Re: [OFFTOPIC] RMS and reactions to him

Richard Stallman
2003-01-19T01:27:49Z

Richard, you are failing leadership 101. The hallmark of any and every
leader is letting others take credit for your work.

That lesson concerns sharing credit with people who are trying to help
you. That's the reason I talk about the work that we, the GNU
Project, have done, rather than focusing on my individual role. (I
don't ask people to name the system after my name.)

However, letting the credit for our work fall entirely to someone who
never was part of our project and doesn't share our values and goals
is a different matter. That would be self-defeating. Leadership 101
doesn't need to talk about this, because even cadet leaders generally
already know they should not let rival movements take the credit for
the work they and their supporters have done.

We do give Torvalds a share of the credit by calling the system
"GNU/Linux".

Then contrast the number of people following you vs. the number
following him. There has to be at least 3 orders of magnitude difference,
he's doing something right and you are doing something wrong.

If this is true--I don't know that it is--it's probably because he
gets the credit for our work as well as his own. I'm trying to change
that now.