> Can you name off the top of your head some of the core developers of FreeBSD, PostgreSQL, JBoss, Hadoop, Gnome and a dozen others more important FOSS projects? I can't, and yet this doesn't say anything about both the significance of said projects and my familiarity with them.
It's more like there is an important project, and there is a loud mouth, and you use that project - you have most likely heard of the loudmouth. Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman etc. are known because the projects they work on are important and we use them, and they are vocal, and sometimes arrogant about their projects.
Though Zed isn't in the same league, the same goes for him. He was associated with an important project, and he created controversy while he was associated with that project. You can write articles on "Rails is a ghetto" or "Django is a ghetto" or "Java sucks", and you won't be getting any coverage unless you already are a somewhat known name in the community. Zed's notoriety doesn't directly stem from the essay.
> It's more like there is an important project, and there is a loud mouth, and you use that project - you have most likely heard of the loudmouth.
True, but the point is many/most people have heard of Zed without knowing or ever using his project(s). On the other hand the number of people who know Linus as the creator of Linux is orders of magnitude larger than those who also happen to know he's sometimes arrogant.
It's more like there is an important project, and there is a loud mouth, and you use that project - you have most likely heard of the loudmouth. Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman etc. are known because the projects they work on are important and we use them, and they are vocal, and sometimes arrogant about their projects.
Though Zed isn't in the same league, the same goes for him. He was associated with an important project, and he created controversy while he was associated with that project. You can write articles on "Rails is a ghetto" or "Django is a ghetto" or "Java sucks", and you won't be getting any coverage unless you already are a somewhat known name in the community. Zed's notoriety doesn't directly stem from the essay.