Re this part, about Linus Torvalds being aggressive and insulting to his contributors:
But no, it's not an efficient way to run a community. If
Linux had success, then that certainly happened despite,
not because of this behaviour.
You have to have been utterly brilliant to invent git. I don't know enough about operating system internals to say if the same is true for Linux, but I know enough about git to say it's true for git.
So Linus was brilliant enough to invent git, and is widely known to be a complete asshole to his contributors.
He rarely brags about being a genius - in fact I believe I've seen him on video making modest statements about being overrated and not really that smart - but he often argues that being an asshole to his contributors is a wise and effective form of management.
To me, he seems like an epoch-definingly great hacker who nonetheless has absolutely no clue what his own strengths and weaknesses are.
I'm not sure git is an example of capital-G Genius, since Linus had been using BitKeeper, a commercial distributed revision control system, for about five years by the time he wrote git.
More importantly, Linus took a good look at Monotone, with which git has a lot more in common than with BitKeeper...
and the same is true of Matt Mackall/Mercurial of course.
The incremental improvements in git/Mercurial were of course significant in getting wide adoption.
So Linus was brilliant enough to invent git, and is widely known to be a complete asshole to his contributors.
He rarely brags about being a genius - in fact I believe I've seen him on video making modest statements about being overrated and not really that smart - but he often argues that being an asshole to his contributors is a wise and effective form of management.
To me, he seems like an epoch-definingly great hacker who nonetheless has absolutely no clue what his own strengths and weaknesses are.