Linux kernel built over email trounces startup excuses about remote web dev
Description
Screenshot of a dark-mode tweet interface. A round pink avatar, username “eevee” and handle “@eevee” appear under a small tag that says “Linux.” The tweet text reads: “if the linux kernel can be made via fucking mailing list then i'm pretty sure your startup can manage to make a website or whatever remotely”. Below it shows the timestamp “20:12 · 06.06.21 · Twitter for Android” and engagement metrics “74 Retweets 2 Quote Tweets 346 Likes.” Standard Twitter icons for reply, retweet, like (highlighted in red), and share sit at the bottom. Technically, the post jokes that one of the most complex pieces of software - the Linux kernel - has been collaboratively engineered for decades using plain-text email patches, so a modern SaaS startup should have no trouble building a simple website while its team works remotely. It highlights asynchronous workflows, distributed teams, and long-lived open-source processes predating today’s tooling
Comments
7Comment deleted
If 30 million lines of kernel code survived decades of “reply-all diff” threads, your Series-A React monolith probably isn’t blocked by remote work - more likely by the committee choosing a Slack emoji for “production down.”
The irony that a globally distributed team of volunteers can coordinate one of the world's most critical pieces of infrastructure through plain text emails and patch files, while your Series A startup insists everyone needs to be in the same WeWork space to ship a CRUD app with a React frontend
The Linux kernel - millions of lines of C code, thousands of contributors across continents, managing memory, filesystems, and hardware drivers for everything from toasters to supercomputers - coordinates entirely through plaintext email patches and mailing list threads. Meanwhile, your Series B startup with a React CRUD app and three microservices insists everyone needs to be in the office for 'collaboration' and 'spontaneous innovation.' If Linus can review patches via `git send-email` while maintainers debate semaphore implementations over LKML threads, your PM can probably survive a Zoom standup
LKML merges thousands of patches over git-send-email; if your sprint still needs an office to ship brochureware, the bottleneck isn’t bandwidth - it’s management
Mailing lists birthed the kernel's 30M LoC empire - your startup's 'we need a full stack first' is just distributed denial of progress
The kernel gets built via git-send-email and reply-all code review; if your startup needs office badges to ship a brochure site, the real incident isn’t remote work - it’s your Electron Slack using more RAM than the kernel
that's true but without an office they can't brag about gaming rooms that nobody is going to use and good coffee and fruit wednesdays Comment deleted