Our open source heroes are humans too

Sam Varghese
Monday, 02 February 2009 05:54

Opinion and Analysis

Let's stop and think for a minute - why is an intelligent human being like Torvalds reduced to just an argument about rival desktops? Is that all that the people who congregate at sites like Slashdot consider him to be?

I watched him carefully during the Australian national Linux conference last month. On one occasion, he came to the reception quietly and stood there joking with those manning the desk.

Another time, I watched as he nonchalantly made his way through the crowd, taking his turn to reach a seat for a talk on power management. There was no pushing or shoving, no "I-am-Linus-make-way-for-me" about him.

Many other times I saw him wandering around alone, at times obviously a bit confused by the way venues for certain talks at the conference had been switched.

Unfortunately, people like those who run Slashdot tend to only see him as a means of gaining page impressions, not a human being who, apart from having written some very good code, is as complex as any of the other 6.1 billion who dot the planet.

The same applies to many of the other FOSS people who have created applications that have made them famous. I had the chance to have a long chat with Samba creator Andrew Tridgell and the moment when his eyes really lit up was when he mentioned that he would be soon celebrating his 20th wedding anniversary.

Not when we were discussing interoperability or the settlement that has given people access to Microsoft's protocols. Not when we were talking about the previous day's talk by Microsoft man Lawrence Crumpton.

He was also quite animated when he told me that he would be teaching a course at the Australian National University this year.

Take another of these big-name FOSS people, Bdale Garbee. I had the opportunity to exchange views with him quite a bit too and a lot of what he talks is around his family; you realise that this man is very close to them and all the code in the world comes second to the three humans who are in his immediate vicinity.

Monty Widenius is one half of the duo who created MySQL. He came looking for me, trying to re-schedule an appointment for an interview because he wanted to take his family to see the dolphins, if that were possible.

It's a pity that we often see people of this kind reduced to arguments of the kind that take precedence on idiot-infested areas of the web like Slashdot. The next time, it may be good to take a step back and realise that these people are much more than the code they write. They, incidentally, are humans too.