Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman

Linux@lemmy.ml – 116 points – 1 weeks ago

I've tried using my incredible (british) brain using Google to see if these open source titans ever engaged in a battle of "friendly conversation" with one another.

I was always interested what Stallman thought of the angry but smart finnish man who gave us the robust penguin kernel that breathes life into older machines and powers supercomputers for the weather.

The same with Torvalds thoughts on Stallmans GNU involvement and him as a person.

This is because you sometimes had different organisations in the FOSS and OSS community that take on different meanings so I wanted a better idea if these chaps ever spoke in an interview together.

TLDR : Does finnish man like bearded GNU jesus man and the same vice versa

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Neither of them is exactly what I'd call easily likeable

But Linus was very likeable among the computer nerds of his own generation. These eccentricities that are criticized today have actually added a lot to his fame.

He was never likeable. He acted like a huge asshole, which naturally made other assholes look at him and go "see if he can do that so can I"

He acted like a huge asshole

Not at all. I can't remember anything like that.

Are we pretending that his various and ubiquitous abusive rants didn't happen, or that they weren't him acting like an asshole?

I can only assume that you are very young.

In our times, a good rant has gotten somewhat out of fashion, and that is a sad fact. A good rant does not make you an AH (or anybody else). It is different from spreading hate (which is quite fashionable these days). You must learn the distinction.

Right, I must be "very young" if I don't think that hurling abuse at others is OK.

Yeah, pretty much figured you were one of the people who thought his behavior wasn't only acceptable but preferable. In other words, an asshole.

From LKML:

So I'm going to have a HARD REQUIREMENT that any compiler complaints need to be really really sane. They need to detect when people do things like this on purpose, and they need to SHUT THE ^&% UP about the fact that wrap-around happens.

Any tool that is so stupid as to complain about wrap-around in the above is a BROKEN TOOL THAT NEEDS TO BE IGNORED.

Really. This is non-negotiable.

And no, the answer is ABSOLUTELY NOT to add cognitive load on kernel developers by adding yet more random helper types and/or functions.

We already expect a lot of kernel developers. We should not add on to that burden because of your pet project.

Be the solution, not the problem.

Is he asshole?