> I would challenge that notion that using an aggressive and diminishing language doesn't imply being a jerk.

It's 100% a cultural difference. While you see it as personally aggressive and grating, a lot of people see "overly polite" language as a sign that you don't care about the topic being discussed and/or are trying to address an issue politically rather than by merits of a strong argument. Neither of these perceptions is really right or wrong, it just has to do with the perspective you have based on where you grew up and who you've interacted with the most.

From an engineering perspective it'd be optimal if everyone had the same universal expectations for how a conversation should be held, just like how it'd be optimal if everyone spoke the same language. People don't really work that way, though, and just like with languages we try to accommodate each other as much as possible and find middle grounds, etc.

Had a Program manager once who was the English Gentleman stereotype. No matter how ridiculously behind schedule someone was he could not confront anyone about it. He would just ask the same questions every week.

For six months I knew that we had a hardware driver problem on the target hardware that was causing the drive to be accessed at PATA speeds (3 MB/s max throughput stuck out from my time spent configuring Linux).

Finally, finally I convinced him to let me sit in on a call to the vendor (VxWorks) and in fifteen minutes we identified the problem and a feasible workaround. Old VxWorks, new bridge controller(?) backward compatible with one they DID support.

All because he couldn't say what needed to be said.

We got a nice 35% jump in the app after the next firmware upgrade.

My idea of the stereotypical English Gentleman as a program manager is someone who uses nice language and still makes it perfectly clear, after you have thought about it a little, that he's telling you to fuck off idiot.

Not someone who's not able to communicate.

We Americans are dense and don't always pick up on undertones of disappointment. Half of the program answered his questions as if they weren't loaded. It was painful to listen to after a year.

Here's an article which discusses some difficulty that British communication could be causing in diplomacy right now http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-37799805

When you say "trying to address an issue politically", that sort of implies a context in which you're pushing back against someone else who's already employed a more "Linus-like" approach.

That's not what the parent comment was suggesting. Someone like Knuth isn't accused of valuing politics over technical merit because he simply addresses technical merit in a polite way. I'm not one of the people who cares all that much that Linus is an ass to people on a mailing list, but it's ludicrous to suggest that his being an ass on a mailing list is necessary to convey a technical point.

I love Donald Knuth but let's face it, from a productivity standpoint he's strictly below average.

He's a perfectionist and he seems to get distracted easily.

Like me, he seems to overly inured to the siren song of Force Multipliers (making other people more productive) and really should have spent more time practicing the craft.

If I had it to do over again I probably would have spent a little more time coding and a little less of it thinking in my late 20's to early 30's. It would make a broader group of people understand what I'm about. Especially bosses who don't understand that it would take three people to replace me, even though the majority of the team close more bugs than I do.

> I love Donald Knuth but let's face it, from a productivity standpoint he's strictly below average.

In fact, Donald Knuth is so below average from a productivity standpoint that there is an entire book published about books and papers that Donald Knuth published: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/cp.html

Ah, I thought you had me there.

Aside from Art, the Tex books, his earlier work on computational complexity and the one on AI, isn't most of the rest of that his bound lecture notes?

His extremely long side rail into typography was mostly what I was talking about. Art was left unfinished that entire time.

You just posted a critique of the most prolific living computer scientist as not productive and then proceeded to compare yourself to him. Who are you? More to the point, how did you get to be so delusional?

I wouldn't say it's universally necessary, just like it's not universally necessary to speak any given language to convey information. We just all have our own natural ways of doing things and it's not necessarily productive to try to get everyone to force themselves into the same mode of communication. We all have the tendency to view our natural modes as superior in various ways but I don't think we should let that tendency lead us to try to coral others into conforming to our norms.

You think Linux didn't have legal challenges? Where have you been since 2003?

The legal challenges were at very different points in their lifetimes. It's at least arguable that the legal issues associated with AT&T and BSD kept it from becoming as mainstream as it might have. (As did the somewhat splintered community.)

Linux OTOH was already well-established before the SCO suits.

I think BSD's biggest problem was all the fragmentation that they created for themselves, with FreeBSD and NetBSD and OpenBSD (and more).

BSDs legal challenges happened largely before Linux had any popularity, so the narrative that pins the blame for BSD's failure in the marketplace on its legal troubles seems hollow to me. The biggest lawsuit was settled in 1994, when Linux hit version 1.0 and Red Hat released its first version. FreeBSD 1.0 landed the previous year.

I don't really disagree. As you say, the legal issues with BSD had been largely resolved by the time there was a significantly growing market for x86 *nix. (It's also worth remembering that, at the time, a lot of people were assuming that market would just go to Windows anyway.)

I'm also inclined to think that fragmentation was a big part of why BSD didn't win out--not legal issues or licensing.