“I personally think that one reason that the Linux kernel has been so successful was the fact that I didn’t have a huge vision of where I wanted to force people to go. Sure, I wanted ‘unix’, and there are some very high-level concepts that go with that (fork,exec,files etc), but I didn’t want to enforce any particular world-view outside of that very generic pattern. That’s exactly the reverse of the gnome ‘we know better’ mentality, and “We will force Corba/.NET down your throat whether you like it or not, and if you complain, you’re against progress, and cannot handle the change’. The gnome people have their problems. They do seem to like to blame pretty much anything but themselves.” (via Torvalds pours scorn on De Icaza’s desktop claims)
De Icaza made the claim in his personal blog on August 29 when he wrote: “Linus, despite being a low-level kernel guy, set the tone for our community years ago when he dismissed binary compatibility for device drivers. The kernel people might have some valid reasons for it, and might have forced the industry to play by their rules, but the Desktop people did not have the power that the kernel people did. But we did keep the attitude.”
