@itsfoss

Torvalds is like a soccer player who comes on in the 75th minute when the score is 1-1. His team is called Alice-Team, the opponent is Bill-Team.

He plays well for 15 minutes, works hard out there, and scores the winning goal, for a 2-1 victory. Alice-Team fans rejoice. Bill-Team fans, sad.

Imagine an interview a couple of days after the match.

INTERVIEWER: fans are saying you basically won the whole match, and the victory should even be named after you, Linus' victory. Journalists are writing the story of this match as if all that happened is one person arrived out of nowhere and won a game. What do you say to those people?

TORVALDS: oh, I don't do politics. People can say what they like. I just chase the ball and kick it.

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Cultural context: soccer ("football", to some) is an 11-person-a-side 90-minute team sport, where the team with the most goals at the end wins. Fans of teams tend to dislike when players are selfish and egotistical, and tend to adore players who recognise the team effort, and put their individual effort in the context of the team effort.

Disclaimer: This comment is about *all* the GNU people, and all the not-that-GNU people who still contributed to those sorts of ideas and all that work around that time; *not* any one individual. For example, I personally have a particular fondness for the late Bob Chassell, of "An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp" fame.

Conclusion: (i) why must we adulate individuals, sigh, and (ii) why do we let programmer types off the hook so easily when they play the "Oh I'm a computer-person, I'm not aware that politics and culture exists" card, also sigh

@jbc @itsfoss

Are we talking about Linus Torvalds, the person who does not follow GNU coding standards at all?

There are all kinds of hard coded limits in Linux, for instance. I had to completely change the design of something after running into this with overlay fs.

And lately he blew his top at other people who wanted to submit some code for big-endian architectures, because HE, Linus Torvalds, has let people commit code to the kernel that is little endian-only.

Oh, he’s a legend, alright