>Also, you're wrong, because Linus's job and greatest skill is in managing people.
He doesn't manage people. He manages their contributions. Why are they contributing? Because they want to make it better.
In general, businesses don't have volunteer employees who work there solely on the basis of wanting to make the product better. Their decision to work there is also based factors like the salary, the benefits, the culture, whether they like the people they work with/for, etc., some or all of which will vary from person to person.
Basically, he's a very very very successful troll :)
My personal rule of thumb is do not say something written that I wouldn't say in person, especially if I am using a profanity language.
So, while it's your good rule of thumb, my observation over the years is it is not followed by many.
Erik's influence ended outside of comp.lang.lisp and the influence of that usenet group was fairly small, in the greater scheme of things.
comp.lang.lisp was very important prior to the founding of Stack Overflow, EmacsWiki, and so on. It was a lot more important to Lisp than any Lisp company, and maybe more important than all Lisp companies put together.
comp.lang.lisp is long dead.
However, I wasn't talking about only Common Lisp users, but about users of all Lisps. Elisp and Clojure have similarly-sized Freenode channels #emacs and #clojure, each substantially bigger than #lisp. Various estimates of the number of Emacs users put them around 5–50k people: there are perhaps around 15000 Elisp users http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3311227/emacs-user-base-s... or 0.5% of Ubuntu users using Elisp http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/35312/emacs-u... (some tens of thousands) or 5300 Github users with Elisp repositories http://www.quora.com/How-many-people-use-emacs-per-day?share....
How many Emacs users just use it? How many already need help to configure .emacs ?
My personal rule of thumb is do not say something written that I wouldn't say in person, especially if I am using a profanity language.
> Linus doesn't run a business. He's the kernel admin
He's also the original author. And he still is an awesome developer and the Linux kernel is not his only accomplishment. Git is another one. Linus is one of those people that can change the face of our industry over night and he has done so at least twice.
Not only that, but if you read his trail of angry emails, one thing is for sure - he's also one of those people in the open-source community that care deeply about users. Many of his rants are about changes in the kernel that break the userland. This is not so different than a business owner caring for his customers.
> I want to get his opinion on managing code not managing people. He doesn't deal with payroll, 401ks, employee vacations or benefits, he doesn't care about retention, he cares about code
That's an odd statement to make. A business owner cares about revenue, not payrolls, 401ks, employee's vacations or benefits - those are just things that a business owner must do to secure the company's revenue.
Also, you're wrong, because Linus's job and greatest skill is in managing people. If it were about "the code", Linux the kernel would have taken a back seat to 386BSD.