WIRED: What have people been saying to you privately, since you brought this up?
Sharp: I’ve gotten a lot of private emails expressing support for standing up to Linus. Some of these are from prominent open source people in KDE, Gnome, Canonical…I can’t say who they are because they wanted to remain private, but they basically said: “Yes, this is a problem and thank you for standing up.”
I also got some really awful hate mail that tried to drag my gender in. But I don’t think this is a gendered topic. This is about people and developers being civil and respectful to each other and trying to figure out how to communicate.
WIRED: Is this an open source issue or is this a Linux issue?
Sharp: There are some open source projects that have explicitly told their members: “We need to be civil because we don’t want to be like the kernel project.” And there are some people that justify how their project is run by saying: “Well the Linux kernel works this way.” So, I think it’s not just a Linux kernel discussion. It’s also an open source discussion.