The most toxic thing to happen in the F/OSS world is the attitude that some people are so smart (because they’ve created successful projects) that you cannot criticise them. The idea that, because someone created something good, they are infallible is disastrous for them, the projects they run, and the broader ecosystem.

Producing good work is inseparable from getting useful feedback.

I like to think I’m pretty smart, but I absolutely would not have been able to build any of the things I’m proud of without people willing to tell me that my ideas are stupid.

There are may examples, but a couple of concrete ones: I had an entire mechanism designed for delegating access to the CSR field that allows control over interrupts in CHERIoT. Hongyan Xia pointed out that I was solving the wrong problem, badly. He proposed sentries (an existing mechanism for immutable, unforgeable, function pointers and return addresses) that enabled or disabled interrupts on a jump and captured the prior state in the link register. This not only let us have functions that ran with interrupts disabled (and therefore the ability to reason about worst-case context switch time), it also let us statically audit these properties and enforced a structured-programming discipline. Murali Vijayaraghavan later extended the mechanism to properly differentiate function pointers and return addresses, giving lightweight enforcement of some useful CFI properties. I’d not tried this because I assumed it was impossible without explicit call and return instructions, he showed me I was wrong.

If I ever reach the position where people are unwilling to disagree with me, I expect the quality of my work will drop considerably.