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Comment by forapurpose | Hacker News Reader

> Personality is important.

I agree, but I wonder how it factors in. Compare DJB to Linus Torvalds or Theo de Raadt or Steve Jobs or Steve Balmer or Travis Kalanick, as examples with a variety of outcomes (and I'm not trying hard to come up with those names; there are many more out there). Maybe the determining factor is something other than abrasiveness, maybe it's just balanced against demand for your project or other factors, maybe it depends on the market segment you're operating in - or maybe it's circumstance and luck that really matter.

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I don't think that's the right way of looking at this.

It's hard to deny that Linus would not lose influence by having a modicum of self control and not saying someone should have been aborted because of a bad patch. Sure, maybe DJB won't become uber-famous by being nicer, but at the very least he wouldn't generate these sorts of conversations every time he writes something.

There's so many documented cases of people saying they don't want to work with Torvalds or Kalanick. In exchange for what? Being able to be some massive edgelord?

If even a single good core Linux developer would otherwise be contributing, Torvald's abrassiveness would be a net negative I think.

But no one have mentioned licensing issues. Linux or *BSD do have quite liberal licenses comparing to QMail license or at least last time I read it, it was quite years ago. I have maintained my own set of patches with some of my own additions but it was a hurdle and it didn't make exchanging of those easy. My point it, maybe it is not only abrassiveness issue?

QMail is public domain.

Oh, I see now that it went public domain in 2007. I had used it prior to the change (migrated to Exim and the Postfix later). Wonder if it would get a better traction and community behind it if it was OSI-compilant from the start?

Except that he does not generate these sorts of conversations, given then he has written plenty since qmail and no such conversations have happened.

Kids, I speak as one of the few people, possibly the only person, in this discussion who has actually been subject to this. Daniel J. Bernstein is not in the same class of people as the people who call for retroactive abortions of their correspondents or who call people "slimy hypocritical asshole". It is a calumny to put him in that class.

And if I, who actually has been subject to this, say this, all of you, who have not, do not have a leg to stand upon.

Sorry, I might have been overly generalizing here. I'm not aware of djb's behavior in particular, and was working off of the comparison that OP had made.

I had cited the abortion example as it's perhaps the most well-known example of Torvald's behavior. I should have made that more clear.

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