“What I wanted to say [at the keynote]—and clearly must have done very badly—is that one of the great things about open source is exactly the fact that different people are so different,” Torvalds wrote via e-mail. “I think people sometimes look at it as being just ‘programmers,’ which is not true. It’s about all the people who are more oriented toward commercial things, too. It’s about all those people who are interested in legal issues—and the social ones, too!”
Torvalds spoke to what he thought was a larger concept of “diversity” than what has been mentioned a lot in recent stories on the topic, including economic disparity, language, and culture (even between neighboring European countries). “There’s a lot of talk about gender and sexual preferences and race, but we’re different in so many other ways, too,” he wrote.
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