
Ending the cults of personality in free software  - Who828
http://aseigo.blogspot.ch/2012/11/ending-cults-of-personality-in-free.html
======
TeMPOraL
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>

~~~
edanm
"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
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_.

------
Nikaido
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
_"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...

------
keithpeter
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
_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
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.

------
forgottenpaswrd
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
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
_> 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

------
icebraining
_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.

------
math
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
Credibility is an amalgamation of measured predictions.

------
borplk
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>

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.

~~~
muuh-gnu
> 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.

~~~
edanm
That is true about facts, e.g. I trust that other people have verified the
fact that the earth is round.

Unfortunately, ideas like "is open-source good" are usually very difficult to
turn into pure facts, and are therefore opinions. And these are usually very
different depending on what different people think the world is or should be -
there is no "correct" fact which I can trust someone else to verify.

~~~
lostnet
Please write the sequel to my book, I will not be including my book, but
someone who has read my book will provide a review.

The review may be in a language you speak (and may be in a language they
speak,) and they may have understood my book, but I am a clever author and
they were the cheapest reviewer I could find. They are not themselves an
author, nor can they read, but they have talk to authors before and have
looked at the pictures in my book (I had not realized they were there!) and
asked me questions I did not understand.

Oh, and I will not correct, evaluate or pay you for your sequel but readers of
my book can choose to also read your book. I can cancel or up the fee for my
book whenever I feel like it, so future readers may not exist.

I would say that it is a "correct fact" that it is a disadvantage to undertake
the project I suggest even though you may on occasion succeed. Similarly, I
would suggest you avoid building on your own dime on a closed source
framework. But hey, I can't prove that golfing in lightning storms is a bad
plan, so go nuts..

------
davidkatz
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.

------
lnanek2
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
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.

~~~
Avshalom
Where the hell are you finding "non-techie"s that

A) use a VCS (explicitly not as like a transparent feature in some software
package)

B) use one from a command line

because I'm pretty sure managing documents with hg from the command line
qualifies you as "techie" at the very least "tech-ish"

~~~
jordigh
At my current job we have MRI readers, almost all of them who come from
medical backgrounds (neurologists, radiologists, the odd obstetrician here and
there) and we have them use the command line all the while. We're
transitioning them into using hg for some things, and they seem comfortable
with it.

------
kinleyd
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.

------
nnq
...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!

------
viseztrance
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.

------
antirez
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.

------
sathishmanohar
<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.

------
Xcelerate
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
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.

------
pasbesoin
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.

------
smoyer
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.

------
eternalban
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.

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

------
stcredzero
_> 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.)

------
aristidb
"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.

------
olalonde
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...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080103072111/http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/rails_is_a_ghetto.html)

------
recoiledsnake
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.

