Linus Torvalds on Competition by Technical Merit

I saw this message from Linus on the LKLM and I thought it was well stated.  I love the way Linus runs the crazy bazaar of Linux Kernel development.  He stays true to technical merit and essentially bases all of his decisions on this.  (though sometimes this is in conflict with the ethics of Free Software).

Linus Torvalds from the Linux Kernel Mailing List:

"One of the most motivating things there *is* in open source is "personal pride".

It's a really good thing, and it means that if somebody shows that your code is flawed in some way (by, for example, making a patch that people claim gets better behaviour or numbers), any *good* programmer that actually cares about his code will obviously suddenly be very motivated to out-do the out-doer!

Does this mean that there will be tension and rivalry? Hell yes. But that's kind of the point. Life is a game, and if you aren't in it to win, what the heck are you still doing here?

As long as it's reasonably civil (I'm not personally a huge believer in being too polite or "politically correct", so I think the "reasonably" is more important than the "civil" part!), and as long as the end result is judged on TECHNICAL MERIT, it's all good.

We don't want to play politics. But encouraging peoples competitive feelings? Oh, yes."