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I remember first reading about "7 Habits" from Linus's management style:

First off, I'd suggest buying "Seven Habits of Highly Successful People", and NOT read it. Burn it, it's a great symbolic gesture. [1]

After that I read the book and it's actually not that bad. It helps.

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/105375/

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That says more about Linus that anything else I've read.

I suspect it's more of a tongue-in-cheek self-reference to the Linux C coding style (http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/CodingStyle) where he suggests burning the GNU coding standards, using exactly the same phrasing.

Incidentally if you read the GNU coding standards I think you'll find they really ARE that bad (http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Formatting.html#...)

I was curious about how bad the GNU standards could be [they make so much great software!].

Holy crap. Function calls with a space? foo (x,y);

Braces indented halfway into the "else" keyword? Ugh. I'm no C guru but even has a freshman cs major I'd recognize that as ugly.

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