FOSS is nice, but it's not a silver bullet. In this case I think Linus is largely to thank. Things will be a lot harder if he decides to retire.

Maybe I'm projecting.

Well if Linus goes too far, Google and a couple other big corporate contributors could team up and fork Linux, and it would be very hard for the open project to compete. I think the fact that Linus is so good is a big part of what makes the whole thing hold together.

I have a suspicion that Satya's rise to CEOdom via Azure's success could be attributed to him too.

1: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic...

Spectre and meltdown are a great example of this. Sure, ARM, Intel, and (to a lesser extent) AMD may want to downplay these things, but Google did not, so it became a big deal anyway.

So what? Nobody said that. This is a strawman.

Of course FOSS is not sufficient. Look at any homework-style GitHub repo. Nobody disputes that.

All that is said is that FOSS is necessary to achieve this level of quality.

That doesn't make any sense. This is a strawman argument.

Nobody ever said that FOSS is a silver bullet, not even FSFE, FSF, or Stallman himself.

Ranting and swearing is part of who he is personally, but those are not generally required for being a good project leader.

I agree that his other skills are likely more important overall, and there are certainly other ways to be memorable, but I don't think you can discount the contribution of the ranting.

Like others said, his language helps drive the point home and leaves more of an impression. It also humanizes Linus as well.

As far as this particular Torvalds screed goes, it strikes me as measured for him. He is very clear about what he wants more of and what he wants less of. It's the code that is garbage, and he doesn't get overly personal other than to chide Woodhouse for glossing over the quality of Woodhouse's own contributions.

edit: ahh right, "mis-designed by morons" which is pretty inflammatory, and he should do better than that. I suspect he is trying to provoke someone at Intel into explaining their intent. Insult their intelligence, and they'll reveal something about their (possibly sinister) motive.

Linux is what allowed Intel to get its biggest foothold into the UNIX server market.

Given enough time, SPARC chips would also become vulnerable to these issues. See what happened to ARM: their later (higher performance) designs are more vulnerable than their older designs.

Solaris, with the exceptions of a few bright stars like DTrace and ZFS, always seemed like a POS to me, compared to linux. Especially as a work-station. Sun went full retard with Java everywhere right before they went under and I have a feeling the Solaris Desktop experience, and by extension the UNIX desktop experience, would be something from my worst nightmares, something to make wish for Windows Vista.

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and loved FreeBSD back when it was more easy to choose... But I do think the 'free UNIX' movement has had unintended consequences like the demise of Sun, and perhaps now also this exposing of a failure in what was a desktop class chip architecture that was elevated to server usage.

Everything has a cost is all I'm saying.

Honestly, back when Linux started getting momentum, RMS' GNU/Linux argument had merit. Most of the stuff people where running on top of Linux, never mind using to develop Linux, came from the GNU project.

I actually worked at a startup that threw out a working Linux / MySQL solution in favor of a Sun / Oracle one. Because, you know, VC...