Sounds like homework...
If so, I'd love to know who gives homework like that so I can sign up for the course....
Ask HN: Difference in management styles of Ulrich Drepper and Linus Torvalds
21–23 of 23 posts
Re: Ask HN: Difference in management styles of Ulrich Drepper and Linus Torvalds
#22There really is not much similarity between Linus and Ulrich. Linus relies on his "lieutenants" to do most of the work in Linux... not only the code, but also reviewing the patches of others. Ulrich was a one-man show who would often rewrite patches rather than accept the work of someone else.
Anyway, Ulrich was just wrong about a lot of things. I remember one bug that affected ARM that he tried to close because "ARM is not a real arch." He made a lot of very questionable decisions, like leaving out strlcpy and strlcat. To be fair, there is valuable stuff he did behind the scenes (like ELF TLS support and some of the dynamic linking documentation). But people (reasonably) focus on the negative things, because a negative maintainer can cause huge problems for downstream projects...
Re: Ask HN: Difference in management styles of Ulrich Drepper and Linus Torvalds
#23The assholeness of Torvalds is oversold. Imagine that every conversation you had at work, and a good deal of your conversations with your friends off work, were publicly available on the internet and routinely scrutinized by journalists and bloggers, and any time they criticized you it was newsworthy enough to make it to all the big social news aggregators. Now imagine that you worked a retail job, and not only dealt with professionals with a sense of propriety, but randoms with varying degrees of anger, malice, and incompetence.