Living Colour recorded a superb song in the Early 90’s called “Cult of Personality”.

Well worth a download when Ubuntu Music store is up and running

But a weird thing started happening: people who didn’t know my code at all started fan-boying. There are numerous hackers I admire for their magic code and planet-sized brains who are just doing the awesome while leading projects, posting on lists, speaking and blogging gets disproportionate kudos.

Eventually you start to distinguish between the noise of random praise and the cherished appreciation of those you admire yourself (eg. they come to you with hard problems thinking you might solve it where they failed.)

Some really good shows recently, thanks! Rusty.

Btw, what is your podcast?

It wasn’t until I started a podcast of my own that I realized the following:

1) It’s a fat lot of work; 2) I hate the sound of my own voice 3) You don’t (at least I don’t) do it as an attention whore.

When I started my podcast, it was because I found a niche that I felt needed to be covered. And I suspect most of us (we come from a core set of socially awkward geeks, Leo Laporte not withstanding) are more comfortable in front of the keyboard than behind the mic…With the possible exception of Jono and his hand eating, mind melting, cookie monster metal…:)

Cheers, –vr

I mean, we are hardly talking about – like, the cult around Steve Jobs or something, you know?

http://venturebeat.com/2009/08/17/steve-jobs-profile-shows-our-obsession-with-the-cult-of-personality/

in my mind at the end of the day he wrote a key piece of low-level software, and I just don’t get the fanboying.

Yes very true Jono but one big question exists… if this low level software was not created would Linux even exist today? For that Linus deserves all the fanboys he can get!

I love being a developer of a project because I get such nice e-mails but then, I also have to deal with e-mails asking “when is it going to be done?” as if what im doing is a walk in the park!

Also people expect me to devote most of my free time to the project even though I am not even getting donations. (its not setup yet)

The open source world by its very nature has a much more fertile pool of influence then alot of other communities. This was also talked about in the latest Linux Outlaws show where Dan and Fab pointed out that microsoft and apple have Balmer/Gates/Jobbs as the head honchos, whereas in the open community we have dozens, all appealing to different personalities and mindsets. I personally gravitate towards the more casual of the honchos. I just cant take overly serious people very seriously

Someone like Kent Beck, to the greater extent, only uses Twitter to discuss code-related things, recommendations, insights, etc.

Others, such as, say, Randall Schwarz, talk about all sorts of things. I know he’s looking for work (or was), went to see Avatar with his mother, and just sold the first house he bought. I know Ade B just started a job with RedHat and appears to be a vegetarian – that sort of intimate knowledge does, I think, give you a misplaced sensation of familiarity with the celebrity, and surely it must be odd to have some dude from the wild suddenly congratulate you on selling your house or something without feeling like you’ve asked for that feedback.

What I find curious, from time to time, is watching the conversations between pairs of celebrities I follow (e.g. watching Aq and Ade B organising which pub they’re going to meet in). ;o)

Can’t say I envy him. )

I’m not sure I’d agree with you on this Brian. Look at someone like David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the creator of Ruby on Rails. He’s pretty well known and he’s a pretty good coder (I’m sure he wouldn’t be backward in suggesting it anyway, and the Rails framework is known as being a pretty good piece of code, I thought).

I wonder how much a community takes on all the opinions of their celebrity unquestioningly, or appears to accept all their opinions. For example, DHH has, in the past, ripped into Java for being overly complicated and mundane and now it appears that if you want to be a Rails developer, it’s almost as if you must have that opinion. I may be reading more into it than is there, but that’s the vibe I get anyway.

In that sense, as well as being a lightning rod, there’s a risk that a community is viewed as a bunch of clones of their celebrity (which you may or may not be happy with, depending on who that is).

Just my two cents.

The difficulty for me is I read about the people who are contributing so much and have created this whole ecosystem which I now partake in, so its a bit hard to not look up to them. They are celebrities to me, sure they’ve not been on an island for weeks, or gotten locked in a house or pretend to be someone else on TV but around the things that interest me, they are celebrities.

I don’t watch much TV, maybe 3 hours a week on average but I spend easily 10 hours a day in front of a computer. These people are stars in my Soap Operas and having the opportunity to meet and greet is sometimes too much for some people.

I think its getting things into context, would someone respect you more if you walked upto them and asked them for an autograph or if you worked hard on a piece of code or project they were working on? I’d assume the latter.

Have you read many of Linus’ threads on the LKML? He definitely gets heated up and works through a lot of good arguments, but he’s not as detached as RMS.

There are the people who are known by their coding actions (even if they did only write a F—in kernel) and there are the people who are known by their leadership or promotional activities.

The latter might never have written a line of code in their lives but they are the public face of their project and known to all in the community.

It’s definitely a benefit, if you want your project to grow, to have a “personality” or “public face” that is approachable and lives on planet earth. Whom has skills in talking, motivating and communicating with people in “meat-space” and not just online or even via lines of commented code.

I would even argue that all the “personalities” of Open Source are known because of these skills and not for any coding ability.

I think most good people will not attack people who are emotionally sensitive to the criticism so that feelings get hurt.

What do you think?

I think there’s some cause/effect loop involved; having that kind of personality will drive some to relentlessly pursue their goals, and achieving their goals feeds that personality.

Honestly, I’d rather have people from Roger Waters to Theo de Raadt doing great stuff than a wishy-washy democracy mired in infighting and squandering their potential (cough Gentoo, a few years ago anyway).

Even the lovable Linus Torvalds is an arrogant bastard; he just has a sense of humor about it.

I think one of the reasons that Linus is useful is that he’s very much a person, not a brand. Theo de Raadt is the same way; he’s very passionate, but he’s always come across to me as a real human being.

RMS is the other way around: he promotes his brand and speaks for his brand, and so becomes very easy to attack because you’re not really attacking a person any more. Eric Raymond was the same way.

Just a thought.

I think that part of the reason for this happening is the same thing with celebrity: you feel at least reasonably detached and of the view “I am never gonna meet that person, so I may as well hammer on them” which removes that sense of accountability.

Ya. Indeed. This is part of what I was getting at with the sense of responsibility. If you’re in the unenviable position of being de facto spokesperson for a project even though you don’t really want to be, then you take all this whinging, but it’s hard to say “forget it, I’m leaving” because you have a responsibility to the project to not leave it with a vacuum instead of a spokesperson.