I recall when ESR tried to school Linus Torvalds about the "curse of the gifted student" and that Linux would collapse under the complexity of device driver code duplication. Linus didn't care because he was more concerned about introducing code dependencies that would block developers and make them less productive than some duplicated code in drivers maintained by different people.
Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 16:00:52 -0400
From: "Eric S. Raymond" <esr@thyrsus.com>
To: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>
Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>:
>
> On Tue, 22 Aug 2000, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> >
> > Linus Torvalds <torvalds@transmeta.com>:
> > > But the "common code helps" thing is WRONG. Face it. It can hurt. A lot.
> > > And people shouldn't think it is the God of CS.
> >
> > I think you're mistaken about this.
>
> I'll give you a rule of thumb, and I can back it up with historical fact.
> You can back up yours with nada.
Yes, if twenty-seven years of engineering experience with complex
software in over fourteen languages and across a dozen operating
systems at every level from kernel out to applications is nada :-).
Now you listen to grandpa for a few minutes. He may be an old fart,
but he was programming when you were in diapers and he's learned a few
tricks...
http://lwn.net/2000/0824/a/esr-sharing.php3
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11077799 (2016 discussion)