See also a rebuttal of sorts [1] from Brett Glass, the sole programmer singled out by name in phk's essay:
> Poul-Henning's assertion that all such ideas should be dismissed as "bikeshedding" reflects this dismissive attitude, which can be just as damaging to a software project as taking too many suggestions (or accepting bad ones). At the time of the discussion I mention above, internal squabbles drove several talented programmers from the project, and I was discouraged from becoming more deeply involved in it. FreeBSD was falling behind Linux in features and in popularity. While it has now caught up in terms of technology, it remains an underdog. This is, in part, due to the developers' dismissal as "bikeshedding" of good ideas that Linux adopted much earlier.
I feel like I'm missing the context of the sleep(1) debate and reading both points of view they seem like they're arguing for the same side? Would love for someone to cleanly explain both sides to this as I clearly don't quite get it.
I don't think Brett was on the other side of the sleep(1) debate, just that he'd previously had disagreements with the author of this post.
Grabbing that domain, they must have quite an axe to grind. Not that the attack on them was any less childish.
It sucks to be called out by name in a document that’s been referenced continuously for decades. I would be surprised if whatever he said to piss off Poul Henning Kamp warrants that level of retribution.
Why? Isn't that a trivial thing to do so that even the tiniest of axes could justify?
The action itself is trivial, sure, but that and the quora answer itself kind of indicates the issue has been living in their head for at least 15 years, which is a rather long time for a dumb quip to be taking up any amount of mental space. Most people wouldn't even think of the idea of taking a domain name for the purpose of an internet argument. Granted, most people don't have that internet argument continuously referenced for decades, but I doubt 99.99% of later readership outside of the original mailing list were thinking about the name randomly being called out and were more interested in it solely for etymology's sake.
But it's not just a "quip", he mentioned some internal squabbles that discouraged him from contributing, so not a trivial thing to forget. It's also constantly reinforced as a meme, so hard to forget, so again the tiniest of axes works just fume to justify trivial actions like writing a response or getting a domain.