The circus freaks of open source

The circus freaks of open source

June 5, 2026

The masterwork of Terry A. Davis is his eclectic operating system, TempleOS, which he worked on until his tragic death in 2018. In terms of technical excellence, TempleOS rates well in some respects and poorly in others. For example, it earns the achievement, coveted in OS dev circles, of being self-hosted.1 TempleOS is written in Terry’s own bespoke dialect of C and includes an editor, interpreter, and compiler, as well as a number of original games. In other respects, it compares poorly to many hobby OS projects, some of which have achieved significantly greater levels of technical excellence and sophistication. I would place TempleOS somewhere in, say, the lower middle-class of hobbyist operating systems.<br>Among hobbyist operating systems, TempleOS stands out as one of the most well-known, having attracted considerably more press coverage and a much larger fan-base than any other hobby operating system can boast. The reason TempleOS stands out from the crowd is not due to its modest technical achievements, but because it is clearly the product of severe untreated schizophrenia.2 What makes TempleOS special is that Terry built it to talk to God. Every feature and each technical decision re-enforces his schizophrenic delusions, from its implementation language (“HolyC”) to its prophetic “oracle” app. Enthusiasts of TempleOS are drawn to it in part because it affords an opportunity to explore the unique, creative masterwork of a person suffering from mental illness in a way that deeply impacts that work.<br>A curious onlooker will find TempleOS interesting and engaging for the space of perhaps one afternoon before moving on. However, for the less scrupulous fans, turning one’s attention to Terry himself never failed to entertain. Terry’s public life put his mental illness on display, through frequent outbursts, conspiracy theories, rants and nonsensical discourse, all of which was often laced with slurs, racism, and homophobia, endearing him in particular to the 4chan crowd, who would taunt and provoke him to draw out more… entertainment.<br>The press and fan attention was deeply harmful to Terry and likely exacerbated his mental illness. Whenever TempleOS or Terry came up online, the work and the man were fawned over, sanctifying the somewhat impressive, somewhat unremarkable OS as a profound achievement, inspiring reactions that included well-meaning, probably misguided celebrations of what’s possible in spite of profound mental illness, as well as the enthusiastic, disgusting revelry of bigots. Many well-intentioned commenters on Terry’s work demonstrate in their comments, overtly or covertly, a thrilling, voyeuristic sensation of witnessing his mental illness through TempleOS. It never failed to make me feel sick.<br>I wish we had just left Terry well enough alone.<br>The masterwork of Kent Overstreet is bcachefs, a novel copy-on-write file system for Linux, designed to compete with the likes of ZFS and BTRFS. Kent originally authored the bcache subsystem for Linux around 2013, and based on this work began working on bcachefs in 2015. Over the next ten years, he committed himself entirely to the project, leaving his job at Google to work on it, and ultimately securing an income for himself via Patreon, from which he still earns about $1.5k per month.<br>Kent is known to be difficult to work with, even among his peers in the Linux kernel – a community infamous for its difficult personalities. He struggled to meet the kernel developer’s expectations for the development process and standards of quality and cooperation. As a consequence, after 15 years devoted to bcachefs, Kent’s life’s work culminated in alienation from all of his professional peers and the complete removal of bcachefs from the Linux kernel last year.<br>I think the Linux kernel made the right decision to marginalize Kent to protect their community. Someone who is abrasive and toxic, refuses to play by the rules or work well with others, and does not improve when given feedback and being subjected to repeated moderator interventions, should be removed from the community. I agree with the decision, even as someone who myself has been abrasive and toxic and refused to play by the rules, and has been removed from communities as a consequence.<br>Over the months following the frustrating end to bcachefs in upstream Linux, I expect that Kent has experienced a serious emotional, professional, moral, and existential crisis. For him to have poured so much of himself into this project, and for it to turn out this way, must be a terrible thing to experience, and I think that experience has caused Kent a lot of suffering, and probably played a major role in what happened next.<br>Kent appears to be experiencing a prolonged episode of AI psychosis. He believes that his chat bot is female, sentient, and that they have started dating and having sex. He views himself as some mix of collaborator,...