[disjointrevelry]

Linus' behavior is one that is necessary in order to work with the dominant culture in OSS, particularly white males. The open forum insults to establish the pecking order, and to deter thin skinned people is one that is also abundant in other cultures where open forums are used for establishing the hierarchy. One such example are some East-Asian cultures, such as the Chinese.

The question is, is this method of selection conducive and is the use of obsessive aggression costing open forum projects like OSS through selective acceptance? There may have never been an alternative to the extremely abusive nature of white-male dominated cultures in the first place in regards to projects in open forums.

[muyuu]

It has little to do with "white males" and more to do with Open Communities with no barrier of entry needing to be extremely dismissive when a standard is not met, to make up for said lack of barriers of entry.

The vast majority of OSS projects that don't start from a strong core fail miserably and it's because of this. People extrapolate their real life professional behaviour to a virtual, open scene where assumptions of competence and commitment fall flat massively.

If anything, OSS needs more people like Linus Torvalds and Theo de Raadt managing projects and not post modern clowns with "white male" guilt. It's not by chance that Linux is possibly the biggest success in OSS history with real community contribution, and most of the others have been carried out by their respective cores with very little external output.

American PC behaviour is a disaster for OSS and that's why a lot of OSS is "awful" where it matters, which is in quality, in competitiveness and in leading the industry. Companies like Google and Mozilla lord it over OSS projects that are basically "glass house" corporative projects with extremely little external contribution (other than forking code from Linux, Apache, BSD, etc).

If anything the OSS is not dismissive enough of shit and this is holding us back.