I've read a few of Linus' rants and been on the fence, but this one does seem to have crossed some sort of line into being unnecessarily abusive, and to add to that, unclear communication. The rewritten version really does emphasise a much better approach. Linus's rant doesn't read like it was written by... a stable person.
I was in full agreement with the article up until this:
>Of the many things I could say about this, I will say just one: sadly, I am certain the reaction to this text would be entirely different were it written by a woman.
What the... where on earth did this come from? Completely irrelevant and not true in my opinion. This issue is about whether it post was abusive, the gender of the poster makes no difference. I'm pretty sure that female Linus (assuming female Linus had accomplished everything real Linus has over her life) would have had a bunch of loyal followers that defended her no matter what she said, and a bunch of people who thought she was out of line.
Does the gender issue really have to be shoehorned into every story?
> Completely irrelevant and not true in my opinion.
Hardly, when talking about brash/abusive behavior in the context of an industry where women are underrepresented, I think it's plenty fine to mention that there might be a connection to be made.
> the gender of the poster makes no difference
Eh, I don't agree. It's well-observed in social sciences that men are given more leeway to be abusive than women are; one example is how often words like "abrasive" or "bossy" come up in performance reports: http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias...
Or just look at our popular media: how many male antiheroes on TV have enough audience to support them vs. women antiheroes? For every Walter White or Doctor House or Tony Soprano, how many unlikeable women are there? Roxane Gay writes about this pretty well. http://www.buzzfeed.com/roxanegay/not-here-to-make-friends-u...
> Does the gender issue really have to be shoehorned into every story?
Per above, I don't think it's "shoehorned." And I think it's fine if we talk about it more than we currently do, because there's plenty to suggest we don't talk about it enough or are insufficiently introspective about it.
It's shoehorned because it's inserting a completely unrelated assertion despite nothing in the slightest pointing to it at all on the rest of the article.
It would have made just about as much sense if they'd written "This would be entirely different had it been written by a black person". But they just had to make it political and race just isn't a hot enough topic in the tech world so they didn't go for that.
It's a pathetic attention grab that sullies an otherwise valid critique.
>Eh, I don't agree. It's well-observed in social sciences that men are given more leeway to be abusive than women are; one example is how often words like "abrasive" or "bossy" come up in performance reports: http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias....
Have they ensured that they are using identical behaviors in this comparison?
If women are socially punished for being abrasive or bossy, you could consider THAT to be a problem. I might consider it a basic human right to use curse words, get angry, and come off as abrasive, and in fact I truly do.
Somewhat relatedly, the supposition some people have that "women" need to be especially protected from teh scary curse words pisses me off. THAT is a gendered prejudice based on Victorian morality or something.
> I might consider it a basic human right to use curse words, get angry, and come off as abrasive, and in fact I truly do.
This is a common error, but you're mixing up the idea that the government shouldn't be allowed to penalize you for your free speech and the idea that no one at all should be able to react to you for using curse words, getting angry, or coming off as abrasive.
If I think you're an asshole, I'm perfectly within my rights to not hire you, not befriend you, make fun of you to other people, not invite you out on camping trips, "accidentally" give you smaller slices of birthday cake at company parties, write internet comments calling you a doofus, etc.
"It's a problem that women are socially punished for being abrasive because I consider being abrasive a basic human right."
It is a basic human right to use curse words, get angry, and come off as abrasive. That fact does not protect you from social punishment if you behave in a way that the people around you don't want to tolerate. Nor should it.
I meant to say if women are especially penalized in an unfair way that hinders them from other basic stuff like career and community. Of course people are free to dislike abrasive styles of talking. But combined with gender discrimination, it becomes a problem. I don't think men should be excessively punished for cursing either, but they generally aren't (in secular societies).
I had the same feeling about the last bit of the article. Drama for no reason. I would be glad if the tech community focused more on tech than on shitstorms.
Some people are just too sensitive. If you don't like how Linus behaves, then don't deal with him. Noone forces you.
But why post an article on your blog which is associated with Mozilla including a gist of collected swear words? At least Linus didn't engage in some meta-drama nonsense.
unfamiliar: I don't agree though that this makes Linus a unstable person. In fact I'd say if people can't swallow some swear words, then they are in turn not emotionally strong enough.
There's no reason that anyone would need to be emotionally strong enough that in a company with adults in which the focus is working together on technology, they should expect to get sworn at a few times as an acceptable interaction with their peers.
> If you don't like how Linus behaves, then don't deal with him. Noone forces you.
Linus' status in the Open Source community makes him a role model for some people (whether he likes it or not; I suspect he doesn't), and so people imitate him. It's much less palatable coming from someone with less credibility and experience.
Shanley Kane criticised Linus and got her and her family's addresses posted, death threats, rape threats, and other horrific abuse. If you think gender isn't an issue, you haven't educated yourself well enough.
This comment is very amusing in the context of the article. Shanley Kane uses abusive language, at minimum, two orders of magnitude more often than Linus does.
I think I know what you're trying to say, but it probably isn't true that abuse requires a power imbalance, unless "willingness to abuse" is itself a form of power, in which case the word doesn't mean much anymore.
> Does the gender issue really have to be shoehorned into every story?
There are some people who believe it needs to be brought up more, even in places where it's off topic, because raising awareness is easy and historically it has been an effective strategy to move the needle on public perception.
Linus isn't celebrated because Linus is a famous programmer notorious for being quick to reach for the poison pen, Linus is being celebrated because he's a man, or so the story goes.
I agree that gender isn't relevant to Linus's behavior. The door swings both ways on abuse, after all. Humans of all gender identities are equally capable of being terrible to humans of any gender identity. But if the author's gripe is with the public reaction to it, it sort of makes sense why they would bring gender up. Namely: strategic political reasons.
I have noticed that Nordic non native English people often have very good spoken English but have a poor grasp of the unwritten rules concerning "engineering language"
It's not just Nordics. Non-native speakers tend to see swearwords as funny (aren't they the first thing one learns, after all? Even as a kid!), I'm guilty of that myself.
For English in particular, this is reinforced by abundant film material: the cooler the movie, the highest the chance to have it packed with swearwords, because it makes it sexier for native-speakers. This results in non-natives (who will likely consume this sort of exceptional material but not necessarily the more average stuff) assuming "harsh" language is more acceptable than it might actually be in practice. Some productions' appeal is almost entirely based on swearwords, e.g. In The Loop.
> Does the gender issue really have to be shoehorned into every story?
Exactly right. I read that like and I lost interest in reading any more from this guy. Now he's trying to make a point about "sexism" by pulling a strawman out of thin air
My wife and I are both software engineers, so I'm particularly sensitive to this topic. However, this even through me for a loop as to why it was mentioned.
If you've been paying attention to Mozilla post-Eich, it's overrun with social justice warriors now. the JWZ's are long gone, since replaced by the Apparatchik[0]. Thankfully, the Servo side of things still has competent engineers.
May I quote the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19:
"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression: this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
You misunderstand this passage. It doesn't mean you can open your mouth and say any stupid thing and no one can do anything about it. You can get fired. You can get your account removed from Twitter. People can complain about you on the internet.
Oh, and don't paint Brendan Eich as some kind of victim of the free speech police. He actively participated in trying to deny a large class of Americans the basic freedom to marry whom they wanted. And people decided they didn't want someone with that record running Mozilla.
Brendan Eich stepping down as Mozilla's CEO was not due to speech:
>His appointment sparked controversy over a $1,000 political donation Eich had made in 2008 to the successful campaign for California Proposition 8, which sought to establish that, "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."
You don't have to support the Citizens United decision to think that contributing small amounts to political campaigns is effectively speech - because the money is used to promulgate speech (ads), as well as in the more abstract sense that donations are viewed by society as a normal and encouraged outlet for people to promote their viewpoints.
(Of course the humongous donations the decision enabled are also used to promulgate speech, which is why I have some sympathy for it, but there's just a huge difference in practice between giving $1,000 and giving millions.)
Nobody will try to pull that shit again for quite some time.
The "Constructive" version will be handwaved by submitting the same code again and giving literally any deflecting excuse like "You're just afraid of using new technology like this function.
Right, in fact, if I were the developer who wrote that shit, I would probably think twice about doing any work on the code. Not because I was insulted but because I would be scared. I don't know about this specific situation and maybe it's political/religious. But maybe the girl/guy just wrote this code because they thought it was the best solution. Being screamed at by an authority like that (even if they don't mention you by name) would be quite demoralizing to me. But I guess you can argue that I just don't have what it takes to be a Linux contributor then..
I would argue exactly that, yes. If you don't understand basic things about code clarity and safety, you're not ready.
The Linux Kernel doesn't exist to validate your opinion of yourself, but to literally support the world's software infrastructure. Which is more important.
> Nobody will try to pull that shit again for quite some time.
Did you read the thread? The programmer who wrote the original patch is arguing with him, just as he would have had Linus' reply been polite. I seems that vitriol does not have the power you think it does.
"We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop there lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again and that is well but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore."
The lesson a lot of people are going to learn from this is, "Don't submit any code to Linux." Not submitting code like this is merely going to be a small side effect. Especially since Linus doesn't explain his reasoning so there's no real way to know if the next chunk of code is going to displease him or not.
But the shouting is intended to maintain quality. I appreciate that you doubt it does this. You could be right, but the article doesn't convince me of this.
It seems to have a different agenda anyway, that the shouting is unacceptable regardless of any benefit. I'm not sure I go along with that either.
>In one of the talks by Linus he spoke of a developer who felt suicidal because Linus didn't want to include some work this particular dev had done. Linus didn't cut the shit short when he should have, he let it drag out too long, which is why he acts the way he does now. It's a defence for him and the developers in the community.
What is more, people remember abusive posts and will remember the mistakes.
I can try. Not better but conveying more meaning in the context it was made than the alternative.
TL;DR: different choice of words in writing help to compensate the lack of metainformation present in human communication like body language, tone of voice and choice of venue (like closed doors).
Reposting from the other thread:
Although the polite version is semantically identical the syntax of the message in many cases as important as the message itself.
Much of what makes human communication universally intelligible across cultures and languages like tone of voice or body language is lost in writing and the human tendency is to replace it with similar substitutes as it helps to convey meta-information that would be hard to convey otherwise.
I believe if one would analyze every single email sent by Linux to the list the great majority of them would have similar syntax to the polite English above but, of course, those wouldn't make the news.
The bitter rants seem to be reserved to the cases where it is imperative that everybody, involved or not, understand very clearly why that behaviour is not tolerable and the reason for that. Similar cases like the refusal to merge Kay Sievers further submissions [1] until he cleaned up and owned up to his mistakes or the reprieve of a maintainer [2] that broke userland with a kernel commit seems to follow the same pattern.
The difference to a professional setting is that, in person in a company, one can always call a closed doors meeting and express with tone of voice and body language the same message without the public spectacle.
Even in those cases, specially when everybody knows what it mean to be called to the boss presence, it can be as embarrassing and intimidating as what happens in those forums.
Not better communication per se, but Eisenberg's version completely lacked any communication of the strong emotions of anger and frustration Linus very clearly communicated in his version.
An addition I'd make to Eisenberg's version would be something along the lines of "To be honest, I'm extremely furious this kind of code was attempted to be submitted at all - these are basic issues that I expect everyone to adhere to. I don't want to see this kind of mistake again."
There's nothing to "defend". It's incomparably better, because it is strongly opinionated, and therefore makes anyone think twice before making similarly stupid changes in the future.
All those "the way I see it" and "I think" clauses in rewritten version is a false modesty, reeking of pretense and BS. There's also that closing "thank you" that is as disingenuous as it gets. That's just like thanking someone who just washed your car with a cloth full of sand. Yes, there was an effort involved, and the intent might've been good, but do they deserve a Thank You? No, of course, they don't.
I thought that finally I can see example of Linus being abusive. This was not it.
Linus was attacking the work and ideas and cursing them. He was not attacking the person who wrote the code. Cursing is not abusive by itself. Cursing is emotional emphasis.
I would not want to work in a environment where strong emotional language used to criticize your work is considered abusive. If conflict over ideas and work does not make your blood flow, you don't care.
Can you (the person who wrote that this code would "ruin" the Linux kernel) explain in as much detail as you can how it would have ruined the Linux kernel?
I'm curious about how much people take what Linus says at face value.
I agree. Can you explain how this particular code is "safe" or "unsafe"? Again: I'm curious as to how much of what Linus says is taken at face value on HN.
I'm even more interested now, because the fulcrum of Linus's argument isn't safety.
You are committing a logical fallacy. I'm not "the voice of HN", nor am I a representative sample of "what HN thinks".
This is just my opinion.
Using a builtin operation ("addition and comparison of integers") is always safer than using a function that may or may not work the same everywhere. I.e. a nonstandard function.
Also, the proposed code has more levels of indirection, therefore places a higher cognitive load on the reader. These things tend to result in bugs down the road.
And it is also true that "an overflow could still happen", which is mentioned in Linus' critique.
All of these are objective ways to measure how "safe" the code is.
No, that's not what Linus is saying. It's close to the opposite of what he's saying (overflow_usub wraps a builtin). You obviously can't simply use the builtin addition and subtraction of unsigned integers in safe code, because in modern C, integers wrap.
Returning to the thread: why are you so comfortable extrapolating from Linus's rant to "this code would ruin the Linux kernel"? You don't grok the code he's talking about.
Is it because "if Linus is arguing against this code with this much ferocity, the code must be really bad?" Because if that's it, you're starting to see the issue some people have with the tone he uses.
In the discussion Linus is providing his suggested code, which is literally "just a builtin addition", but your opinion is that "He says that you can't use builtin addition".
> Because it was a bad idea that ruins the Linux Kernel.
That seems a bit hyperbolic.
> Kernel development isn't for everyone.
Very little is "for everyone". That's not an excuse to offer criticism in a nasty manner. The article links to a nicer response that's a) shorter and b) a lot more likely to educate and build up a better contributor.
I'd go even further - kernel development isn't just 'not for everyone', it's for very few. Relatively speaking, how many people are competent enough to contribute to the kernel? Those that even make the attempt are doing so voluntarily - if the reward from that is to be entreated with a hyperbolic rant, why would they bother going any further?
You all realize that this argument cuts both ways, and probably even cuts against Linus harder, right?
By the time Linus is ranting at someone at LKML, the person he's ranting at has --- statistically, at least --- already qualified themselves as especially competent. These people aren't arguing over Rails template languages.
I'm coming to realize that the sociology of Linus LKML rants is pretty fascinating.
I would feel strong negative emotions for sure. That would be fine. I want to feel emotions and be challenged.
I would be extremely motivated to prove Linus wrong. If I would realize I was wrong, I would lick my wounds and be hurt. The hurt felt would be related to the amount of work and effort I would have invested. I would not claim that Linus is responsible for my emotional state. I was challenged and I lost.
Identifying with your ideas is fine in moderation but taking lasting personal offense is when your ideas forcefully rejected is madness.
"He was not attacking the person who wrote the code."
Linus: "...anybody who thinks that the above is [acceptable] is just incompetent and out to lunch."
That's a direct attack on the coder (and anyone else who thought the code was acceptable.) The remainder of the rant is written in such as way as to castigate the coder indirectly by insulting the work. If that wasn't the intent, such emotional and abusive language is completely unnecessary to get the point across.
I would not want to work in an environment where strong emotional language used to criticize employees "work" is considered acceptable.
I would not want to work in an environment where strong emotional language used to criticize your work is not considered abusive. It's childish and counterproductive. I'm not your enemy, I'm your ally --- making me hate you isn't going to make me want to work with you. If I'm wrong, say so, but do it politely.
I work with someone who has an amazing ability to tell people they're wrong and make them feel good about themselves. You come out of gruelling code reviews feeling hyped and enthusiastic about refactoring your code. It's a skill I'm not very good at and one I want to learn. That's professionalism in action.
Please don't make posts like this on HN. As bad as the SJW's are, I'd say "replying as upvote" kills the signal-to-noise ratio much more. I'm totally glad you agree with me (and thank you for taking the karma hit to post), but upvoting is enough to stave off the hoarde of downvoters.
However, for anyone taking notice, "this'ing" a post is a great way to encourage parent downvotes, which is a far easier way to divebomb an opinion. Let's see if it becomes a tactic used in the future on HN.
I'm normally pretty good with your moderation. This one's a little vague. I worry that if I apply this uniformly, it'll effectively ban snark from my postings.
Thanks for your openness here. You're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com if you want to discuss it further. Short answer is that snark in general doesn't break the HN guidelines (though it is deprecated!) but when directed personally it probably does.
But it wasn't clear what was wrong with it Linus' version of the criticism as opposed to the rewritten version which cut to the chase about the irregular usage of the helper function.
> "Get rid of it. And I don't ever want to see that shit again."
Would you really want to work with someone who speaks to you this way? It's like a caricature of a typical "evil boss". I'm amazed that Linus can take himself seriously writing like this. It's just so unnecessary and overly dramatic, like a child throwing a tantrum.
I think you might be confusing two different things.
Is this the worst Linus rant ever? No. I think its virality is a bit inexplicable too. For a Linus rant, it is unusually focused on the code and not the upbringing of the authors of the code. It's weird that this is the one everyone's glomming onto; Gizmodo even ran a story headlined "you don't need to be a programmer to understand what this rant is about", but as you can see from this thread, even programmers don't understand what this rant is actually about.
But "not the worst Linus rant ever" is not the same thing as "not abusive". This clearly is abusive language, and would not be tolerated in most professional teams, even if the rant was about something more substantial than the relatively insubstantial thing it's about.
See my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506823 I suspect that this is generational/cultural issue. Abusive is codified and differentiation between "abusive language" and actual abuse is lost from people.
>This clearly is abusive language, and would not be tolerated in most professional teams,
Assuming that some people can differentiate between "abusive language" and actual abuse, is it possible to have different work cultures? Some are more masculine and competitive, some are more feminine and people select the work environment they like.
An argument over the semantics of the word "abuse" will be unproductive. It's just abusive in a technical sense.
I think on most well-managed teams in the US software industry, if you were a staff programmer, you could get away with a rant like this just once; you'd be warned, and if you did it again, you'd be dismissed.
Obviously, if you were the manager, you could rant like this as much as you wanted. But then that's the point, right? Even on a team managed by a raving asshole, if you were lower-status and tried to get away with a rant like this, you'd get in trouble.
I'm pretty sensitive to it because candidly it's a struggle for me not to be ranty like this particular Linus rant (thankfully, I am nowhere nearly as bad as the worst Linus rants) and I've had to work hard to suppress it.
>Obviously, if you were the manager, you could rant like this as much as you wanted.
I think you would be surprised what happens in boardrooms and how bad heated discussions between CTO or CEO can look for outsiders.
I understand that if you are managing code monkeys whose lifehood is in your hands, you must behave differently because there is huge power imbalance. But workplace where everyone is competitive individual (top level corporate, professional sports teams, hacker culture) can work well with people who test each other constantly.
I'm a startup founder (wincing), since ~1999. I've seen a board member ejected for talking like this.
But if you're talking about the board of, like, AB InBev, I dunno!
There are people who get away with it, and there are cultures that are fine with it, but my guess is that about 80% of the time, your ability to rant like this is a function of the social status hierarchy. In a Lord Of The Flies sense.
I'd be uncomfortable working on a team that allowed it, because my thought would be: we're not really allowed to talk to each other this way, and the day I piss someone higher-status off will be the day one of my rants is used as an excuse to manage me out of the team.
When I was 17, I was super enthusiastic about Linux. I read a bunch of stuff about kernel development. Linus' attitude was very well known and presented as an amusing thing. Glorified even. I remember reading some of his emails with a great deal of schadenfreude.
Now I'm really glad I never pursued that. I work in a field where all the leading figures are absurdly nice and respectful. Reading Linus' rant makes me appreciate that more.
I think this is the underlying point. It's difficult to imagine that Linus's style of criticising attracts people to the industry, or indeed has any benefits at all. Conversely, it clearly puts off a lot of talented people from getting involved in Linux, and people use his style as justification for their own aggression.
Outside of the open source movement, managers using this kind of language would be reprimanded and even fired, as it could make employees feel stressed and suffering from constructive dismissal.
There is simply no need for being rude, or any kind of aggression in the workplace, and we should consider open source contributors as being in the workplace. Full stop.
I see at least two comments that are critical of the author. And even if they were posted after you wrote this, how do you know he has deleted anything at all?
Because it's a very divisive issue. Obviously I cannot guarantee that he had posts submitted that are critical of him but I would be very surprised that a fairly high-profile post (high enough to be featured on HN) had anything but nearly universal acclaim, given how it tends to polarize crowds.
To be honest, Linus' rants is making a better point for me. I really feel his pain with overflow_usub, and i feel nothing when reading rewritten version.
Because them some people think it's still ok to go with the broken code
That's cultural differences 101
As a simple example: in Canada one might say "please do not feed the animals" in a Zoo. In some other places, for the message to have the same effect it must be as such: "It is expressly forbidden to feed the animals! Those being caught doing so will be expelled from the zoo!"
"And yes, you still could have overflow issues if the whole "hlen +
xyz" expression overflows, but quite frankly, the "overflow_usub()"
code had that too"
I'm afraid that doesn't clarify, because if the overflow_usub code is broken in that sense, then so is the code Linus is advocating for. Do you still think "broken" was the right word to use? Why?
overflow_usub is the code that gets called when your compiler doesn't support __builtin_usub_overflow (Linus opposes both the function and the intrinsic, of course).
True, however how it is used in this case leads to unnecessary opacity
(I'm referring to the || mtu <= 7 part), which, once
you know how usub_overflow works is obvious what it
means, but this might not be evident and unnecessarily
complicating that snipped
Just to be clear: I don't think Linus is wrong (I'm also not qualified to judge that). From what I can tell, he's like, 52.5% right.
What's more interesting to me is how low-stakes this issue is. Gizmodo wrote an article about it, but really, if you understand kernel C, do you even give a shit about this code? Linus could have said "we're not using GCC builtin overflow intrinics", just like that, one line no punctuation, and the issue would have been settled.
But look at this thread at the number of people who extrapolated from Linus' rant that this code was bad, ruinous, unsafe, "one size fits all" (still scratching my head about that), &c. How many of Linus' defenders actually know what he's ranting about? It looks to me like: not many.
What's funny is, you actually do seem like you know what he's talking about, and even you overshot the mark with "broken". :)
> Sometimes 'smart code' is not necessarily better
I would argue that it's usually not, especially in large and long lived projects. “Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program”.
I'm surprised to read this, because I feel like I understand what Linus is ranting about, and while he's probably right, he's right about such a minor and easily disposed-with point that I'm surprised to see him invest so much emotion in it.
He could have just said "overflow_usub? no, not in 2015." and everyone would have agreed with him.
I disagree. I read a bit of the rant and didn't feel like reading the rest: its not short, its not to the point, its full of language that, despite not being directed at me, made me feel bad.
The "rewritten" version is short and to the point. Its clear and it uses neutral language. I read it and immediately understood what the issue is with the proposed code and why the changed code is better.
So for me, the rewritten version was many many times better because I could actually understand it without having to force myself to read something long and horrible.
My take on it was that the non-abusive rewrite would be much more useful to the submitter, as it lays out the issues. The original just make Linus look like he's lost it. Glad I don't have to work with him.
Why is it that people who support Linus' tirades and mention freedom of speech, etc get so incredibly hurt when others exercise their own freedom of speech and point out how abusive they are?
>Why is it that people...get so incredibly hurt when others...point out how abusive they are?
Because they don't think it's abusive. If it isn't (I personally think it is), then pointing "out how abusive they are" comes off as passive aggressively saying they shouldn't express themselves in a certain way. That is effectively telling them they can not speak certain things that they feel are an important part of their ability to express certain ideas. It may as well be needless censorship, in their minds.
Clearly the best response would be to calmly explain why expressing themselves in that way is important. But they're on the defensive, and honestly think aggression is a good way to express themselves, so -in their minds- why should they be calm about it?
You can lift that argument to the next level:
Why do you get hurt about someone exercising his right to speak when he criticizes that you're exercising your right to speak to criticize someone who exercises his right to speak?
And then to the next level. And the next. Ad infinitum.
It's his project that he started years ago. His participation is likened to a monarchy, not a democracy. His further involvement is, therefore, not something that can be decided by an election.
He doesn't deserve to be in his position with respect to a project he started and owns? That doesn't make any damn sense.
Or maybe since he can't communicate without expletives or being overly coarse he can appoint someone else to the task of explaining the problems with code contributions?
Yes, I'm saying that he doesn't deserve to be in charge of a project he started and owns. It's bigger than just his pet project now, it affects lots of people and many people spend a significant fraction of their life working on it.
> It's bigger than just his pet project now, it affects lots of people and many people spend a significant fraction of their life working on it.
Tough shit. It's still his project. If people don't like how he runs it, they can choose to instead contribute their time elsewhere.
Any argument for him to step down from owning and operating the Linux kernel, that doesn't accompany a complete replacement for the Linux kernel, is naught but entitlement.
A person wrote things that some other people find morally objectionable. Some other people think the thing that person wrote was not morally objectionable. Now someone "considers" the thing "indefensible" in their "personal opinion." Hacker News asks for intellectually stimulating topics; this one isn't.
Linus' version is intimidating. But that's why it is very effective. Case in point, we people on hacker news would have never even read his rant if the language was mild. So in some way it sticks better. You really DO NOT WANT to step on his toes again (and everyone else reading it, too), so in the end Linus' wins.
Also, it's sad, but after so many years on the internet I don't consider his language to be abusive. It's aggressive yes, but clearly there went much though into it. If I'm honest, i find it kind of amusing. But maybe that's just me.
> You really DO NOT WANT to step on his toes again (and everyone else reading it, too), so in the end Linus' wins.
And yet it keeps happening, frequent enough that it's something everyone knows about. If anything, he's not optimizing his own responses based on actual performance. He's doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And he's not even being efficient with it.
And, well, pretty sure he ruins his own performance by getting all enraged like that.
> He's doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And he's not even being efficient with it.
It seems his results are just fine, why would he expect different results? I say this supported by the slightly arguable premise that the Linux kernel is a good example of a big success in software development.
> You really DO NOT WANT to step on his toes again (and everyone else reading it, too), so in the end Linus' wins.
But the person who wrote the code still argued with him. They're still making the same points that they would have made whether Linus were polite or not.
Linus is the lead for the kernel project, so at the end of the day he wins regardless.
Most people on this planet can deal with opinions just fine. Case in point: the recipient of Linus' message.
It only ever seems to be an issue for those entitled, self-absorbed Title IX crybabies for whom every opinion they disagree with is "literally rape". :-)
So you've stereotyped over three hundred million people to be "self-absorbed Title IX crybabies for whom every opinion they disagree with is 'literally rape'."
I still don't see how this is relevant or contributes to the discussion.
Obviously, since your original post was downvoted to oblivion and flagged (neither of which I can do because you replied to me), I must be the one with the problem.
I'm not the OP, and I think he makes a bad job at expressing his opinion being so confrontational and dismissive.
That being said I agree with his core point.
There is tons of things totally unacceptable in the US society that are just fine in other cultures, and US people tend to impose their moral view on other cultures.
"I am certain the reaction to this text would be entirely different were it written by a woman."
Do we really need this garbage at the end of this post? How is it f-ing relevant? Linus' post was despicable in itself, everybody sees that except a few zealots. People are condemning it on this very thread, why do we need to throw this hypothetical gender bias BS?
The rant was written by a man, it is needlessly rude and aggressive, and we all point it out. Period.
A much more relevant thing to say would have been "I am certain the reaction to this text would be entirely different were it written by the guy who created Linux."
That's simply an expression to emphasise on current feelings and to add tone to the text. The rewritten text is clearly overly bland and on the edge of being apologic and doesn't reflect the anger and annoyance that Linus most likely felt at the time of writing the mail. It seems that people do not realize anymore that languages exist not only to pass the point along but also to express yourself (including emotions and feelings).
Further more I think that thanks to Linus being "abusive" it makes contributors think twice before they submit code and making sure the code is mostly valid, which in turn, results in higher quality code landing in the codebase and decreases the risk of potential bugs. Does that make some people "scared" of contributing? Sure but that's a whole different story.
I am troubled by this obsession that these activists have with Torvalds. Could there be anything more minor than these complaints about tone? What harm does the existence of one software project which permits 'rants' do to others?
Do those who claim to desire civility not understand that by hounding and inundating him and the community in general with the same talking points ad infinitum, they are themselves being uncivil? Not only by the unrelenting and hostile complaining, though. They have gone much further; Eric S. Raymond alleged yesterday that feminist groups have been repeatedly attempting to frame him for sexual assault! http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6907 The OP post title is applicable to this situation in my opinion.
Rational Wiki certainly has its own biases, but they call out a lot of problematic items with links right back to the blog posts if you care to verify.
I wasn't aware of that crankery, however, that does not discredit these straightforward allegations (argumentum ad hominem). I should add that this particular tactic is already being practiced on the bigwigs in the atheist community, so it's far from implausible.
The allegations have absolutely no evidence behind them. In that case of course one should take into account their source's general credibility, or lack thereof.
As for the atheist community, you will have to provide a source.
i) I think there's a difference between being a conspiracy theorist (allegedly; haven't looked into this), and being a liar. Credibility does not extend across domains, either. An authority on, say, OS design might be a complete fool when it comes to politics (for instance).
ii) Allegations have been made against Micheal Schirmer and Lawrence Krauss (not hard to find if you search for them).
Corporations do not like Linus. they like the work he did, but if they could replace him with, say, Greg Kroah-Hartman, or Ted T'so, they would do so in a heartbeat. Until then, they can preach the narrative that Linus is hurting linux because he rants.
Once he retires or dies, they'll say "thank goodness he's gone!", and you'll see the kernel code quality (and security) take a nosedive.
So now you see why the social justice warriors are getting so much press: their opinions align with the interests of people wishing to taint the linux kernel.
I thought Mr. Sowa's reply to be a very professional in defending his decisions to write it as he did, and still remain open and gracious in Linus' criticism.
ah. the name did sound familiar. in the position he's in, he probably sees too much b.s. and shenanigans all day, and i imagine there are people and organizations out there, perhaps even govts that would love to see this little os project fail.
> I consider this kind of abuse indefensible. Nonetheless, I’ve seen multiple people defending and even celebrating it.
And so what? You have never seen bullies in School ? Are you going to go in the streets and fight for moral righteousness in every corner ? Or are you just picking on Linus because it's an easy target with no controversy ?
It's not like people who work with Linus don't know how he acts and interacts with others. I'd rather have someone who is blunt and direct than someone who smiles to your face and says shit in your back. At least you know where you stand.
220 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadI was in full agreement with the article up until this:
>Of the many things I could say about this, I will say just one: sadly, I am certain the reaction to this text would be entirely different were it written by a woman.
What the... where on earth did this come from? Completely irrelevant and not true in my opinion. This issue is about whether it post was abusive, the gender of the poster makes no difference. I'm pretty sure that female Linus (assuming female Linus had accomplished everything real Linus has over her life) would have had a bunch of loyal followers that defended her no matter what she said, and a bunch of people who thought she was out of line.
Does the gender issue really have to be shoehorned into every story?
Hardly, when talking about brash/abusive behavior in the context of an industry where women are underrepresented, I think it's plenty fine to mention that there might be a connection to be made.
> the gender of the poster makes no difference
Eh, I don't agree. It's well-observed in social sciences that men are given more leeway to be abusive than women are; one example is how often words like "abrasive" or "bossy" come up in performance reports: http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias...
Or just look at our popular media: how many male antiheroes on TV have enough audience to support them vs. women antiheroes? For every Walter White or Doctor House or Tony Soprano, how many unlikeable women are there? Roxane Gay writes about this pretty well. http://www.buzzfeed.com/roxanegay/not-here-to-make-friends-u...
> Does the gender issue really have to be shoehorned into every story?
Per above, I don't think it's "shoehorned." And I think it's fine if we talk about it more than we currently do, because there's plenty to suggest we don't talk about it enough or are insufficiently introspective about it.
It would have made just about as much sense if they'd written "This would be entirely different had it been written by a black person". But they just had to make it political and race just isn't a hot enough topic in the tech world so they didn't go for that.
It's a pathetic attention grab that sullies an otherwise valid critique.
Have they ensured that they are using identical behaviors in this comparison?
Somewhat relatedly, the supposition some people have that "women" need to be especially protected from teh scary curse words pisses me off. THAT is a gendered prejudice based on Victorian morality or something.
This is a common error, but you're mixing up the idea that the government shouldn't be allowed to penalize you for your free speech and the idea that no one at all should be able to react to you for using curse words, getting angry, or coming off as abrasive.
If I think you're an asshole, I'm perfectly within my rights to not hire you, not befriend you, make fun of you to other people, not invite you out on camping trips, "accidentally" give you smaller slices of birthday cake at company parties, write internet comments calling you a doofus, etc.
"It's a problem that women are socially punished for being abrasive because I consider being abrasive a basic human right."
It is a basic human right to use curse words, get angry, and come off as abrasive. That fact does not protect you from social punishment if you behave in a way that the people around you don't want to tolerate. Nor should it.
Some people are just too sensitive. If you don't like how Linus behaves, then don't deal with him. Noone forces you.
But why post an article on your blog which is associated with Mozilla including a gist of collected swear words? At least Linus didn't engage in some meta-drama nonsense.
unfamiliar: I don't agree though that this makes Linus a unstable person. In fact I'd say if people can't swallow some swear words, then they are in turn not emotionally strong enough.
Day to day project work is not one of those.
But they could as well just tell Linus he's a jerk. Or filter out the technical aspects of his post and ignore the rest. Or stop working with Linus.
But there is no reason to create a wide discussion around this, imho.
Linus' status in the Open Source community makes him a role model for some people (whether he likes it or not; I suspect he doesn't), and so people imitate him. It's much less palatable coming from someone with less credibility and experience.
That's a pretty steep hurdle for potential contributors to Linux.
But I suppose that's BSD's gain.
There are some people who believe it needs to be brought up more, even in places where it's off topic, because raising awareness is easy and historically it has been an effective strategy to move the needle on public perception.
Linus isn't celebrated because Linus is a famous programmer notorious for being quick to reach for the poison pen, Linus is being celebrated because he's a man, or so the story goes.
I agree that gender isn't relevant to Linus's behavior. The door swings both ways on abuse, after all. Humans of all gender identities are equally capable of being terrible to humans of any gender identity. But if the author's gripe is with the public reaction to it, it sort of makes sense why they would bring gender up. Namely: strategic political reasons.
For English in particular, this is reinforced by abundant film material: the cooler the movie, the highest the chance to have it packed with swearwords, because it makes it sexier for native-speakers. This results in non-natives (who will likely consume this sort of exceptional material but not necessarily the more average stuff) assuming "harsh" language is more acceptable than it might actually be in practice. Some productions' appeal is almost entirely based on swearwords, e.g. In The Loop.
Exactly right. I read that like and I lost interest in reading any more from this guy. Now he's trying to make a point about "sexism" by pulling a strawman out of thin air
It comes from the same place all flamebait comes from: they're picking a fight.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatchik
May I quote the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression: this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Oh, and don't paint Brendan Eich as some kind of victim of the free speech police. He actively participated in trying to deny a large class of Americans the basic freedom to marry whom they wanted. And people decided they didn't want someone with that record running Mozilla.
>His appointment sparked controversy over a $1,000 political donation Eich had made in 2008 to the successful campaign for California Proposition 8, which sought to establish that, "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."
So in a very literal way, he was pushed out due to the manner in which he chose to speak.
0: http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/citizens-united-v...
(Of course the humongous donations the decision enabled are also used to promulgate speech, which is why I have some sympathy for it, but there's just a huge difference in practice between giving $1,000 and giving millions.)
The "Constructive" version will be handwaved by submitting the same code again and giving literally any deflecting excuse like "You're just afraid of using new technology like this function.
Watch me! (not really, but if I wanted to troll Linus, rants like that would serve as encouragement)
Also using the compiler builtins is the most secure, most readable, least error-prone and fastest way of implementing overflow checks.
Right, in fact, if I were the developer who wrote that shit, I would probably think twice about doing any work on the code. Not because I was insulted but because I would be scared. I don't know about this specific situation and maybe it's political/religious. But maybe the girl/guy just wrote this code because they thought it was the best solution. Being screamed at by an authority like that (even if they don't mention you by name) would be quite demoralizing to me. But I guess you can argue that I just don't have what it takes to be a Linux contributor then..
The Linux Kernel doesn't exist to validate your opinion of yourself, but to literally support the world's software infrastructure. Which is more important.
Did you read the thread? The programmer who wrote the original patch is arguing with him, just as he would have had Linus' reply been polite. I seems that vitriol does not have the power you think it does.
The lesson a lot of people are going to learn from this is, "Don't submit any code to Linux." Not submitting code like this is merely going to be a small side effect. Especially since Linus doesn't explain his reasoning so there's no real way to know if the next chunk of code is going to displease him or not.
It seems to have a different agenda anyway, that the shouting is unacceptable regardless of any benefit. I'm not sure I go along with that either.
>In one of the talks by Linus he spoke of a developer who felt suicidal because Linus didn't want to include some work this particular dev had done. Linus didn't cut the shit short when he should have, he let it drag out too long, which is why he acts the way he does now. It's a defence for him and the developers in the community.
What is more, people remember abusive posts and will remember the mistakes.
TL;DR: different choice of words in writing help to compensate the lack of metainformation present in human communication like body language, tone of voice and choice of venue (like closed doors).
Reposting from the other thread:
Although the polite version is semantically identical the syntax of the message in many cases as important as the message itself.
Much of what makes human communication universally intelligible across cultures and languages like tone of voice or body language is lost in writing and the human tendency is to replace it with similar substitutes as it helps to convey meta-information that would be hard to convey otherwise.
I believe if one would analyze every single email sent by Linux to the list the great majority of them would have similar syntax to the polite English above but, of course, those wouldn't make the news.
The bitter rants seem to be reserved to the cases where it is imperative that everybody, involved or not, understand very clearly why that behaviour is not tolerable and the reason for that. Similar cases like the refusal to merge Kay Sievers further submissions [1] until he cleaned up and owned up to his mistakes or the reprieve of a maintainer [2] that broke userland with a kernel commit seems to follow the same pattern.
The difference to a professional setting is that, in person in a company, one can always call a closed doors meeting and express with tone of voice and body language the same message without the public spectacle. Even in those cases, specially when everybody knows what it mean to be called to the boss presence, it can be as embarrassing and intimidating as what happens in those forums.
[1] http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01331.html
[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75
An addition I'd make to Eisenberg's version would be something along the lines of "To be honest, I'm extremely furious this kind of code was attempted to be submitted at all - these are basic issues that I expect everyone to adhere to. I don't want to see this kind of mistake again."
All those "the way I see it" and "I think" clauses in rewritten version is a false modesty, reeking of pretense and BS. There's also that closing "thank you" that is as disingenuous as it gets. That's just like thanking someone who just washed your car with a cloth full of sand. Yes, there was an effort involved, and the intent might've been good, but do they deserve a Thank You? No, of course, they don't.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10506678
Linus was attacking the work and ideas and cursing them. He was not attacking the person who wrote the code. Cursing is not abusive by itself. Cursing is emotional emphasis.
I would not want to work in a environment where strong emotional language used to criticize your work is considered abusive. If conflict over ideas and work does not make your blood flow, you don't care.
I'm curious about how much people take what Linus says at face value.
I'm even more interested now, because the fulcrum of Linus's argument isn't safety.
This is just my opinion.
Using a builtin operation ("addition and comparison of integers") is always safer than using a function that may or may not work the same everywhere. I.e. a nonstandard function.
Also, the proposed code has more levels of indirection, therefore places a higher cognitive load on the reader. These things tend to result in bugs down the road.
And it is also true that "an overflow could still happen", which is mentioned in Linus' critique.
All of these are objective ways to measure how "safe" the code is.
Returning to the thread: why are you so comfortable extrapolating from Linus's rant to "this code would ruin the Linux kernel"? You don't grok the code he's talking about.
Is it because "if Linus is arguing against this code with this much ferocity, the code must be really bad?" Because if that's it, you're starting to see the issue some people have with the tone he uses.
OK, sure.
That seems a bit hyperbolic.
> Kernel development isn't for everyone.
Very little is "for everyone". That's not an excuse to offer criticism in a nasty manner. The article links to a nicer response that's a) shorter and b) a lot more likely to educate and build up a better contributor.
By the time Linus is ranting at someone at LKML, the person he's ranting at has --- statistically, at least --- already qualified themselves as especially competent. These people aren't arguing over Rails template languages.
I'm coming to realize that the sociology of Linus LKML rants is pretty fascinating.
I would be extremely motivated to prove Linus wrong. If I would realize I was wrong, I would lick my wounds and be hurt. The hurt felt would be related to the amount of work and effort I would have invested. I would not claim that Linus is responsible for my emotional state. I was challenged and I lost.
Identifying with your ideas is fine in moderation but taking lasting personal offense is when your ideas forcefully rejected is madness.
Linus: "...anybody who thinks that the above is [acceptable] is just incompetent and out to lunch."
That's a direct attack on the coder (and anyone else who thought the code was acceptable.) The remainder of the rant is written in such as way as to castigate the coder indirectly by insulting the work. If that wasn't the intent, such emotional and abusive language is completely unnecessary to get the point across.
I would not want to work in an environment where strong emotional language used to criticize employees "work" is considered acceptable.
I work with someone who has an amazing ability to tell people they're wrong and make them feel good about themselves. You come out of gruelling code reviews feeling hyped and enthusiastic about refactoring your code. It's a skill I'm not very good at and one I want to learn. That's professionalism in action.
but thank you for telling us your opinion anyway.
However, for anyone taking notice, "this'ing" a post is a great way to encourage parent downvotes, which is a far easier way to divebomb an opinion. Let's see if it becomes a tactic used in the future on HN.
I'll do my best to honor your request, though.
totally using that in the future.
Would you really want to work with someone who speaks to you this way? It's like a caricature of a typical "evil boss". I'm amazed that Linus can take himself seriously writing like this. It's just so unnecessary and overly dramatic, like a child throwing a tantrum.
"No sane PERSON"
"YOU damn well didn't do the right thing to begin with"
"[YOU are] just incompetent and out to lunch"
"[YOU] are so far out to lunch that it's not even funny"
The lines above would suggest otherwise. (Capital emphasis mine.)
Is this the worst Linus rant ever? No. I think its virality is a bit inexplicable too. For a Linus rant, it is unusually focused on the code and not the upbringing of the authors of the code. It's weird that this is the one everyone's glomming onto; Gizmodo even ran a story headlined "you don't need to be a programmer to understand what this rant is about", but as you can see from this thread, even programmers don't understand what this rant is actually about.
But "not the worst Linus rant ever" is not the same thing as "not abusive". This clearly is abusive language, and would not be tolerated in most professional teams, even if the rant was about something more substantial than the relatively insubstantial thing it's about.
>This clearly is abusive language, and would not be tolerated in most professional teams,
Assuming that some people can differentiate between "abusive language" and actual abuse, is it possible to have different work cultures? Some are more masculine and competitive, some are more feminine and people select the work environment they like.
I think on most well-managed teams in the US software industry, if you were a staff programmer, you could get away with a rant like this just once; you'd be warned, and if you did it again, you'd be dismissed.
Obviously, if you were the manager, you could rant like this as much as you wanted. But then that's the point, right? Even on a team managed by a raving asshole, if you were lower-status and tried to get away with a rant like this, you'd get in trouble.
I'm pretty sensitive to it because candidly it's a struggle for me not to be ranty like this particular Linus rant (thankfully, I am nowhere nearly as bad as the worst Linus rants) and I've had to work hard to suppress it.
I think you would be surprised what happens in boardrooms and how bad heated discussions between CTO or CEO can look for outsiders.
I understand that if you are managing code monkeys whose lifehood is in your hands, you must behave differently because there is huge power imbalance. But workplace where everyone is competitive individual (top level corporate, professional sports teams, hacker culture) can work well with people who test each other constantly.
But if you're talking about the board of, like, AB InBev, I dunno!
There are people who get away with it, and there are cultures that are fine with it, but my guess is that about 80% of the time, your ability to rant like this is a function of the social status hierarchy. In a Lord Of The Flies sense.
I'd be uncomfortable working on a team that allowed it, because my thought would be: we're not really allowed to talk to each other this way, and the day I piss someone higher-status off will be the day one of my rants is used as an excuse to manage me out of the team.
Now I'm really glad I never pursued that. I work in a field where all the leading figures are absurdly nice and respectful. Reading Linus' rant makes me appreciate that more.
Outside of the open source movement, managers using this kind of language would be reprimanded and even fired, as it could make employees feel stressed and suffering from constructive dismissal.
There is simply no need for being rude, or any kind of aggression in the workplace, and we should consider open source contributors as being in the workplace. Full stop.
ITT: Grown adults being little bitches.
This is why the next generation will be so fragile they'll be unable to take any sort of criticism. God help us.
I've since deleted 3 or 4 of the worst ones, but left up ones that disagree without being overtly abusive.
That's cultural differences 101
As a simple example: in Canada one might say "please do not feed the animals" in a Zoo. In some other places, for the message to have the same effect it must be as such: "It is expressly forbidden to feed the animals! Those being caught doing so will be expelled from the zoo!"
"And yes, you still could have overflow issues if the whole "hlen + xyz" expression overflows, but quite frankly, the "overflow_usub()" code had that too"
Maybe broken is too strong a word I agree
(I'm referring to the || mtu <= 7 part), which, once you know how usub_overflow works is obvious what it means, but this might not be evident and unnecessarily complicating that snipped
Sometimes 'smart code' is not necessarily better
(I'm open to disagreement, though)
What's more interesting to me is how low-stakes this issue is. Gizmodo wrote an article about it, but really, if you understand kernel C, do you even give a shit about this code? Linus could have said "we're not using GCC builtin overflow intrinics", just like that, one line no punctuation, and the issue would have been settled.
But look at this thread at the number of people who extrapolated from Linus' rant that this code was bad, ruinous, unsafe, "one size fits all" (still scratching my head about that), &c. How many of Linus' defenders actually know what he's ranting about? It looks to me like: not many.
What's funny is, you actually do seem like you know what he's talking about, and even you overshot the mark with "broken". :)
I would argue that it's usually not, especially in large and long lived projects. “Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program”.
And judging by his response, i'd say he did - http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1510.3/02919.html
He could have just said "overflow_usub? no, not in 2015." and everyone would have agreed with him.
The "rewritten" version is short and to the point. Its clear and it uses neutral language. I read it and immediately understood what the issue is with the proposed code and why the changed code is better.
So for me, the rewritten version was many many times better because I could actually understand it without having to force myself to read something long and horrible.
That's a fundamental difference.
If they get hurt (big "if"), then they are still not saying "and that means you are not allowed to talk".
Are you seeing an inconsistency that I'm not?
How about, "you should stop talking about how that guy should stop talking"? Does that qualify too?
Does every meta-level have the same problem, or is there a limit to how deep it goes?
No, they're saying stop being a jerk.
The only way that translates to "you should stop talking" is if said person is incapable of communicating whilst not being a jerk.
There may be jerk behaviour. I'm not saying there isn't. I did not mean to address that part at all. I'm saying there's no hypocrisy.
Because they don't think it's abusive. If it isn't (I personally think it is), then pointing "out how abusive they are" comes off as passive aggressively saying they shouldn't express themselves in a certain way. That is effectively telling them they can not speak certain things that they feel are an important part of their ability to express certain ideas. It may as well be needless censorship, in their minds.
Clearly the best response would be to calmly explain why expressing themselves in that way is important. But they're on the defensive, and honestly think aggression is a good way to express themselves, so -in their minds- why should they be calm about it?
And then to the next level. And the next. Ad infinitum.
It's totally unproductive.
Wasn't it throughly discussed, dissected, analysed and debated in that very recent topic?
The only new input this post beings is one more opinion among the many in that other HN post. Should it be considered a dupe?
What exactly do you mean by "in his position"?
It's his project that he started years ago. His participation is likened to a monarchy, not a democracy. His further involvement is, therefore, not something that can be decided by an election.
He doesn't deserve to be in his position with respect to a project he started and owns? That doesn't make any damn sense.
Of course he can, but that doesn't mean he will.
Should he end all his messages with "Long live our dear leader Kim Jong-Un" to not offend North-Koreans?
Tough shit. It's still his project. If people don't like how he runs it, they can choose to instead contribute their time elsewhere.
Any argument for him to step down from owning and operating the Linux kernel, that doesn't accompany a complete replacement for the Linux kernel, is naught but entitlement.
Hate Linus? Contribute to FreeBSD.
Also, it's sad, but after so many years on the internet I don't consider his language to be abusive. It's aggressive yes, but clearly there went much though into it. If I'm honest, i find it kind of amusing. But maybe that's just me.
And yet it keeps happening, frequent enough that it's something everyone knows about. If anything, he's not optimizing his own responses based on actual performance. He's doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And he's not even being efficient with it.
And, well, pretty sure he ruins his own performance by getting all enraged like that.
It seems his results are just fine, why would he expect different results? I say this supported by the slightly arguable premise that the Linux kernel is a good example of a big success in software development.
But the person who wrote the code still argued with him. They're still making the same points that they would have made whether Linus were polite or not.
Linus is the lead for the kernel project, so at the end of the day he wins regardless.
Oh, right, they can't.
It only ever seems to be an issue for those entitled, self-absorbed Title IX crybabies for whom every opinion they disagree with is "literally rape". :-)
I still don't see how this is relevant or contributes to the discussion.
This is something you should definitely work on then.
That's exactly the issue I'm talking about. They need to grow up and learn that their culture isn't the only one that counts.
That being said I agree with his core point.
There is tons of things totally unacceptable in the US society that are just fine in other cultures, and US people tend to impose their moral view on other cultures.
One example that come back very often is Facebook "censorship" of "l'origine du monde": http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/11461004/Face...
It's a judgement based on his own culture, not Linus'. In many cultures, mine included, such rants are ok.
Is this serious? Are you kidding me?
He talked to a specific person. This person understood what he said. That's it.
Why should he care about your or other people's entitled whining? He isn't even talking to you.
Do we really need this garbage at the end of this post? How is it f-ing relevant? Linus' post was despicable in itself, everybody sees that except a few zealots. People are condemning it on this very thread, why do we need to throw this hypothetical gender bias BS?
The rant was written by a man, it is needlessly rude and aggressive, and we all point it out. Period.
A much more relevant thing to say would have been "I am certain the reaction to this text would be entirely different were it written by the guy who created Linux."
What a useless article.
Further more I think that thanks to Linus being "abusive" it makes contributors think twice before they submit code and making sure the code is mostly valid, which in turn, results in higher quality code landing in the codebase and decreases the risk of potential bugs. Does that make some people "scared" of contributing? Sure but that's a whole different story.
The post raises the question as to whether passive aggression or active aggression is the worse offender.
Do those who claim to desire civility not understand that by hounding and inundating him and the community in general with the same talking points ad infinitum, they are themselves being uncivil? Not only by the unrelenting and hostile complaining, though. They have gone much further; Eric S. Raymond alleged yesterday that feminist groups have been repeatedly attempting to frame him for sexual assault! http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6907 The OP post title is applicable to this situation in my opinion.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#i_am_slowly_goi...
Rational Wiki certainly has its own biases, but they call out a lot of problematic items with links right back to the blog posts if you care to verify.
As for the atheist community, you will have to provide a source.
ii) Allegations have been made against Micheal Schirmer and Lawrence Krauss (not hard to find if you search for them).
And you take this seriously because... ?
Once he retires or dies, they'll say "thank goodness he's gone!", and you'll see the kernel code quality (and security) take a nosedive.
So now you see why the social justice warriors are getting so much press: their opinions align with the interests of people wishing to taint the linux kernel.
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1510.3/02919.html
A worthwhile read in how to handle these situations.
who is this linus guy anyway? he sounds like a typical new yorker.
lol. just the guy who wrote linux and git. He's a fin btw.
I don't think calling it an "epic rant" was celebrating it.
http://www.itworld.com/article/3000564/linux/linus-goes-on-e...
"Linus loses it in an epic rant about kernel code." isn't exactly a complimentary line, IMO.
I'm not clear if the author is from the UK or something, though.
And so what? You have never seen bullies in School ? Are you going to go in the streets and fight for moral righteousness in every corner ? Or are you just picking on Linus because it's an easy target with no controversy ?
It's not like people who work with Linus don't know how he acts and interacts with others. I'd rather have someone who is blunt and direct than someone who smiles to your face and says shit in your back. At least you know where you stand.
Of course there are bullies in school.
That doesn't make it a good thing. Ideally, there wouldn't be bullies in school. And Linus isn't a child.
> I'd rather have someone who is blunt and direct than someone who smiles to your face and says shit in your back.
False dichotomy. There are plenty of people who smile to your face without having to say shit about you behind your back.
just grow a skin, Linus can say and do whatever he wants about his project (linux). don’t like it? don’t help it then.
seriously kids these days get offended by everything..