The gnome people claiming that I set the "attitude" that causes them problems is laughable.

One of the core kernel rules has always been that we never ever break any external interfaces. That rule has been there since day one, although it's gotten much more explicit only in the last few years. The fact that we break internal interfaces that are not visible to userland is totally irrelevant, and a total red herring.

I wish the gnome people had understood the real rules inside the kernel. Like "you never break external interfaces" — and "we need to do that to improve things" is not an excuse.

Or "different users have different needs". The kernel was — and is — happy to support both the SGI style thousand-CPU machines and the embedded vendors with cellphones and routers. The fact that they have different needs is very obvious.

I personally think that one reason that the Linux kernel has been so successful was the fact that I didn't have a huge vision of where I wanted to force people to go. Sure, I wanted "unix", and there are some very high-level concepts that go with that (fork,exec,files etc), but I didn't want to enforce any particular world-view outside of that very generic pattern.

In fact, Linux pretty much did what I envisioned back in 1991 when I first released it. Pretty much all subsequent development was driven by outside ideas of what other people needed or wanted to do. Not by some internal vision of where things "should" go.

That's exactly the reverse of the gnome "we know better" mentality, and "We will force Corba/.NET down your throat whether you like it or not, and if you complain, you're against progress, and cannot handle the change".

Some gnome people seem to be in total denial about what their problem really is. They'll wildly blame everybody except themselves. This article seems to be a perfect example of that.
(cc) Linus Torvalds

//tl;dr: Гномобляди — не люди.

#toissg

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