Lessons from torvalds/GitHub commits discussion

I really don't see it as him being a prima donna. Some of the deleted comments from the github forom removed the truly trollish comments that he was responding to, such as "Linus's shit doesn't stink."

My take on it is that there are a very large number of morons out there on the internet, and just as you don't want to hire B or C people in a startup, you don't want morons trying to contribute to an open source project. B and C people add negative value to a company, not just with their bad ideas and bad code, but in wasting the time of the A people in cleaning up after their bad ideas and bad code. Why does anyone think it will be any different in an open source project?

Hence, if you have someone who has demonstrably acted like an idiot, you really are better off driving them away from the project (fortunately many of these idiots have thin skins, and can be easily driven away). There is a risk that someone who isn't a moron and who sees someone else who does deserve this treatment might decide to go away, but the chances of this are low, especially if you treat non-idiots well. Also, just from a probability point of view, especially on the internet, unfortunately the morons vastly out-number the non-morons (see 4chan for proof of this :-), so if you don't do this, you will get swamped.

There's also the probability that someone who acts like a moron could be trained how to be less moron-like, but personally, someone who says something like "Linus's shit doesn't stink" is probably someone I would treat as a NO HIRE in an interview situation; maybe they could learn, but you don't take those chances when interviewing potential engineers for a startup. They can learn at some other companies, and try again to go through the interview process later after they've gained some experience.