Agreed. I can't even find examples of transgressions. It's not sexist and homophobic to perform software development, so why can't she just ignore any of those comments or subtexts? She harps on about lack of professionalism but she can't raise the bar for herself?
> Life would certainly be easier in some situations if humans were this rational. However I don't think they are.
In this case you say, "How much does it really matter that Linus is being a huge asshole to me? Is this really something I should be ashamed about? Do I really care that much? Is this going to have any effect long term?" and so on. And perhaps most importantly, you remember the positive things that counterbalance the negatives.
It doesn't take a genius. Humans are certainly "rational enough" to do this.
This is the same technique used by/promoted by cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy.
A person who never learns to do this effectively is going to be at the mercy of random emotions their entire life.
There's a huge difference between being "at the mercy of random emotions their entire life" and deciding that staying in the situation you're in just isn't worth it anymore. People make that decision all the time, and have different thresholds for it. I don't understand the hostility towards Sarah's decision in the thread.
> There's a huge difference between being "at the mercy of random emotions their entire life" and deciding that staying in the situation you're in just isn't worth it anymore.
Right. We weren't specifically taking about Sarah Sharp any more at the point in the conversation that I said that.
I would not want to stay in a genuinely hostile work environment, and I would leave.
That said, I doubt the LKML is actually a genuinely hostile work environment. The people on LKML do not genuinely wish others harm or genuinely despise them. They just have a culture of being confrontational, harsh, and direct, sometimes with exaggeration, and it works.
That is something that Sarah Sharp could not (or wasn't willing to) adapt to, by her own admission.
Conversely, there should be no expectation that the community of Linux developers is going to adapt to Sarah Sharp. Nor should they---what they have works very well.
> Conversely, there should be no expectation that the community of Linux developers is going to adapt to Sarah Sharp. Nor should they---what they have works very well.
I hope we can agree, though, that she can't be blamed for trying. I really don't get the hostility to that (not from you).
I caught an earlier edit of this comment, and I think it may have incidentally demonstrated (shall we say) a focus on blunt honesty that resonated with the description in the article. I've gone back and forth about posting about the edit, but it seemed germane to discussions of possible communications issues experienced by the subject of the article.
In Germany we have the term "Empöreria" for people who have nothing better to do than complain about "bad culture" just for the sake of complaining.
In the case of the Linux kernel, well, the culture seems to work out just fine - the kernel is pretty much a solid piece of technology and used in literally billions, if not trillions, of devices. So why change if it is not needed?
edit: Downvotes, just because I'm not following the radfem ideology? Please either explain your downvotes or fuck off, thank you very much...
edit 2: oh, more downvotes? Looks like I hit an uncomfortable core of truth, huh? <3
You're being downvoted because it's not "just fine" to verbally abuse and harass people. This has nothing to do with complaining for the sake of complaining, this is about not wanting to work in a hostile environment.
And forces otherwise useful people to leave, and intimidates first-time contributors who might not be completely up to snuff yet. Is the rudeness worth the trade-off? It's an open question.
Well, it's known for decades that the culture on LKML isn't exactly newbie-friendly.
I believe that keeping newbies (which most often have no idea about how much security is required in kernel code) off is actually valuable in the kernel - just imagine what sloppy coding can cause on millions of devices, or actually, see it happening right now on routers and Samsung smartphones.
There's a reason why lots of Android driver stuff is not in mainline Linux, and the biggest reason is that most of the code shipped by the manufacturers is utter crap which Linus would tear apart in seconds, not to mention security experts or actual blackhats using said crap code to own devices.
But isn't that also the point? A combative culture would intimidate people who aren't up to snuff yet. The people contributing are more likely to be those who are confident enough in their abilities to know they don't deserve any of the community's scorn.
You are causing cognitive dissonance in people that have bought into "diversity/inclusiveness/feeling safe is the best thing in the world" ideology and language by showing them that they are optional and not that important. They feel discomforted, so express their frustration by downvoting you.
Edit: Got a downvote brigade that trawled my old posts. Thank you people.
We all see how well "feeling safe is the best thing in the world" turned out in the end.
Helicopter parents raising kids which go on whining to the cops for teachers giving bad grades instead of sitting on their asses and learning... kids which are not able to deal with frustration or roadblocks because they never learned to...
I'd just disagree with the "diversity/inclusiveness" part - for me, I don't care if you're straight, bi, homo, trans or whatever, the only thing I care about is the quality of your code. And I won't refrain from calling bullshit when I see bullshit - and I don't expect that people restrict themselves from judging my code based on my skin color or whatever.
>In Germany we have the term "Empöreria" for people who have nothing better to do than complain about "bad culture" just for the sake of complaining.
Not really. Only some Germans use the term. And as far as I understand Sarah Sharp didn't "complain for the sake of complaining", she tried for several years to improve things.
P.S: There is no "radfem ideology". Radical feminism is as diverse as any other strand of feminism. Also this is not about feminism, but about treating other humans with a minimum of respect.
Why did you decide to use the biased word "improve" instead of the neutral word "change"? She tried to change things. Whether it would have improved things or not is pure conjecture.
How is "improve" biased? Are you questioning her motivation to improve the situation? Whether you agree with her goals or not, improve is the correct word to use.
from what I understand she complains about the rudeness of the comments. comments that she wouldnt have gotten if her work was perfect.
I would LOVE to have such comments from competent and knowledgeable people about my work. I don't care about them being rude if they are right. work is not like disneyland.
We're not talking about a mobile app running in layers of sandboxes. We're talking about kernel space code, the most sensitive area in computing. And it's shipped to literally billions of devices, many of them not updated even once in their lifetime.
If it takes a couple devs leaving in order to maintain security for the inarguably most shipped piece of software, be it.
I know I'm by no means a perfect coder, so I leave my fingers off kernel code. With kernel code, I carry responsibility, and part of acting responsibly is leaving my hands off stuff I don't understand!
Do you mean those who fail to <perfectly live up to coding standards, every single time>?
Or is there a tolerance level for imperfectly meeting standards, below which it is not necessary to exclude?
I mean, you could, I suppose, require that submissions all include a coq proof of correctness (and of meeting standards), and then you wouldn't have to respond to submissions not meeting standards at all; any that didn't just wouldn't go through.
Perfect sure not - but I highly doubt Linux would be as widespread as it is if code quality hadn't been priority even above the "Never break userspace" doctrine.
Nice!!! Finally!!! I'm so happy. I'm going out with all my other Linux friends and having a little smorgasvine this evening. We all knew the day would come, it's just wonderful that it's here now. Thank you Sarah!
I strongly empathize with this decision, and I think it's unfortunate to lose a valuable developer because many people feel a lack of basic politeness is a virtue.
It is a hard problem to solve, and the open source model greatly aggravates the problem. Within an open source project, no one is accountable for their actions, by design. This ends up meaning you can say whatever hurtful things you want, and unless you really cross a line, most people except for the target of the attack will ignore it. If you haven't been the target of such frequent negative reinforcement, it's easy to tell others to "shake it off" and learn from the experience. And maybe you can do that a handful of times. But it really drags to have the work you put a lot of effort into described as crap and yourself physically threatened for having dared to bother someone else with it. Eventually, you're not going to want to work on it anymore.
The reason it's a hard problem to solve, though, is that sometimes you do get crap code, or bad community members, and you need a mechanism for dealing with that, too. Open source means you effectively can't "fire" anyone from the project. The best you could do is ban them from all of the project communication channels, or make it extremely clear that they're not welcome, and well now you're back to negativity. On a project the size of the kernel, where do you draw the line?
I guess if your attitude is "software uber alles" then hounding and insulting submitters that aren't up to standard seems like a legitimate way to improve your product. But if you're more concerned about creating a welcoming and diverse development environment, then it's time to lighten up and dial down the vitriol. Those goals are at odds, and a balance needs to be found. Sharp's departure might be a sign that the current balance is wrong.
I think hounding and insulting Linus does comes at least a bit from self protection. I can just assume the amount of wacky ideas he might get on daily basis, that would have little or no value in the product. Being aggressive about low quality ideas is to limit the input that is wasting his time. And to end the discussion and not to waste more time on explaining why he doesn't want to consider that any longer than he already has.
Just trying to understand why he behaves as he does.
I'm always surprised to read about how awful the linux community sounds, given how great the product is.
Does anyone familiar with the psych literature know if Linus' behavior here might be causal of quality? Abrasiveness feels like it might cause conformity[1] effects or similar, which sounds like poison for a tech project... but then again, some of the best software I've seen has come from "proving someone wrong on the internet" so maybe it depends on the type of person?
To me it's always seemed strange how there's an expectation that iconic leaders could have achieved all they achieved while being nice, polite, gentle, etc.
You see it a lot when Steve Jobs is discussed - as though he could have been as docile and friendly as Woz and still accomplished all the same things.
The truth is that the truly exceptional achievers are typically a-holes to deal with. Their uncompromising attitudes and relentless techniques for getting what they want rub many people the wrong way.
Personally, I don't have to be good friends with these people or approve of how they interact with others in order to appreciate their contributions to technology and society in general.
I'm always surprised to read about how awful the linux community sounds, given how great the product is.
Digging into the psych here is a wild goose chase because you're starting without a useful impression of what the kernel community is like. Unless you're already a kernel dev, you only hear about kernel maintenance if the drama blows up big enough to wind up in your periphery.
The kernel community is about work, it's generally way too fucking boring for anyone other than Jon Corbet to report on. If you want to analyze the kernel culture, then the things that do show up on your radar are just anchoring your assumptions. Even if they turn out to be right, it's still bad craftsmanship to extrapolate from them alone.
I see where she is coming from. My first (and last) foray into the Linux community was ~2003 in high school. I decided that I was going to try and use Linux for "real stuff" - which implied internet access. At the time I used my smart phone as an EDGE modem which didn't work in Linux. After hours of switching dual-booting between Linux and Windows I had devised a 1-liner that would detect the PCI vendor/id by diffing some device listing with the device plugged in vs. not plugged in. It would then insert the information into <some file>.
I approached the IRC room for the distro I was using (this time from within Linux!), asked for a wiki or some website where they would recommend I post the quick-fix and got a disproportionate aggressive response from a few of the participants.
A few weeks later my brother got me a friends-and-family license for Visual Studio and I've been developing on Windows ever since - I found people always appreciated contribution (ironic) no matter how insignificant, and would give far friendlier (as a relative term) advice on how to fix problems with the contributions.
I praise Linus and the Linux community in general for their bluntness and honesty, but I don't think being honest requires being nasty to high school children.
Edit: I strongly recommend having a look at the Contributor Covenant[1]. It has some great guidelines for ensuring that any misguided contributions are guided toward success in a friendly manner.
Although unfortunate, your experience doesn't seem to be directly related to the community that Sharp is experiencing problems with. She is talking about working with Linux-the-kernel, not a particular distribution of GNU/Linux. What I mean to say is that "the Linux community" in this case refers to kernel hackers, not to Debian, Ubuntu, or whatever other distro maintainers. There are different attitudes and factions within those larger communities.
I also find a bit of a contradiction between you praising bluntness and honesty while at the same wishing for not being nasty to high school children. It is kind of impossible to have both. I would prefer if people were cautious, not blunt.
Sometimes a contribution simply cannot be salvaged, calling the person an idiot has chance going to chase them away resulting in a net loss. "Sorry to make you try this again, here is a more appropriate approach" could result in a usable contribution and possibly future higher-quality contributions from that same person - a net gain.
That line of thought indicates that being nice is the most logical "contributor architecture" choice. Why do we have all these guidelines about how to deal with code, yet none about how to deal with people? It's insane.
Re: the Linux/distro split. It's true, an IRC room for a distro is not the Linux kernel group - however, it's not a vast stretch of the imagination to conclude that they learned that attitude from the kernel group.
"Please feel free to ask..." does not sound "blunt" to me. It sounds cautious. It's positive. It gives indication of what to do next. Read this, ask questions. It makes people feel invited to do more. It could be improved a little, with hints of what part to read or how to improve it, but it's adequate.
"Your contribution is inadequate. Try again." That's blunt. For one, it's purely negative. It doesn't say what to do instead, only that something wrong was done. It makes people feel like there's no hope for them to do it right.
How do you say, "Please don't send any more patches" in a way which isn't hostile, and what is the point? Rejection is fundamentally hostile, no matter how you dress it up.
Let's try it:
"I, speaking not only for myself, would be most grateful if, at least for a period of some number of years during which your already considerable skills continue to attain even greater heights of excellence, you might, as kindly as you have done here, bestow the favor of your well-considered patches upon some other open source software project. Should you be so obliging as to accommodate our wishes in this matter, you shall be rewarded with no less than a half pound sack of jelly babies, delivered to your place of residence by overnight courier."
Now that I look at it, though, not bad! Would it kill those kernel developers to use this friendly template?
Hostility is not avoidable in human interactions; the British have off-the-shelf reusable solutions that satisfy everyone involved with reasonable compromise.
Not to nitpick, but it is perfectly possible to be honest with someone without coming across as hostile. There may be cases where being blunt and honest might be difficult without coming across as rude, but if the default honest behavior is just to come across as hostile and vile there's probably something wrong with the individuals in question.
I think this is a good example of a rant that doesn't come across as hostile, a response to the question "RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags": http://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454
Unfortunately, a lot of these kernel developers have day jobs.
I was recently working with a particular hardware module from a certain company. Their lead technical support person was also helping develop the ARM side of the kernel and merge their drivers into the tree.
The awful technical interactions and pretty much the complete lack of patience and empathy for a customer, made the whole thing a nightmare. Eventually I lobbied, and got, our company to drop them as a vendor and move to a competitor. That one developer created -$1,000,000 in annual revenue for the vendor.
Since this was the business model this company deemed acceptable, I figured it was completely acceptable to do it in return. When all you receive to your questions is "RTFM, idiot", that's a punishment in my opinion...not a correction. And I'm the one holding the million dollar purchase order in my hand.
I could not (and would not) waste development time trying to reeducate this person into being a better customer support person. That's not my job - it's theirs. Sometimes you need to whack someone on the head with a 2x4 before they get the message.
> it is perfectly possible to be honest with someone without coming across as hostile
Yes, it is possible: objectively. However, there exist people with whom you cannot be honest whatsoever without coming across as hostile to them. (Maybe via heaps of sugar-coated language, interspersed with all sorts of reassuring hedges.)
I totally get what you mean but that isn't really the issue here. While over-sensitivity is often an honest worry plenty of people have to needlessly worry about when trying to criticize if it isn't sparkled with numerous reassurances, the problem with the examples I've seen are to paraphrase, objectively hostile.
True, but I read OC's anecdote as an interpolation of what might occur since distros and kernel communities have similarities. The very first time I got a RTFM response was in one distro IRC channel (which probably was not the same that OC's)
I am excessively honest, to a fault. It makes me fond of the movie line "I am too truthful to be good."
I am also equally fond of a sentiment I read somewhere that "Those who love brutal honestly love brutality more than honesty."
Real honesty reveals the genuine feelings beneath the PC surface. Those feelings can include genuine respect, caring, esteem, etc. It in no way is required to be cruel. If honesty involves nastiness, it tells you something about the person being "honest" in that way.
Granted, it can be hard to tell the difference at first blush, as it certainly isn't PC to be so honest.
Typically I've found IRC to be the worst subsections of any community[1], be that a Linux distro's official channel, programming language specific channels or anything else.
That's not to say that I don't like IRC, quite the opposite. But like with Redit, you'll often meet few bored and outspoken individuals that will taunt you. But once you look past those trolls, you can usually still find a real depth and friendliness to a community. Sadly that sometimes requires interacting with said community via other mediums or portals.
[1] excluding YouTube's comments section. But that's a whole other level of hell.
There is no linkage between your anecdote and the linux kernel development community.
This could just as well have been posted in a discussion about: IRC culture, your distro community, internet culture or anything else.
Unrelated to your post: When you live and work intimately with people you know on a public mailing list it you will have friction. There are way to many people self inserting themselves as "victims" in online conversations without any knowledge about the relationship between the conversation partners.
As somebody who provides support to the Ubuntu community (and helps manage one of the largest Linux support sites), I feel your brief experience with a few grumpy old tramps in an IRC channel —over a decade ago— is not reflective of what we currently do. We've moved long way since then.
And your experience is certainly not reflective of anything in the article, which is about Kernel developers. The LKML is its whole own world with its own set of problems (mostly volume and competence related) and very few downstream communities model themselves on it.
For example, Ubuntu and Ask Ubuntu both require their community members to follow the Ubuntu Code of Conduct[1] if they want to remain part of the community. That codifies being respectful into everyday tasks.
Edit: That's not to say that LKML is fine as is. It needs to retain developers and many don't enjoy being abused by seniors... It just has very little to do with your comment.
> A few weeks later my brother got me a friends-and-family license for Visual Studio and I've been developing on Windows ever since - I found people always appreciated contribution (ironic) no matter how insignificant, and would give far friendlier (as a relative term) advice on how to fix problems with the contributions.
Interesting. What have you contributed to Windows and Visual Studio? (If you don't mind.)
Welcome to IRC. Sadly any highly visible channel will have a number of hanger-ons that are simply there to troll for their own levity. Trying to get them removed is likely just going to spur them into being mean (hijacking channel control etc). Quite possibly most of the longterm people of the channel had them on mute.
And to paraphrase a local "saying": tween is a mentality, not an age.
The Linux kernel development culture has always been like this, so it is a bit strange that foul language using bunch of developers turning out to be foul language using bunch of developers is a shock for someone. It suits for some and sure will annoy/scare some. As far as I know bashing is not about the person, but it is about the quality of idea or implementation.
Is it right? Maybe. Maybe not.
Of course there is this line, where some people are doing it in professional context and are expecting it to be... professional. In every level. That I find a false expectation, as LKML and this "terrible" culture has a public track record of a few decades. Of course not everyone can choose what kind of work they do and which projects they attend to, but someone working in IT corporations probably isn't one of those unfortunates.
I don't find it amusing, that someone's feelings have been hurt. But on the other hand I find it a viable alternative for all that wasted time on correctness, when someone's idea or implementation is terrible, but no-one can tell it directly, that this really is crap.
I don't have much experience with the Linux community, but it seems there should be a difference between telling someone their idea or implementation is terrible and telling them that they are terrible.
It is possible to give honest, direct feedback without personally attacking someone, and I don't see why it would be necessary or desirable to include personal attacks in a technical discussion.
If an idea is technically bad, it should be sufficient to point out the technical flaws without defaming the character of the contributor.
Yes, I don't argue with that. But, saying "this dual locking implementation we're looking at is definitely written by a retard"* is still 99% more about the quality of the implementation than about the person who did it.
No its not. There is no constructive criticism in that comment, it was 100% abusive. And what did you gain by calling someone a "retard"?
The entire reason for saying that was to make the commenter look good by making someone else look bad.
Torvalds, ironically, doesn't encourage this sort of thing. Unfortunately, he is also an offender - the "shut the fuck up Mauro" incident comes to mind.
What specifically could I action from that one sentence? All it told me was it was a double-locking implementation. But if I was the original developer, I'd know that.
Sure, but it's also extremely unhelpful. I'm sure it makes the person writing it feel superior, but it doesn't actually convey any useful information.
"this dual locking implementation creates a race condition under circumstances X, Y, and Z" would be more accurate and probably more successful in achieving the purported goal of having a working dual locking implementation.
Still direct, but addresses the technical problem without insulting the contributor.
It's a false dichotomy. You can give honest reviews and tell people they're wasting their time without resorting to "Shut up, Mauro. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously."
Wow seeing a clear example yourself really just gets the picture across. I was giving some credence to the fact that these people were just blunt to each other, but this is just toxic and hostile. If it were just blunt honesty their excuses might be far more credible.
Don't read that one email, read the whole exchange.
Also, one rule Torvalds holds kernel development to is "do not break user space". If a kernel patch exposes an API, the behavior of said API is fixed from that point onwards.
If a subsequent patch change the behavior, thus causing something in user space to error out, said patch is broken.
All this should be known to the person Torvalds is talking to, having doing this for some time. Yet when the issue is pointed out, he tries to pass the blame to user space.
I read it, and I see that Linus was right as usual: The patch in question did break userspace and did behave in ways POSIX says the kernel shouldn't ever do.
It's a pity that some others have adopted Linus' loudness without also adopting his habits of grasping the issue and being right. Linus says "don't break the posix rules%@#$!$@#$", never "do as I prefer$#@$@#$!@#$". There's a big, big difference.
What would be the general level of frustration if something
fundamental was broken?
More importantly, how frustrating it is to get back to the same kinds of problems?
(I remember a similar issue with ACPI where the kernel got into a 'fix/break/fix' loop until they decided to change the
approach and not accept breakages anymore)
This is totally not about 'shock' and 'hurt feelings'. This is about active contributors to core kernel functionality being continually alienated and harassed by their colleagues.
> The Linux kernel development culture has always been like this, so it is a bit strange that foul language using bunch of developers turning out to be foul language using bunch of developers is a shock for someone. It suits for some and sure will annoy/scare some. As far as I know bashing is not about the person, but it is about the quality of idea or implementation.
I'm not sure where this is coming from. Sarah's grievance is explicitly about people-bashing, not blunt technical criticism. And there's no hint of surprise here... She's been around quite a while, she saw what the community was like and tried to make things better, and eventually found it to be futile and draining, so she's leaving.
Can you expand on that? Nobody would argue that it isn't hard to change the status quo, so I assume that's not all you're saying. You seem to be hinting that you think what she was trying to do was wrong, but I'd rather you explain why (or if) you feel that way than have me put words in your mouth.
You're describing how to maintain the status quo (which is simpler than any other option, indeed). Changing the behaviour of communities is instead how progress works (well, also regression, but I hope you got the point).
"You god damned idiot, how could you write something so full of logic errors, you should have been aborted".
vs
"I disagree. In paragraph 3 you state X, but in paragraph 4 you contradict yourself with Y...."
The latter is direct, but not personal, and fully communicates the point. It is also shorter, and thus less of a time waste than typing out insults.
There is absolutely nothing stopping the Linux community from being direct, for evaluating technical solutions. You can do all of that without being vicious and being personal.
The narrative that a large segment of society consists of abusers (racist, misogynists, sexists, etc) and that it's a serious problem that needs to be dealt with, when the reality is that these people make up a very small percentage of society.
Part of being free is having the freedom to make bad decisions.
> Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it
> was a good idea to read things ONE FCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system
> calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fck does
> idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering
> that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?
No, it's not accurate at all. It's embellished to make it sound much worse than it is. It's inaccurate and might as well be slander. If this is what you have to resort to to get people on your side, what does that say about your side?
You're crazy if you think the paraphrasing was less offensive than the actual quote.
I actually support Linus' (and the entire kernel team's) decision to be the way they are. You're discrediting his wit by saying the OPs paraphrase was more insulting.
His term was aimed generically, the paraphrasing made it seem directed at a specific person at the other end of the exchange.
So far the only times i have seen an email where Torvalds direct it at an individual, it is because he already tried the calm and detailed approach and the person still didn't see the problem.
You're right, he didn't say aborted. He said retroactively aborted, which would be murdered if I'm not mistaken.
Please show me the technical benefits that arise from calling for someone to be put in front of a firing squad for daring to waste the code maintainers precious time, or just walk away with whatever shred of dignity you have left.
Fair. But the takeaway I think would be that these people seem to think making an error in software (which I think sets a new bar for FirstWorldProblems) is grounds for someone to be removed from life, which is kind of amazing since even people who drive drunk are allowed to continue living.
No, I think in this (being a situation of slang language on an email list), the Urban Dictionary can be of help: "a legal medical procedure for the taking of ones life regardless of their age."
>It is also shorter, and thus less of a time waste than typing out insults.
It's fewer words, but more work. If you read a patch/pull-request and it's generally no good it is going to take a while to formulate a detailed response on why you're wrong and a possible fix. At this point you might as well fix the code yourself.
Sure you solution is more polite, helpful, and over all more productive. On the other hand random Linux develop X never promised to teach you kernel programming and given that just wasted his time with your bad code he/she might but be all that motivated to help you out.
Honestly I don't care how the Linux developers communicate, that's their business. There's of cause an issue with developers hired to do commercial Linux development, but that's something those companies need to work out, they aren't forced to use or develop on the Linux kernel.
>> Then Linus made a joke about Greg being big and squishing people
> Not fucking cool. Violence, whether it be physical intimidation, verbal threats or verbal abuse is not acceptable. Keep it professional on the mailing lists.
WHAT?
Thanks for injecting some actual facts into this. I was actually hoodwinked by that blogpost into thinking something was wrong here, but upon reading the actual conversation it's clear that this Sarah started any and all problems herself. Well, there goes my sympathy in this case.
Goes to show you should never believe anything without actually checking the source.
She created a false narrative that Linus was encouraging "physical intimidation and violence". She purposefully took a joke out of context to push her agenda. She seems to be trying to create a situation where it impossible to disagree with her, else you're some kind of "abuser", whether it be a racist or misogynist. Why? I don't know but I wouldn't be surprised if she was seeking a position of power where she could govern the moral rules over a large project and assimilate everyone into her monoculture by calling everyone who disobeyed her rules racist or sexist or what-have-you.
Whoah... Step back a bit. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the joke was taken out of context. Going from that to knowing what her motivations are is a huge stretch. Isn't it possible that she sincerely believed (even if you disagree) that changes were necessary and would be beneficial?
The stuff you mentioned above is a really flimsy basis for accusing her of an agenda of trying to impose a monoculture, however you may couch that accusation in words like "seems to be trying" and "I don't know but I wouldn't be surprised if".
It's unfortunate that her response lists physical intimidation before verbal abuse, but I don't think she "started any and all problems herself." Her point is still valid.
You're extrapolating from a single email. Linus and many other LKML devs frequently berate and belittle contributors with personal attacks. They're not hard to find, in fact he's famous for them. Sharp was responding to the long history of contributor abuse, and it happened to be in that particular series of emails.
Famous in the same way that 24/7 news can turn a anthill into a mountain.
If you were to read through Torvalds complete LKML log, likely a very small percentage would be harsh. And they in turn would be preceded by someone that should know better violating how kernel development is supposed to be done.
Torvalds have asfaik never woken up, put on his slippers, rolled a die, and started going after someone without cause.
Good riddance. Her blog indicates that she was trying to change an entire community's behavior so she didn't have to be offended. That's just as oppressive as the people slinging around insults.
Some people work better in harsh environments and some work better under environments where everyone's feelings are taken into account and you kill any behavior that could offend anyone.
The kernel dev community is not a place that censors rudeness. If you don't have the ability to read mean words, it's not a community for you.
this is kind of the problem, though. surely you can see there's a difference between bluntness or directness and meanness or cruelty? we can have the former without the latter.
It sounds like she likes working on the kernel but she'd like to do with without hostility/rudeness/insults. So she took the first step that everybody takes which is to complain or try to discourage behavior they don't like. Now she's taking the step of leaving. How is she being oppressive again?
Sadly the work environment she seem to pine for is the sort where you have ass-kissing, passive-aggressiveness, and politics get ahead of actual usable results.
Are you suggesting that not wanted someone to call for you to be "retroactively aborted" is a slippery slope that leads to ass-kissing, passive-aggressiveness and politically motivated culture rather than results motivated culture?
So the only people who can now work on the Linux kernel are rude, abusive and arrogant people?
That cuts out a major part of the population. I think I'd be very hesitant at submitting a patch or contributing in any way. Heavens, I might make a mistake!
If you're trying to attract engineering talent, you need to stop pushing them away. Also, she wasn't criticizing this from outside - she was a maintainer of part of the USB subsystem, so it was absolutely her community too.
An inclusive community could accommodate a range of "personalities". Apparently, only one kind of person can handle the toxic LKML environment, and that's surely bad for the long-term viability of the project. At this point a fork seems inevitable. e.g. https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38136.html
People fork the kernel all of the time. It won't be relevant though because any good patches will be cherry picked to the main trunk. Only garbage patches attract the rudeness on the LKML. So a fork that's only difference is garbage included will not likely gain a lot of traction.
Can I just say, the comments on this article are amazing. Guys drawing from the experiences of people like Joel Schumacher or the Fortune 500 men. You're writing drivers you nitwits, and based on my experiences with the graphics drivers in linux, you have a long damn way to go.
Just sounds like a bunch of those "rockstar" programmers that we all dread working with, the ones who walk into your office and tell you half your codebase needs to be rewritten to use Node.js or whatever trendy thing is up at the time.
Honestly, looks like a whole bunch of guys who never got around to growing up. If an idea is that terrible as to warrant that level of criticism, turning it into personal attacks both trivializes the actual criticism you're giving and should be completely unnecessary. As they said in a Cracked video...people this obsessed with winning are usually losing in their natural state.
it's "basic human decency" if you're in favor and "political correctness" if you're not. Both refer to an external virtue/sin.
This lkml conflict would be addressed with statistics, that is: It would be so nice if we could give evidence that the culture improves the kernel's quality, or hurts it.
I have no opinion on whether it is or isn't "just basic human decency" or "the insidious threat of political correctness." I do think that if the kernel "succeeds" (for whatever definition of that) that we'll retroactively decide we defended against political correctness. And vice versa.
I think you have it backwards: people will believe that the Linux kernel is better than it would be without the cultural elements that are complained of if they believe the complaints are excessive political correctness, and believe that it is worse than it otherwise would be if they believe the complaints are about basic human decency.
In my over 30 years of BBS, mailing list and Usenet experience, the pattern I've observed that the ones complaining about the behavior of others are almost invariably annoying personae non gratae. Based on that experience, before digging into any facts here, I'm already predisposed to a suspicion that this person might be a poor developer who is bad for Linux, and the hostility is basically doing its intended job.
That is to say, if you're the target of hostility, it's likely because you've been written off by the community as an imbecile or some such.
Not saying this is the case here, but I'd avoid making big public displays of complaining about forum behavior, and "exit drama" exactly for the reason of attracting such suspicion on myself.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 226 ms ] threadWhy should she have to?
Thinking about what they are saying in an appropriate way will lead to an appropriate emotional response.
If you can't do that, and you are feeling inappropriate emotions, the only other option you have is to just quit. Which is what she did.
It isn't even a male vs. female thing. Men are constantly assholes to other men.
Life would certainly be easier in some situations if humans were this rational. However I don't think they are.
FWIW I also don't think it has anything to do with people's (real or perceived) gender.
In this case you say, "How much does it really matter that Linus is being a huge asshole to me? Is this really something I should be ashamed about? Do I really care that much? Is this going to have any effect long term?" and so on. And perhaps most importantly, you remember the positive things that counterbalance the negatives.
It doesn't take a genius. Humans are certainly "rational enough" to do this.
This is the same technique used by/promoted by cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy.
A person who never learns to do this effectively is going to be at the mercy of random emotions their entire life.
Right. We weren't specifically taking about Sarah Sharp any more at the point in the conversation that I said that.
I would not want to stay in a genuinely hostile work environment, and I would leave.
That said, I doubt the LKML is actually a genuinely hostile work environment. The people on LKML do not genuinely wish others harm or genuinely despise them. They just have a culture of being confrontational, harsh, and direct, sometimes with exaggeration, and it works.
That is something that Sarah Sharp could not (or wasn't willing to) adapt to, by her own admission.
Conversely, there should be no expectation that the community of Linux developers is going to adapt to Sarah Sharp. Nor should they---what they have works very well.
> Conversely, there should be no expectation that the community of Linux developers is going to adapt to Sarah Sharp. Nor should they---what they have works very well.
I hope we can agree, though, that she can't be blamed for trying. I really don't get the hostility to that (not from you).
It's just selfish and rude, and yet Linus is called that when when calls these people out.
In the case of the Linux kernel, well, the culture seems to work out just fine - the kernel is pretty much a solid piece of technology and used in literally billions, if not trillions, of devices. So why change if it is not needed?
edit: Downvotes, just because I'm not following the radfem ideology? Please either explain your downvotes or fuck off, thank you very much...
edit 2: oh, more downvotes? Looks like I hit an uncomfortable core of truth, huh? <3
Might be it appears hostile, but it forces people to submit quality code.
I believe that keeping newbies (which most often have no idea about how much security is required in kernel code) off is actually valuable in the kernel - just imagine what sloppy coding can cause on millions of devices, or actually, see it happening right now on routers and Samsung smartphones.
There's a reason why lots of Android driver stuff is not in mainline Linux, and the biggest reason is that most of the code shipped by the manufacturers is utter crap which Linus would tear apart in seconds, not to mention security experts or actual blackhats using said crap code to own devices.
Edit: Got a downvote brigade that trawled my old posts. Thank you people.
Helicopter parents raising kids which go on whining to the cops for teachers giving bad grades instead of sitting on their asses and learning... kids which are not able to deal with frustration or roadblocks because they never learned to...
I'd just disagree with the "diversity/inclusiveness" part - for me, I don't care if you're straight, bi, homo, trans or whatever, the only thing I care about is the quality of your code. And I won't refrain from calling bullshit when I see bullshit - and I don't expect that people restrict themselves from judging my code based on my skin color or whatever.
Not really. Only some Germans use the term. And as far as I understand Sarah Sharp didn't "complain for the sake of complaining", she tried for several years to improve things.
P.S: There is no "radfem ideology". Radical feminism is as diverse as any other strand of feminism. Also this is not about feminism, but about treating other humans with a minimum of respect.
Why did you decide to use the biased word "improve" instead of the neutral word "change"? She tried to change things. Whether it would have improved things or not is pure conjecture.
I would LOVE to have such comments from competent and knowledgeable people about my work. I don't care about them being rude if they are right. work is not like disneyland.
If it takes a couple devs leaving in order to maintain security for the inarguably most shipped piece of software, be it.
I know I'm by no means a perfect coder, so I leave my fingers off kernel code. With kernel code, I carry responsibility, and part of acting responsibly is leaving my hands off stuff I don't understand!
Or is there a tolerance level for imperfectly meeting standards, below which it is not necessary to exclude?
I mean, you could, I suppose, require that submissions all include a coq proof of correctness (and of meeting standards), and then you wouldn't have to respond to submissions not meeting standards at all; any that didn't just wouldn't go through.
(Angle brackets meant to reduce ambiguity)
Do you feel the Linux kernel is perfect by any metric?
And what made you think that the code written by Sharp wasn't high quality?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10331891
> within a developer culture that required overworked maintainers to be rude and brusque in order to get the job done
And I guess that's the root cause of it
It is a hard problem to solve, and the open source model greatly aggravates the problem. Within an open source project, no one is accountable for their actions, by design. This ends up meaning you can say whatever hurtful things you want, and unless you really cross a line, most people except for the target of the attack will ignore it. If you haven't been the target of such frequent negative reinforcement, it's easy to tell others to "shake it off" and learn from the experience. And maybe you can do that a handful of times. But it really drags to have the work you put a lot of effort into described as crap and yourself physically threatened for having dared to bother someone else with it. Eventually, you're not going to want to work on it anymore.
The reason it's a hard problem to solve, though, is that sometimes you do get crap code, or bad community members, and you need a mechanism for dealing with that, too. Open source means you effectively can't "fire" anyone from the project. The best you could do is ban them from all of the project communication channels, or make it extremely clear that they're not welcome, and well now you're back to negativity. On a project the size of the kernel, where do you draw the line?
I guess if your attitude is "software uber alles" then hounding and insulting submitters that aren't up to standard seems like a legitimate way to improve your product. But if you're more concerned about creating a welcoming and diverse development environment, then it's time to lighten up and dial down the vitriol. Those goals are at odds, and a balance needs to be found. Sharp's departure might be a sign that the current balance is wrong.
Just trying to understand why he behaves as he does.
It's not that. Rather, it's that they don't feel that basic politeness is a virtue.
Rather than having a different belief than you, they simply lack belief.
Does anyone familiar with the psych literature know if Linus' behavior here might be causal of quality? Abrasiveness feels like it might cause conformity[1] effects or similar, which sounds like poison for a tech project... but then again, some of the best software I've seen has come from "proving someone wrong on the internet" so maybe it depends on the type of person?
Any references would be appreciated.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments
The experiment is so badly constructed http://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html that it is hard to imagine one takes results seriously.
You see it a lot when Steve Jobs is discussed - as though he could have been as docile and friendly as Woz and still accomplished all the same things.
The truth is that the truly exceptional achievers are typically a-holes to deal with. Their uncompromising attitudes and relentless techniques for getting what they want rub many people the wrong way.
Personally, I don't have to be good friends with these people or approve of how they interact with others in order to appreciate their contributions to technology and society in general.
Digging into the psych here is a wild goose chase because you're starting without a useful impression of what the kernel community is like. Unless you're already a kernel dev, you only hear about kernel maintenance if the drama blows up big enough to wind up in your periphery.
The kernel community is about work, it's generally way too fucking boring for anyone other than Jon Corbet to report on. If you want to analyze the kernel culture, then the things that do show up on your radar are just anchoring your assumptions. Even if they turn out to be right, it's still bad craftsmanship to extrapolate from them alone.
I approached the IRC room for the distro I was using (this time from within Linux!), asked for a wiki or some website where they would recommend I post the quick-fix and got a disproportionate aggressive response from a few of the participants.
A few weeks later my brother got me a friends-and-family license for Visual Studio and I've been developing on Windows ever since - I found people always appreciated contribution (ironic) no matter how insignificant, and would give far friendlier (as a relative term) advice on how to fix problems with the contributions.
I praise Linus and the Linux community in general for their bluntness and honesty, but I don't think being honest requires being nasty to high school children.
Edit: I strongly recommend having a look at the Contributor Covenant[1]. It has some great guidelines for ensuring that any misguided contributions are guided toward success in a friendly manner.
[1]: http://contributor-covenant.org/
I also find a bit of a contradiction between you praising bluntness and honesty while at the same wishing for not being nasty to high school children. It is kind of impossible to have both. I would prefer if people were cautious, not blunt.
Sometimes a contribution simply cannot be salvaged, calling the person an idiot has chance going to chase them away resulting in a net loss. "Sorry to make you try this again, here is a more appropriate approach" could result in a usable contribution and possibly future higher-quality contributions from that same person - a net gain.
That line of thought indicates that being nice is the most logical "contributor architecture" choice. Why do we have all these guidelines about how to deal with code, yet none about how to deal with people? It's insane.
Re: the Linux/distro split. It's true, an IRC room for a distro is not the Linux kernel group - however, it's not a vast stretch of the imagination to conclude that they learned that attitude from the kernel group.
"Your contribution does not fit our current guidelines. Please read CONTRIBUTING.md and feel free to ask if you have any further questions."
comes across very differently than something aggressive.
You're telling the contributor that his/her work does not conform to the project's standards without being an asshole.
I don't see where the difficulty of treating other human beings with some respect resides.
"Your contribution is inadequate. Try again." That's blunt. For one, it's purely negative. It doesn't say what to do instead, only that something wrong was done. It makes people feel like there's no hope for them to do it right.
Let's try it:
"I, speaking not only for myself, would be most grateful if, at least for a period of some number of years during which your already considerable skills continue to attain even greater heights of excellence, you might, as kindly as you have done here, bestow the favor of your well-considered patches upon some other open source software project. Should you be so obliging as to accommodate our wishes in this matter, you shall be rewarded with no less than a half pound sack of jelly babies, delivered to your place of residence by overnight courier."
Now that I look at it, though, not bad! Would it kill those kernel developers to use this friendly template?
Hostility is not avoidable in human interactions; the British have off-the-shelf reusable solutions that satisfy everyone involved with reasonable compromise.
I was recently working with a particular hardware module from a certain company. Their lead technical support person was also helping develop the ARM side of the kernel and merge their drivers into the tree.
The awful technical interactions and pretty much the complete lack of patience and empathy for a customer, made the whole thing a nightmare. Eventually I lobbied, and got, our company to drop them as a vendor and move to a competitor. That one developer created -$1,000,000 in annual revenue for the vendor.
I still don't think they realize what happened.
Basically your goal was to punish not to correct?
(Attempting to correct from the outside, the flaws of vendor bureaucracies seldom goes well.)
Since this was the business model this company deemed acceptable, I figured it was completely acceptable to do it in return. When all you receive to your questions is "RTFM, idiot", that's a punishment in my opinion...not a correction. And I'm the one holding the million dollar purchase order in my hand.
I could not (and would not) waste development time trying to reeducate this person into being a better customer support person. That's not my job - it's theirs. Sometimes you need to whack someone on the head with a 2x4 before they get the message.
Yes, it is possible: objectively. However, there exist people with whom you cannot be honest whatsoever without coming across as hostile to them. (Maybe via heaps of sugar-coated language, interspersed with all sorts of reassuring hedges.)
I am also equally fond of a sentiment I read somewhere that "Those who love brutal honestly love brutality more than honesty."
Real honesty reveals the genuine feelings beneath the PC surface. Those feelings can include genuine respect, caring, esteem, etc. It in no way is required to be cruel. If honesty involves nastiness, it tells you something about the person being "honest" in that way.
Granted, it can be hard to tell the difference at first blush, as it certainly isn't PC to be so honest.
That's not to say that I don't like IRC, quite the opposite. But like with Redit, you'll often meet few bored and outspoken individuals that will taunt you. But once you look past those trolls, you can usually still find a real depth and friendliness to a community. Sadly that sometimes requires interacting with said community via other mediums or portals.
[1] excluding YouTube's comments section. But that's a whole other level of hell.
Unrelated to your post: When you live and work intimately with people you know on a public mailing list it you will have friction. There are way to many people self inserting themselves as "victims" in online conversations without any knowledge about the relationship between the conversation partners.
And your experience is certainly not reflective of anything in the article, which is about Kernel developers. The LKML is its whole own world with its own set of problems (mostly volume and competence related) and very few downstream communities model themselves on it.
For example, Ubuntu and Ask Ubuntu both require their community members to follow the Ubuntu Code of Conduct[1] if they want to remain part of the community. That codifies being respectful into everyday tasks.
Edit: That's not to say that LKML is fine as is. It needs to retain developers and many don't enjoy being abused by seniors... It just has very little to do with your comment.
[1] http://www.ubuntu.com/community/conduct
Interesting. What have you contributed to Windows and Visual Studio? (If you don't mind.)
And to paraphrase a local "saying": tween is a mentality, not an age.
Is it right? Maybe. Maybe not.
Of course there is this line, where some people are doing it in professional context and are expecting it to be... professional. In every level. That I find a false expectation, as LKML and this "terrible" culture has a public track record of a few decades. Of course not everyone can choose what kind of work they do and which projects they attend to, but someone working in IT corporations probably isn't one of those unfortunates.
I don't find it amusing, that someone's feelings have been hurt. But on the other hand I find it a viable alternative for all that wasted time on correctness, when someone's idea or implementation is terrible, but no-one can tell it directly, that this really is crap.
It is possible to give honest, direct feedback without personally attacking someone, and I don't see why it would be necessary or desirable to include personal attacks in a technical discussion.
If an idea is technically bad, it should be sufficient to point out the technical flaws without defaming the character of the contributor.
*) quote made up
The entire reason for saying that was to make the commenter look good by making someone else look bad.
Torvalds, ironically, doesn't encourage this sort of thing. Unfortunately, he is also an offender - the "shut the fuck up Mauro" incident comes to mind.
"this dual locking implementation creates a race condition under circumstances X, Y, and Z" would be more accurate and probably more successful in achieving the purported goal of having a working dual locking implementation.
Still direct, but addresses the technical problem without insulting the contributor.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75
Also, one rule Torvalds holds kernel development to is "do not break user space". If a kernel patch exposes an API, the behavior of said API is fixed from that point onwards.
If a subsequent patch change the behavior, thus causing something in user space to error out, said patch is broken.
All this should be known to the person Torvalds is talking to, having doing this for some time. Yet when the issue is pointed out, he tries to pass the blame to user space.
It's a pity that some others have adopted Linus' loudness without also adopting his habits of grasping the issue and being right. Linus says "don't break the posix rules%@#$!$@#$", never "do as I prefer$#@$@#$!@#$". There's a big, big difference.
What would be the general level of frustration if something fundamental was broken?
More importantly, how frustrating it is to get back to the same kinds of problems?
(I remember a similar issue with ACPI where the kernel got into a 'fix/break/fix' loop until they decided to change the approach and not accept breakages anymore)
I'm not sure where this is coming from. Sarah's grievance is explicitly about people-bashing, not blunt technical criticism. And there's no hint of surprise here... She's been around quite a while, she saw what the community was like and tried to make things better, and eventually found it to be futile and draining, so she's leaving.
vs
"I disagree. In paragraph 3 you state X, but in paragraph 4 you contradict yourself with Y...."
The latter is direct, but not personal, and fully communicates the point. It is also shorter, and thus less of a time waste than typing out insults.
There is absolutely nothing stopping the Linux community from being direct, for evaluating technical solutions. You can do all of that without being vicious and being personal.
It's funny that you need to embellish a quote so much to push your political narrative.
Part of being free is having the freedom to make bad decisions.
> Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it > was a good idea to read things ONE FCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system > calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fck does > idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering > that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?
I actually support Linus' (and the entire kernel team's) decision to be the way they are. You're discrediting his wit by saying the OPs paraphrase was more insulting.
So far the only times i have seen an email where Torvalds direct it at an individual, it is because he already tried the calm and detailed approach and the person still didn't see the problem.
Please show me the technical benefits that arise from calling for someone to be put in front of a firing squad for daring to waste the code maintainers precious time, or just walk away with whatever shred of dignity you have left.
Which, could be considered to be murder, if it was possible (I think there is probably only one timeline, but that is beside the point).
But it's not "killing the person now, with e.g. a firing squad".
Not that that makes it better, just a distinction to be made.
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=retroactive+a...
I think the term would make more sense if it meant what I said, but I guess it means however people use it to mean.
Shouldn't it have a word that means "after the fact/event" instead of like "affecting something that happened before"?
Or like, "(age *4 +3)rd trimester"?
Oh well, the way slang meanings arise is strange and inscrutable. Or not really inscrutable, but not understood by me personally.
It's fewer words, but more work. If you read a patch/pull-request and it's generally no good it is going to take a while to formulate a detailed response on why you're wrong and a possible fix. At this point you might as well fix the code yourself.
Sure you solution is more polite, helpful, and over all more productive. On the other hand random Linux develop X never promised to teach you kernel programming and given that just wasted his time with your bad code he/she might but be all that motivated to help you out.
Honestly I don't care how the Linux developers communicate, that's their business. There's of cause an issue with developers hired to do commercial Linux development, but that's something those companies need to work out, they aren't forced to use or develop on the Linux kernel.
vs.
> I'm sorry, I can't accept this patch because it's full of logic errors. Please fix them and resubmit.
Same approximate character count, same message, no coddling or doing someone else's work for them. But also no insults.
> Not fucking cool. Violence, whether it be physical intimidation, verbal threats or verbal abuse is not acceptable. Keep it professional on the mailing lists.
WHAT?
Thanks for injecting some actual facts into this. I was actually hoodwinked by that blogpost into thinking something was wrong here, but upon reading the actual conversation it's clear that this Sarah started any and all problems herself. Well, there goes my sympathy in this case.
Goes to show you should never believe anything without actually checking the source.
How so?
The stuff you mentioned above is a really flimsy basis for accusing her of an agenda of trying to impose a monoculture, however you may couch that accusation in words like "seems to be trying" and "I don't know but I wouldn't be surprised if".
May add some context to the whole thing.
> You may need to learn to shout at people.
That is, after all, the last line before her reply, according to this view of the thread:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/23/107
It's unfortunate that her response lists physical intimidation before verbal abuse, but I don't think she "started any and all problems herself." Her point is still valid.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/19/331
If you were to read through Torvalds complete LKML log, likely a very small percentage would be harsh. And they in turn would be preceded by someone that should know better violating how kernel development is supposed to be done.
Torvalds have asfaik never woken up, put on his slippers, rolled a die, and started going after someone without cause.
Some people work better in harsh environments and some work better under environments where everyone's feelings are taken into account and you kill any behavior that could offend anyone.
The kernel dev community is not a place that censors rudeness. If you don't have the ability to read mean words, it's not a community for you.
As I read it, it seems a tautology: if one seeks change, it seems obvious that the initial condition has to be different than the target one.
Can you clarify?
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/7/80
That cuts out a major part of the population. I think I'd be very hesitant at submitting a patch or contributing in any way. Heavens, I might make a mistake!
The author herself spent years working on the Linux kernel without being a 'rude, abusive and arrogant' person.
However, her exit also shows the requirement of being able to work with 'rude, abusive and arrogant' people.
PS. This is an unspoken requirement of many development positions!
Just sounds like a bunch of those "rockstar" programmers that we all dread working with, the ones who walk into your office and tell you half your codebase needs to be rewritten to use Node.js or whatever trendy thing is up at the time.
Honestly, looks like a whole bunch of guys who never got around to growing up. If an idea is that terrible as to warrant that level of criticism, turning it into personal attacks both trivializes the actual criticism you're giving and should be completely unnecessary. As they said in a Cracked video...people this obsessed with winning are usually losing in their natural state.
This lkml conflict would be addressed with statistics, that is: It would be so nice if we could give evidence that the culture improves the kernel's quality, or hurts it.
I have no opinion on whether it is or isn't "just basic human decency" or "the insidious threat of political correctness." I do think that if the kernel "succeeds" (for whatever definition of that) that we'll retroactively decide we defended against political correctness. And vice versa.
That is to say, if you're the target of hostility, it's likely because you've been written off by the community as an imbecile or some such.
Not saying this is the case here, but I'd avoid making big public displays of complaining about forum behavior, and "exit drama" exactly for the reason of attracting such suspicion on myself.