/* The following is not intended as a criticism of you or Linus! */
>my-vision-isn't-first philosophy
Of Linus Torvalds? The man is nothing if not strongly opinionated, and AFAICT his word is law. He obviously has delegated a lot of the creative/editorial control of Linux to others (it would be impossible not to with a project on that scale), but if we think of Linux as a big software company and him as the CTO, you have to say he has an unusual level of direct personal involvement in the development process.
I think you're talking about something different......you're right that Linus keeps tight control of the architecture, and tries to make sure every major decision is of high quality, and that the code in general stays high quality (according to his definition of quality), but.....
If someone comes around with a new feature to add to Linux, as long as the code is high-quality and has no negative impact elsewhere, he's like to say, "sure, put it in!"
>If someone comes around with a new feature to add to Linux, as long as the code is high-quality and has no negative impact elsewhere, he's like to say, "sure, put it in!"
But in that case it seems like a bit of a strawman that's being attacked. It's not like it's a commonplace attitude to object to high-quality new features with no negative impact.
It's not like it's a commonplace attitude to object to high-quality new features with no negative impact.
Well, if you've ever tried to contribute to open source projects, I think you'll find that it actually is commonplace. For example, I eventually gave up even trying to commit bug fixes to Android, because the pain wasn't worth it.
Wherever there's human interaction, there will be politics.
On the other hand, even tho the code submitted is of high quality and good, it may have negative social effects on the projects: the feature may be out of the scope, the project owner(s) might want to make sure that the author of the patch will be there to support it because they don't have the expertise, etc. For example if I was maintaining a web server and you submitted a default mime.types file, I'd hesistate to take the patch if you said you wouldn't be able to support it, because I know nothing of MIME (sorry for the silly example).
No, it's not silly. What you said makes sense. I am referring however instead to meeting resistance in a project because something I've done or said doesn't line up with the already dug-in political interests that often exist in open source projects. I don't want to name names, but I can think of specific large projects (a couple of household names) that operate in this manner. Argue with a core dev about anything, and your PRs will get closed without any discussion. It sucks.
Obviously Linus is a good, even excellent leader. I'm taking issue with the notion that he has an unusually "my-vision-isn't-first" philosophy. For a software product that's not designed to fit any one highly-specific use case,* I don't see how you define "vision" as something other than the technical decision-making process in developing the product, or something meaningless.
*And creating a large-scale software product that's not tied to a highly-specific use case is itself something that requires forethought aka "vision." Vision isn't a bad thing!
>my-vision-isn't-first philosophy
Of Linus Torvalds? The man is nothing if not strongly opinionated, and AFAICT his word is law. He obviously has delegated a lot of the creative/editorial control of Linux to others (it would be impossible not to with a project on that scale), but if we think of Linux as a big software company and him as the CTO, you have to say he has an unusual level of direct personal involvement in the development process.