cared about screen resolutions or even screen quality, then no laptop PC in the 500 dollars range would sell at all. But they do. And it's not Linus who buy them, so he does not understand these people and his opinion is only valid for his personal use case.

lnanek2 14y ago

I'd actually benefit a lot from Linus being more listened to. After all, he gets pissed when desktops remove features coders need to be productive, and I'm a coder. Should Linus have written git to be useful by non-techies? It wouldn't have been powerful enough to compete with CVS and Subversion and the like and many of us would still be stuck on centralized version control. Making stuff for the general public only is all well and good, but it's not all that's out there. In fact, it is kind of anti-open source since open source is all about being able to adapt software to your needs, and our desktops now are ripping out all the options waving the flag of needing to appeal to the general public.

jordigh 14y ago
Git having a horrible interface is orthogonal to it being a successful DVCS. In fact, I'm quite convinced that it's precisely due to the article's subject, cult of personality of Linus, that git took off. Mercurial is a good example of a powerful DVCS (it can do everything git can) and yet a sane user interface that is easier to teach. Almost nobody "non-techie" that I know about learns git's command line. It's a horrible mess! Instead they rely on GUIs (Git Tower, gitk) or WUIs (Github). But almost anyone can learn hg's command line, since they go through great pains to make sure they pick user-facing names and words and concepts that map to familiar ideas.
- kstenerud 14y ago
  A thousand times this. Linus may be amazing at the low level, but he absolutely SUCKS at user interfaces. Git's CLI is a prime example of this. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. It takes strength of character to acknowledge where you're weak, and it takes strength of will to follow only the good examples of those we admire.
- brendoncrawford 14y ago
  > Almost nobody "non-techie" that I know about learns git's command line. That is fine. Those people are not Git's target market.
  - 14y ago

olalonde 14y ago

I think the "cult of personality" is a major reason why many people chose Python over Ruby/Rails. There are way too many strong personalities, strongly held opinions, drama and alpha geeks within the Ruby community. See http://web.archive.org/web/20080103072111/http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html http://web.archive.org/web/20080103072111/http://www.zedshaw...

stcredzero 14y ago

> Of course, it goes even further than that. These cults of personality encourage others to mimic people like Linus when it comes to things like communication style. I've met a number of personality cultists in tech who use the example of Steve Jobs as a justification to be a jerk. I find this to be inversely correlated with their actual insight and intelligence. (I am an iOS developer and owner of several Apple devices.)

smoyer 14y ago

You're not going to end the "cults of personality" in free software for the same reason it won't end in other types of software, in software companies, in companies in general or in the government (a really big company but without the fiscal constraints of having to be profitable). The culture in these places, for better or worse, are initially driven by some small number of charismatic leaders who can create either a good culture or a bad culture. Entropy demands that well-maintained culture must tend towards chaos as an organization grows. At this point, inertia helps prolong the original culture initially, but then provides a huge barrier to reclaiming a favorable lost culture. Finally, the organization's reliance on oral history (we're horrible at really documenting these things) fails as older members of the tribe leave and are replaced with idealistic whippersnappers. The cycle is complete when these young'ins become resigned to their position as a "cog-in-the-machine" and stop trying to effect change. I'm not pessimistic ... I've just been around this cycle a few times.

pasbesoin 14y ago

On the one hand, I dislike this "cult of personality" trend in general culture. (Not infrequently discussed with family and friends.) On the other hand, even and especially in the conservative, corporate cultures I've experienced, there has been a small minority of people who are an order of magnitude smarter and more capable than their peers. And... this tends to generalize. They have their assignments. But sit down with them for a more general discussion, and they often have a better idea than most of what is going on and of its value or cost, in areas well outside their formal assignments. Further, when they -- one way or another -- end up responsible for addressing something "farther afield", they often do so better, quicker, and more insightfully than the dedicated, "expert" staff assigned to it. That's why I pay attention to people like Linus. In my experience, when people like him address a topic, even casually, they've often been paying better attention than many others, and/or their ability and experience enables them to quickly cut through the crap and see to the heart of the matter. Even when they are wrong, their thinking often brings up some very interesting and relevant points.