Consider that you may be eavesdropping on the sort of self-talk the author engages in. The clear reasoning mixed with vituperation makes me suspect he probably beats himself up. There is a lot of worry over being mistaken and stupid.
I'm unfamiliar with the author, so I could be way off base.
I agree, though I think there's an irony in the mutual incompatibility of many FOSS licenses. For instance, try making a GPL project that depends on a data file licensed under Creative Commons. One's best bet in such a situation is to ask the rights holder to release to you under a compatible license, but people (and institutions) are generally reluctant to do so.
Two permissive licenses, one headache for the FOSS dev.
> ...their ability to ask for complex things (where often I'm the dummy in the conversation)...
I love the way you put that.
Whenever my office door opens and the cat walks in, she's either there for a visit or to collect me, in which case she waits by the door to lead me to her dish, her toys, or whatever she has in mind. Beyond communicating with humans, cats are pretty good at training them, too.
> He was one of the creators of PayPal, so digital money is his field.
He was one of four people listed as founders of X.com, which merged with Confinity, which changed its name to PayPal where he was fired as CEO; PayPal was then purchased by EBay, whereupon Musk took a big payday.
Judging by his involvement with Tesla Motors Inc -- he became chairman and CEO by investing 6.5 million into the existing company; a lawsuit brought by an incorporating founder resulted in an agreement whereby Musk and four others can call themselves founders -- makes me wonder what his contribution to X.com actually was.
Whatever else he may be, he's an extraordinarily good investor.
I enjoyed reading this because it reminded me of a moment of hubris as junior developer. I was working with a complicated data structure I wanted to visualize, so I decided to write some quick code to basically read the data structure and output a graph as rectangles and lines connecting them.
I was chastened by the complexity of just drawing the lines between boxes so that they didn't overlap (as much as possible) and were drawn on facing sides (one of the later problems discussed in the article). I don't recall how I did it, but I do remember a sudden refresher on matrix multiplication.
It drove home how simple things can be more complicated than you might expect.
EDIT: also, I appreciated the way the article was written. No cruft.
> It's not just the FOSS community, look at how non technical people react every time gmail, outlook or excel makes a tiny change to the UI
This seems to point to the general situation of change fatigue. If you pick up a random Android device, what does the "settings" app icon look like? Individually, these things are small, but the small impedances these changes introduce does take a toll on people, especially when you're trying to just get stuff done.
I don't think there's an easy answer here when the developer needs to make fundamental changes, though.
I'm unfamiliar with the author, so I could be way off base.