Well, I honestly think that categorizing people into these "jerk" and "asshole" categories based on some sampling of email communication is completely unfair.
Linus Torvalds as a _person_ is a JERK because he's ranting about his life-work in an email list?
I don't think Linus is a jerk just for being passionate about his work. His job is to be extremely critical of the code he reviews. Yes, he gets angry and uses swear words quite liberally but it's his style.
Have you ever been the subject of someone calling your work sh*t? The thing about using such inflammatory language as Linus does is that from the outside, you could say "he's criticizing your work, not you", but if it is directed at you, it's inevitable that you take it personally. It's not passion that makes him make others feel insignificant--it's who he is. It should be possible to be "extremely critical of the code he reviews" without the kind of vitriol that he's comfortable spewing.
There is nowadays some constructing criticism to Linus's outbursts on the mailing lists:
On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 05:44:04PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> [snip]
Don't shit on (new) contributors like this. Noralf has done good work (go
look), Kconfig is an impossible combinatorial maze, and I'd be rather
annoyed if you managed to drive away Noralf (and other contributors) with
your mail.
I know that you need to rage every once in a while, but at least only send
those mails to Dave (and me) in private. On dri-devel here, this isn't
accepted.
To add further context, here's Linus' (imo rude and totally unproductive) rant from https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/2/23/611, which Daniel Vetter is replying to:
The tinydrm code seems like absolute pure shit that has never seen a compiler.
I'm upset, because I expect better quality control. In fact, I expect
some qualitty control, and this piece-of-shit driver has clearly
seen none at all.
And those patches were apparently committed yesterday.
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?
I get tons and tons of lines of warnings:
drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/mipi-dbi.c: In function ‘mipi_dbi_typec1_command’:
drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/mipi-dbi.c:65:20: warning: field width
specifier ‘’ expects argument of type ‘int’, but argument 5 has type
‘size_t {aka long unsigned int}’ [-Wformat=]
DRM_DEBUG_DRIVER("cmd=%02x, par=%ph\n", cmd, len, data); \
with nasty chains of nested defines, but then I also get actual compile failures
redefinition of ‘tinydrm_of_find_backlight’
struct backlight_device tinydrm_of_find_backlight(struct device dev)
^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In file included from drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/core/tinydrm-helpers.c:11:0:
./include/drm/tinydrm/tinydrm-helpers.h:53:1: note: previous
definition of ‘tinydrm_of_find_backlight’ was here
tinydrm_of_find_backlight(struct device dev)
^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(with similar stuff for tinydrm_disable_backlight()).
It looks like it might compile if CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE was
enabled rather than being a module.
It would be really, really easy to make the exact same points, simply by typing less. I've seen a lot of people defend Linus on the grounds that he's "terse" but this is actually quite unnecessarily verbose, and would be much clearer and easy to read without the temper tantrums bookending it. Starting from "I get tons of" and ending with the "in tinydrm-helpers.h" line would make the exact same point, without requiring an actual adult to step in and try to do damage control for him to prevent him from driving a promising newbie out of the project.
He usually has very good points, but people tend to focus on the derision and insults. That means people aren't seeing the points he's making. That's not entirely their fault. Communication is a two way street, and he's making his own communication actively worse.
His infamous C++ rant (http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus) is the one I always go back to. It makes perfect sense when you realize he's talking about coding for the kernel or otherwise coding for something that can only really be understood as a series of bytes. It's complete nonsense if you're talking about, say, business software, where all that abstraction makes the software comprehensible. He also does things in that rant like essentially champion reinventing the wheel, though, too.
People always defend him by saying:
* "Passive aggressive corporate culture is toxic!"
* "It works so it's not toxic/who cares if it's toxic!"
* "They don't have to contribute if they don't want to!"
And I just don't buy any of those arguments as a defense for bad behavior.
You claim that "he's making communication worse". Well, you don't know that really. He using strong language could actually make his communication more effective. You can wave your hands and say it's "bad behavior", but that is subjective as well.
And where exactly is there an insult, though?
You seem to confuse he calling CODE shit with he calling PEOPLE shit.
People very well can see the points even though there is strong language. There is a small amount of people that ONLY look at the strong language and make a point out of it.
> And I just don't buy any of those arguments as a defense for bad behavior.
You define bad behavior as using strong language (swear words basically) and then accept nothing as a defense. But no-one really cares about what you buy.
And may I add that he STARTS THE EMAIL with this (the point):
"I'm upset, because I expect better quality control. In fact, I expect some qualitty [sic.] control, and this piece-of-shit driver has clearly seen none at all."
Then he goes to describe the details to prove his point.
He is _upset_. That's a feeling, you know. Then he calls the patch shit. So there is a guy who gets pissed off and calls code shit once in a while. Maybe he has Tourette's, we don't know. Why do you actually care? Why are you so sensitive exactly?
Oh yeah, and I think he has been wrong in my opinion on many topics. I don't think he's god. But LET HIM BE HUMAN!
From what I gather, he is roughly the equivalent of a CEO and most CEOs would not ever see a lot of what gets sent to him because it would get killed way earlier.
In the original comment, I read "There is nowadays some constructing criticism to Linus's outbursts" as "Linus's outbursts nowadays have some constructive criticism", which was not what was actually said of course... so, that's why I posted the followup comment.
In this case, I think using "of" instead of "to" would be clearer:
"There is nowadays some constructive criticism of Linus's outbursts"
Personally, I enjoy Linus' rants on a regular basis. They are the perfect antidote to total idiocy that happens in the Linux software world at times. I've very rarely ever found his point of view to be incorrect, and the abrasion that occurs is a great way to rub the shine off a lot of bullshit.
I know people find it uncomfortable or rude, but I think its a necessary feature of a great leader when dealing with an unruly mass of, generally speaking, mostly arrogant, mostly privileged individuals.
Sadly while he may be running the kernel development quite well, he defends some serious idiocies when it comes to his dive log software Subsurface.
Such as defending the bundling of modified libs, thus making it hard (if not impossible) to package for various distros.
And rather than noticing this as being very similar to what he has ranted about others doing in the past in userspace, he joins in attacking said distros...
Interesting. Got a link to an example of where this is happening? Because its a form of irrationality I'm not accustomed to with Linus, and I'd like to see for myself if he might have reasons for behaving this way beyond just stubborn pig-headedness. I know he can be stubborn, but in the case of management of Kernel development, he has very fine reasons... the scope of the kernel is far greater than the scope for some user space software, and so this is indeed an intriguing opportunity to gain some insight into his thought processes.
He is consistent in my opinion. His problem is that most libraries don't try to avoid breaking programs, unlike the kernel.
I've started distributing an exact version of boost and gmp with my programs and refusing to accept bug reports generated from using other versions. Life is too short (when unpaid) for the pain caused by exactly the problems Linus is describing.
What he's talking about is on the video above and it's a very reasonable point. I just released a game with Linux support and most of the bug reports I got were from people running the game on different distributions and random libraries not being the version you would expect it to be. This is not to mention that I got way more bug reports from Linux users than Windows users, despite Linux users making up 2%-3% of the playerbase. His point is absolutely valid and not at all a "serious idiocy".
Just out of curiosity: Is you game open source (so every distribution builds it with their libraries) or is it distributed in binary format and are you using a custom engine or something well known like UE4/Unity?
I am asking this because just yesterday, I tried to run the steam streaming client and it kept crashing. As far as I can tell, because it must have been compiled with a different compiler or glibc than the rest of my system.
In fact, with closed source software I see a lot of problems in the Linux space which could be solved by recompiling, but that simply isn't possible. The reason behind all this is probably that Linux systems are just not build for closed source software as the devs keep changing things which would be required for that (e.g. stable ABIs).
Btw. does anybody know if there are tools out there to obfuscate code for games, so that they could release their code in a form which some distribution could compile, but which is too obfuscated for someone else to make use of it (e.g. steal the game)?
If Linux Desktops had a stable and consistent base system, no one would need to recompile anything. That's the actual solution here. It's way way simpler to do than what you're suggesting.
But for users, it doesn't help if you bought a tool last year and it gets non functional because Apple removed or tightened down a function in their OS.
You can only hope than that the developers are still around and update it if that's even possible.
Linux could really use a "It just works" solution for desktop apps.
I think its significantly holding back desktop and laptop adoption. Besides all the distros and multiple desktop environments, all these permutations seems like its holding back applications. I use a cluster compute environment but my client is a mac. If apple can make a "unix" that runs applications well, why can't linux. (I can't code it but I would buy it)
I don't want a separate vm or container for each app I run.
I have my fingers crossed for snap packages. I've only installed the spotify 'snap' and it works flawlessly. I haven't mucked about with any other packages yet
Ugh. Snap is so f'ing over engineered. Linus chose AppImage for a reason. It's only a slightly over engineered implementation of Application Directories, which is the simple solution to this problem.
Thing is that he is blaming distros for the situation, when distros are trying their level best to make things usable while upstream keeps changing the "rules".
He should be blaming their distros. It's their policies causing these problems, not a true technical issue. They should include those (modified) libraries as part of his app's package, where only his app uses them. This is actually the simplest way to package anything: include all the dependencies, isolated from the rest of the system. He's right, Mac and Windows figured this out ages ago.
Indeed, while macOS has global libraries ("frameworks") such as Cocoa, Core Data and so on, which are obviously versioned along with the OS (with a semver type system to handle compatibility issues), user libraries are typically bundled together with the app. While macOS comes with shared libraries in /usr/lib such as like readline, LibXML and OpenSSL, trying to use them from an app is almost always a bad idea, most of all because the libraries tend to be very old. Many Homebrew packages have an install flag to control whether they should link to the system libraries or provide their own.
There are some new methods of linux software distribution comming out, such as Snap packages and AppImages which fix the problem of library incompatibility.
They fix jack shit. They bandage over a festering wound, but do not actually do anything about the wound itself. Because the wound is cultural, not technical.
Someday I really hope the Linux Desktop community pulls its head out of its ass and realizes that building their system the way they do and distributing software the way they do is the reason no one really cares about them. I mean ffs, even Linus can't distribute consistently runnable and stable binary software without completely bypassing all the distro stupidity.
As far as I'm concerned, choosing AppImage is just more evidence that Linus is a smart and practical dude who makes reasonable decisions.
I sort of agree. I wouldn't use linux except for programming tasks unless the major distros like fedora and ubuntu had everything that I needed for the most part. Most people can't compile code and go off and figure out library issues if the build goes belly up.
He may be a harsh critic, but looking at this [1] you can see why other developers work with him. He praises and acknowledges good work from others. He definitely contributes to the overall discussion, and in the end, I even understand the problem discussed.
And praise from Linus is far more highly valued than praise from your standard overly-optimistic business-type yes-man.
The thing is Linus speaks volumes to people like Linus. And it just so happens that people like Linus are really good at writing the kind of software that goes in an operating system. Most of the criticism either comes from outside or from the type of people who feel they need to protect others from things that they themselves are able to handle. The latter is basically where ideas about censorship come from (I'm going to read this first to decide whether it's suitable for you to read).
It's actually the motto of one of the main french newspapers. Sans la liberté de blâmer, il n'est pas d'éloge flatteur, i.e. something like "Where there is no freedom of blaming, there can be no genuine praise".
The English translation of the french phrase seems fine to me. So there isn't a need to be able to learn to read French in order to express that thought, since it can be done in English. Or is the English translation missing something important?
I think I saw a quote from Linus that this is a good filter for non-serious contributors, but it is an additional barrier for anyone who might want to get involved.
The way I understand it, the kernel work is heavily subdivided into subcommanders and such; only a few people show code to linus directly.
So I imagine its extremely unlikely that any early contributer could be turned off by a linus rant targeting them. They contributor loss would have to be based on the fact that the rants exist at all.
My suspicion is that very few qualified contributors are scared off by the existence of Linus's rants. Maybe if it targetted them, repeatedly, but otherwise its difficult to imagine this is a significant source of loss.
That attitude, which is sometimes grating, is also what keeps linux from being the garbage that is most other software. It helps when your gatekeeper is a scary.
In my experience people who give brutally honest and harsh commentary tend to be less offended by it and don't tend to hold grudges the way other people do.
It an open source project where the goal is to promote quality work, I can see this being a valuable attribute.
Is there any evidence of this being true in general? Linux is the only software I can think of where a quality product is accompanied by a "grating attitude".
All of the other software I've liked in recent years (like Redis or SQLite or Postgres) has maintainers who seem rather easy-going.
There are good software maintainers and bad. And good communities and bad. OpenBSD has pretty grating maintainers. FreeNAS has a pretty toxic community. I could go on, but it's certainly not just linux.
Those examples don't have the same influx of contributions, and they don't have a host of corporate contributors (Red Hat, Intel, IBM, Google, Nvidia, etc.) who are all vying to push their own solutions into the code. Much of the rage people see from Linus is about these contributions not being good enough because they put the companies' needs before the kernel. The most important quality in a project manager is often the ability to say "no".
You will see Linus rant about what he considers bad code practices, and will castigate people rather brutally for this [1], but he always provides a cogent, often informative explanation. A more mild-mannered lead would not make a scene, and I don't see the point of his expletive-laden gruffness -- it would have been just as effective without the acidity. I guess if you want the Linus who defends code quality from big contributors, you will also have to accept the Linus who verbally destroys individuals.
Are there other projects with numerous corporate contributors, then, which were threatened or destroyed by poor patches? My perception is that Postgres has a large number of corporate contributors, but they don't seem to be hurting for it.
This justification (i.e., that Linux has to be this way, because it's in a unique position) sounds strange to me. If we're claiming that the relevant sample size is N=1, isn't that equivalent to saying that it's impossible to study whether this management style is necessary or not?
In fact, this argument seems almost backwards to me. Linux can be run this way because it is successful. Nvidia isn't trying to mess up NetBSD's architecture, precisely because NetBSD is not as popular with users.
> Are there other projects with numerous corporate contributors, then, which were threatened or destroyed by poor patches? My perception is that Postgres has a large number of corporate contributors, but they don't seem to be hurting for it.
There's definitely sometimes strains showing. Corporations have often interest in getting specific features in, but don't care that much about maintaining the codebase and/or maintainability.
Definitely causes some strife. I think we most of the time keep it civil enough.
The nice thing about Linus is that he "plays the ball not the man" to use a sporting analogy. He criticises peoples actions, but not the people themselves.
I.e. "this is a stupid thing to do", not "you are stupid".
> aarch64 is just another druggie name that the ARM people came up with after drinking too much of the spiked water in cambridge. [3]
> YOU are full of bullshit. [4]
> I've come to the conclusion that any programmer that would prefer the project to be in C++ over C is likely a programmer that I really would prefer to piss
off [4]
> Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP! It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a maintainer? And you still haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance? [5]
The thing about Linus's rants is that he's almost always completely right. As far as I am concerned, his attitude is part of the reason the Linux kernel doesn't completely suck, in stark contrast the pretty much everything that sits on top of it (at least in the Desktop space).
I think the main criticism of Linus's rants is not that he is incorrect, but rather his tone (primarily his use of explitives and ad-hominens). I think he could communicate more efficiently with a civil yet blunt criticism by simply removing the explicitives and ad-hominems.
Maybe, or maybe he'd be a ball of suppressed rage, get some stress-related disease and die.
I understand that the current trend is to suppress all your emotions, and then quietly read self-help books and seek therapy, but it's not at all obvious to me that venting does more bad than good.
To me, I get a kick out of reading Linus' rants, I find them highly amusing. I can understand that the few people they're directed towards, would feel mildly abused, to which I say welp, it's a small price to pay.
There needs to be an acceptance that dealing with other people is oftentimes frustrating, and that there need to be avenues to release that. Business people have booze, drugs, strippers and hookers. Linus is a good boy, he has offensive language and all caps.
I consider him a saint, compared to the alternatives someone a little more gregarious would've taken.
I don't think you have any legitimate reason to believe his vulgarities are somehow protecting his health or sanity. But I also don't see any reason to believe they're harming anyone else's.
If Linus adopts a saner approach, without all this mindless ranting, to managing the Linux kernel, I seriously believe that would the results be much better.
If he was running a company in a similar manner, would it work?
At least in this thread, the view that his ranting is pointless is in the minority. Most projects don't have the the same constraints and pressures that Linux faces - including IBM, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm all wanting to commit code that benefits their company, but not necessarily the Linux kernel. Linus taking a firm stance on quality helps, I think.
Linus seems to inspire a lot of poor and motivated reasoning - since Linux is successful, it must be because of his toxic personality. If a toxic personality is a requirement (or a major contributing factor) for a successful engineering product, in a world of exquisitely crafted engineering products we should expect to see toxic personalities everywhere. That we don't should have prevented a cult of personality from developing in a community that prizes logical reasoning. Maybe the lesson here is that no group of humans is immune to some set of biases.
I'd take it another way. The fact that he has some toxic qualities is likely orthogonal. Or, an indicator correlated with another quality.
This one is kind of fun. Probably Linus' greatest quality is his fearlessness. He did something publicly for the world, that the majority of experts were saying was a bad idea. Specifically, he made a monolithic kernel.
To that end. Yes, he can rant a bit. The question is if his rants reduce the conversations? It is as possible he shuts down thread that would have been more harmful. Indeed, most people he rants against are pushing from positions of power. And he rarely goes personal. (Ever?)
In general, most intelligent people are aware of the dangers of sampling bias and try to avoid it. But what do you do when your sample size is really small? We extrapolate from what we have seen work, but only a handful of open source projects have had the longevity and success that Linux has had.
We see the same thing with decisions on what kind of movies to make. A handful of high budget movies are made every year, and when its time to decide which movies to fund studios extrapolate from past successes and failures. This includes wrong ideas like "no movies centred around female superheroes because Catwoman, Elektra etc" or "international audiences only connect with white leads, not with black ones". It goes the other way too, Black Panther's success suddenly means that international audiences love black actors.
Me personally, I don't think either of the conclusions wrt black actors is correct - there's insufficient data to support either hypothesis. But people make do with the data they have, which is the same thing with Linux. "Linux is wildly successful - what do they do differently? Hmm, must be Linus' management style"
I wouldn't call Linux toxic but I see your point. Have you considered the possibility that your premise is actually correct?
Just few examples from the top of my head:
* Bill Gates was aggressive office bully and has admitted this himself.
* Steve Jobs was known to be nasty and unreasonable.
* RMS is notoriously difficult person.
* Theo de Raadt is really something (OpenBSD, OpenSSH, NetBSD)
* Ulrich Drepper (glibc, ...)
Above examples are outspoken SOB's. There is another case
of engineering leaders who use passive aggression and 'niceness' to rule in a way that can become very unwelcoming.
People have to lead with the personality they have. Management can be leaned and management
style can be changed. Leadership skills are tied to personality.
I'm willing to admit the possibility, but I'd like to point out that half your examples are commercial products. There's a big difference in my mind between "get paid to work for someone on a product" and "volunteer your time for someone on a free project".
In particular, most business people I've worked for have been, well, let's say 'ruthless', even with their own employees. If I'm going to work at a company, I don't feel I have a lot of choice here. Most open-source maintainers are nice and reasonable (perhaps out of necessity), so if I'm donating open-source patches, I do have a choice there.
Is it their temperaments that lead them to success, or is it their willingness to never cave and always do what they feel is right?
I'm not a fan of confrontation, and in the past have allowed features to get added to my projects that I didn't think was right. I regret it. Had I been willing to have some uncomfortable conversations, the project would have been better.
I think it is. I remember when in 2009, all over Germany (and Europe) students went on strike because they had several issues with how universities changed in the past years.
Students occupied large parts of the campus and started to work out their demands. They decided to try and go by a grassroots democracy. Everything was discussed and reconciled with polls in the biggest lecture hall. The whole thing made big news, was on all TV channels, the nation waited for the students' demands, and they kept arguing, and discussing, and the nation kept waiting, and then they argued about the order of phrases, single words, as long as a single person had a complaint, and finally after half of the students involved gave up and no TV channel reported on the topic anymore, some final document was handed over that nobody remembers, just as nobody remembers the response to it.
This is a pretty stark counter example, but to me it was a huge revelation to actually be part of this experience and see it fall into pieces. It shows that you simply can't always be nice to everyone and make it right for every single individual. Sometimes you have to be that asshole that leads the way and steps onto other people's feet, because a suboptimal decision made in time is often better than discussing every detail to death. A rough tone is simply (and unfortunately) an effective way to assert your position. Call it alpha male 2.0 or whatever. This realization also helped me dealing with that kind of person, not taking it too personal.
As for Linus, I feel like these kind of rants are really an exception, he's either in normal/neutral mode, or goes all apeshit, which I think makes it rather easy to deal with him (never did so far though). In comparison, the passive arrogance that a certain developer of some init system sometimes shows seems much more annoying to deal with (also never had an interaction though).
I was asked to run for office. So I became a politician. I always play to win. So I adopted the mannerisms, attire, speech patterns of other successful politicians.
I've seen many others attempt this transformation. Some are naturals. Some learn fast. Most fail (like me).
My point: The audience demands politicians play the role of politician. Over time, the person becomes the role (because how we talk changes how we think).
I don't think the person Linus could be successful playing the role of Linus Master of the Kernel without adopting that persona. So if he wasn't that way beforehand, he adapted.
You have piqued my interested. Is the problem at a social level? We want leaders who are assertive and strong willed?
I think most organizations suffer from this problem, not just governments.
For example, there are megachurches[0] that have gained huge followings only to collapse due to leaders with this personality and the will to hold onto power.
Though I suspected, I didn't fully realize how much "playing the part" mattered until I participated in the endorsement process before, during and after my own candidacy.
I used to care about a candidate's policies, platform, positions. Now I only care about a candidate's ability to get elected.
Before, I didn't understand the "realpolitick" viewpoint, and actively criticized it. Imagine my chagrin after I flipped my worldview.
To get a glimpse of what I'm talking about, watch a bunch of endorsement interviews. Many jurisdictions post a video voter's guide. Some orgs and publications will post their interviews. Better is to show up and watch. As in join your local party (whatever flavor). Best would be to run for office and see it from the other side.
I know that a huge under appreciated aspect is learning that successful candidates are not like normal people. Going to all the same events, even carpooling with your opponents, you see what it takes to win. Politicians are super human. And have to love it. Doubly so for electeds.
--
As for the Mars Hill guy... That's a story as old as religion.
We now know that some percentage of people are predisposed to authoritarianism. Let's say 15%. If it wasn't Mark Driscoll (?), they'd follow some other charismatic leader.
Well, 15% is a lot. If you have 100, or even 1,000, devoted followers, you have the start of a movement. I've I read up on Mars Hill (and others). Their origins stories are all kinda the same. They sell a great story. Everyone believes their part of something bigger than themselves.
The best managers I’ve ever had were blunt and somewhat disagreeable. The person I currently report to is like that, and I absolutely love it. Both of our time is valuable, and I never have to muck around with him. He tells me what he wants and what he thinks of my work. If I’m getting of track with something, then he corrects my course without wasting any time. It’s not a management style that’s suitable for everybody, because most people just wouldn’t be able to deal with it. But in the upper levels of management I think it’s benefecial, if not necessary.
> since Linux is successful, it must be because of his toxic personality.
Who says this? Just because he is harsh, abrupt and straightforward doesn't necessarily mean he is toxic. And even if he was, nobody is forcing anyone to work with "toxic" linus. If you think Linus is toxic then don't use his kernel, don't use his software and don't read his rants.
Everything is toxic nowadays. Everyone cries about everything being toxic. If you don't praise every mediocrity or give a trophy to everyone who didn't win, you are toxic.
If only we had more "toxic" people like linus instead of people who whine about toxicity imagine what the world would be like.
He doesn't have a 'toxic' personality, and let's not over use the word 'toxic'. It seems to me that you're basing this opinion on A) a few mailing list entries you've read (specifically _because_ there was some drama) and B) the fact that any comment which is even mildly rude is now considered 'toxic' by some.
Chris Lattner led a systems project just as complicated (presumably more so!) than Linus. You don't see whole pages dedicated to "Chris Lattner" rants.
Most be a slow day at HN. I've subscribed to this subreddit and the posts there are mostly people discovering lkml.org for the first time and seeing the "Hottest" emails of which some are over 5 years old. (`Re: [Regression w/ patch] Media commit causes user space to misbahave (was: Re: Linux 3.8-rc1)`, `Re: [GIT] Networking`, etc.) In this thread, there's been plenty of more recent examples of Linus's snark, but this particular subreddit is more or less dead. And, I suspect it's dead for a good reason. That is, Linus doesn't really really all that much. Side from the infamous 'Mauro, Shut The F* Up!' email, there's not that many good "rants".
There's plenty of snarky, bad behavior sure. I get that a lot of people don't like it, but none of them bother to understand that these people work together daily and in the most open environment possible. Nobody considers the fact that, in the most infamous example, Mauro has been a contributor since 2006. (I don't know either, not anyone that's a major Linux contributor.) That's right, I wrote 'has' not 'had' because he still contributes to this day. That's not too excuse a behavior, but as a knock against the characterization of a "toxic environment". Maybe for some, but obviously not for others.
I for one, am glad that most of my cringiest, offensive comments were in person and that I was able to walk then back. And, of the stupifying comments that I made in an email, I'm incredibly thankful that they were private.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] thread[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Linus Torvalds as a _person_ is a JERK because he's ranting about his life-work in an email list?
I don't think Linus is a jerk just for being passionate about his work. His job is to be extremely critical of the code he reviews. Yes, he gets angry and uses swear words quite liberally but it's his style.
Definition of jerk
1 a : an annoyingly stupid or foolish person
b : an unlikable person; especially : one who is cruel, rude, or small-mindedOn Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 05:44:04PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > [snip]
Don't shit on (new) contributors like this. Noralf has done good work (go look), Kconfig is an impossible combinatorial maze, and I'd be rather annoyed if you managed to drive away Noralf (and other contributors) with your mail.
I know that you need to rage every once in a while, but at least only send those mails to Dave (and me) in private. On dri-devel here, this isn't accepted.
The tinydrm code seems like absolute pure shit that has never seen a compiler.
I'm upset, because I expect better quality control. In fact, I expect some qualitty control, and this piece-of-shit driver has clearly seen none at all.
And those patches were apparently committed yesterday.
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?
I get tons and tons of lines of warnings:
specifier ‘’ expects argument of type ‘int’, but argument 5 has type ‘size_t {aka long unsigned int}’ [-Wformat=] DRM_DEBUG_DRIVER("cmd=%02x, par=%ph\n", cmd, len, data); \with nasty chains of nested defines, but then I also get actual compile failures
redefinition of ‘tinydrm_of_find_backlight’ struct backlight_device tinydrm_of_find_backlight(struct device dev) ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In file included from drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/core/tinydrm-helpers.c:11:0: ./include/drm/tinydrm/tinydrm-helpers.h:53:1: note: previous definition of ‘tinydrm_of_find_backlight’ was here tinydrm_of_find_backlight(struct device dev) ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~(with similar stuff for tinydrm_disable_backlight()).
It looks like it might compile if CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE was enabled rather than being a module.
Doing this:
in tinydrm-helpers.h gets rid of the complete build failure, and only leaves the tens of lines of warnings.How the hell did this get to the point where crap like this is even sent to me? Nobody tested anything*?
AND WHY THE HELL WAS THIS UTTER SHITE SENT TO ME IF IT WAS COMMITTED YESTERDAY?
> Derision and general point
> Insult
> Derision and minor point
> Actual, concrete, well reasoned point
> Derision
He usually has very good points, but people tend to focus on the derision and insults. That means people aren't seeing the points he's making. That's not entirely their fault. Communication is a two way street, and he's making his own communication actively worse.
His infamous C++ rant (http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus) is the one I always go back to. It makes perfect sense when you realize he's talking about coding for the kernel or otherwise coding for something that can only really be understood as a series of bytes. It's complete nonsense if you're talking about, say, business software, where all that abstraction makes the software comprehensible. He also does things in that rant like essentially champion reinventing the wheel, though, too.
People always defend him by saying:
* "Passive aggressive corporate culture is toxic!"
* "It works so it's not toxic/who cares if it's toxic!"
* "They don't have to contribute if they don't want to!"
And I just don't buy any of those arguments as a defense for bad behavior.
And where exactly is there an insult, though?
You seem to confuse he calling CODE shit with he calling PEOPLE shit.
People very well can see the points even though there is strong language. There is a small amount of people that ONLY look at the strong language and make a point out of it.
> And I just don't buy any of those arguments as a defense for bad behavior.
You define bad behavior as using strong language (swear words basically) and then accept nothing as a defense. But no-one really cares about what you buy.
"I'm upset, because I expect better quality control. In fact, I expect some qualitty [sic.] control, and this piece-of-shit driver has clearly seen none at all."
Then he goes to describe the details to prove his point.
He is _upset_. That's a feeling, you know. Then he calls the patch shit. So there is a guy who gets pissed off and calls code shit once in a while. Maybe he has Tourette's, we don't know. Why do you actually care? Why are you so sensitive exactly?
Oh yeah, and I think he has been wrong in my opinion on many topics. I don't think he's god. But LET HIM BE HUMAN!
Yes? No?
In this case, I think using "of" instead of "to" would be clearer:
"There is nowadays some constructive criticism of Linus's outbursts"
I know people find it uncomfortable or rude, but I think its a necessary feature of a great leader when dealing with an unruly mass of, generally speaking, mostly arrogant, mostly privileged individuals.
Such as defending the bundling of modified libs, thus making it hard (if not impossible) to package for various distros.
And rather than noticing this as being very similar to what he has ranted about others doing in the past in userspace, he joins in attacking said distros...
Edit (because apparently i am "posting too fast"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_(software)
See the last few parts, and citenotes 9 and 10.
I've started distributing an exact version of boost and gmp with my programs and refusing to accept bug reports generated from using other versions. Life is too short (when unpaid) for the pain caused by exactly the problems Linus is describing.
What he's talking about is on the video above and it's a very reasonable point. I just released a game with Linux support and most of the bug reports I got were from people running the game on different distributions and random libraries not being the version you would expect it to be. This is not to mention that I got way more bug reports from Linux users than Windows users, despite Linux users making up 2%-3% of the playerbase. His point is absolutely valid and not at all a "serious idiocy".
I am asking this because just yesterday, I tried to run the steam streaming client and it kept crashing. As far as I can tell, because it must have been compiled with a different compiler or glibc than the rest of my system.
In fact, with closed source software I see a lot of problems in the Linux space which could be solved by recompiling, but that simply isn't possible. The reason behind all this is probably that Linux systems are just not build for closed source software as the devs keep changing things which would be required for that (e.g. stable ABIs).
Btw. does anybody know if there are tools out there to obfuscate code for games, so that they could release their code in a form which some distribution could compile, but which is too obfuscated for someone else to make use of it (e.g. steal the game)?
Microsoft is backwards compatible to an insane degree. Which gives you stability but not consistency.
OSX is consistent but Apple throws out backwards compatible features every other year, so not really stable.
But for users, it doesn't help if you bought a tool last year and it gets non functional because Apple removed or tightened down a function in their OS.
You can only hope than that the developers are still around and update it if that's even possible.
I think its significantly holding back desktop and laptop adoption. Besides all the distros and multiple desktop environments, all these permutations seems like its holding back applications. I use a cluster compute environment but my client is a mac. If apple can make a "unix" that runs applications well, why can't linux. (I can't code it but I would buy it)
I don't want a separate vm or container for each app I run.
As far as I'm concerned, choosing AppImage is just more evidence that Linus is a smart and practical dude who makes reasonable decisions.
Incorrect. AppImage is used to distribute Linus's Subsurface in distro-agnostic manner, by packaging all needed libraries with the binary.
Even Linus gives his endorsement, "This is just very cool." so that means a lot.
https://appimage.org
[1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/29/449
The thing is Linus speaks volumes to people like Linus. And it just so happens that people like Linus are really good at writing the kind of software that goes in an operating system. Most of the criticism either comes from outside or from the type of people who feel they need to protect others from things that they themselves are able to handle. The latter is basically where ideas about censorship come from (I'm going to read this first to decide whether it's suitable for you to read).
Perhaps because so much of the world do not learn how to read French...
Or to put it another way, “it doesn’t really matter what you call a flower, it still smells just as good”
I think I saw a quote from Linus that this is a good filter for non-serious contributors, but it is an additional barrier for anyone who might want to get involved.
So I imagine its extremely unlikely that any early contributer could be turned off by a linus rant targeting them. They contributor loss would have to be based on the fact that the rants exist at all.
My suspicion is that very few qualified contributors are scared off by the existence of Linus's rants. Maybe if it targetted them, repeatedly, but otherwise its difficult to imagine this is a significant source of loss.
It an open source project where the goal is to promote quality work, I can see this being a valuable attribute.
All of the other software I've liked in recent years (like Redis or SQLite or Postgres) has maintainers who seem rather easy-going.
You will see Linus rant about what he considers bad code practices, and will castigate people rather brutally for this [1], but he always provides a cogent, often informative explanation. A more mild-mannered lead would not make a scene, and I don't see the point of his expletive-laden gruffness -- it would have been just as effective without the acidity. I guess if you want the Linus who defends code quality from big contributors, you will also have to accept the Linus who verbally destroys individuals.
[1] http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/bool.html
This justification (i.e., that Linux has to be this way, because it's in a unique position) sounds strange to me. If we're claiming that the relevant sample size is N=1, isn't that equivalent to saying that it's impossible to study whether this management style is necessary or not?
In fact, this argument seems almost backwards to me. Linux can be run this way because it is successful. Nvidia isn't trying to mess up NetBSD's architecture, precisely because NetBSD is not as popular with users.
There's definitely sometimes strains showing. Corporations have often interest in getting specific features in, but don't care that much about maintaining the codebase and/or maintainability.
Definitely causes some strife. I think we most of the time keep it civil enough.
I.e. "this is a stupid thing to do", not "you are stupid".
> There's something odd about drm people. [2]
> aarch64 is just another druggie name that the ARM people came up with after drinking too much of the spiked water in cambridge. [3]
> YOU are full of bullshit. [4]
> I've come to the conclusion that any programmer that would prefer the project to be in C++ over C is likely a programmer that I really would prefer to piss off [4]
> Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP! It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a maintainer? And you still haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance? [5]
1: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1711.2/01701.html
2: https://www.spinics.net/lists/dri-devel/msg157415.html
3: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/15/133
4: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus
5: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75
I understand that the current trend is to suppress all your emotions, and then quietly read self-help books and seek therapy, but it's not at all obvious to me that venting does more bad than good.
To me, I get a kick out of reading Linus' rants, I find them highly amusing. I can understand that the few people they're directed towards, would feel mildly abused, to which I say welp, it's a small price to pay.
There needs to be an acceptance that dealing with other people is oftentimes frustrating, and that there need to be avenues to release that. Business people have booze, drugs, strippers and hookers. Linus is a good boy, he has offensive language and all caps.
I consider him a saint, compared to the alternatives someone a little more gregarious would've taken.
This one is kind of fun. Probably Linus' greatest quality is his fearlessness. He did something publicly for the world, that the majority of experts were saying was a bad idea. Specifically, he made a monolithic kernel.
To that end. Yes, he can rant a bit. The question is if his rants reduce the conversations? It is as possible he shuts down thread that would have been more harmful. Indeed, most people he rants against are pushing from positions of power. And he rarely goes personal. (Ever?)
We see the same thing with decisions on what kind of movies to make. A handful of high budget movies are made every year, and when its time to decide which movies to fund studios extrapolate from past successes and failures. This includes wrong ideas like "no movies centred around female superheroes because Catwoman, Elektra etc" or "international audiences only connect with white leads, not with black ones". It goes the other way too, Black Panther's success suddenly means that international audiences love black actors.
Me personally, I don't think either of the conclusions wrt black actors is correct - there's insufficient data to support either hypothesis. But people make do with the data they have, which is the same thing with Linux. "Linux is wildly successful - what do they do differently? Hmm, must be Linus' management style"
Just few examples from the top of my head:
* Bill Gates was aggressive office bully and has admitted this himself.
* Steve Jobs was known to be nasty and unreasonable.
* RMS is notoriously difficult person.
* Theo de Raadt is really something (OpenBSD, OpenSSH, NetBSD)
* Ulrich Drepper (glibc, ...)
Above examples are outspoken SOB's. There is another case of engineering leaders who use passive aggression and 'niceness' to rule in a way that can become very unwelcoming.
People have to lead with the personality they have. Management can be leaned and management style can be changed. Leadership skills are tied to personality.
In particular, most business people I've worked for have been, well, let's say 'ruthless', even with their own employees. If I'm going to work at a company, I don't feel I have a lot of choice here. Most open-source maintainers are nice and reasonable (perhaps out of necessity), so if I'm donating open-source patches, I do have a choice there.
I'm not a fan of confrontation, and in the past have allowed features to get added to my projects that I didn't think was right. I regret it. Had I been willing to have some uncomfortable conversations, the project would have been better.
If you are starting on your own, you have to be all three.
Students occupied large parts of the campus and started to work out their demands. They decided to try and go by a grassroots democracy. Everything was discussed and reconciled with polls in the biggest lecture hall. The whole thing made big news, was on all TV channels, the nation waited for the students' demands, and they kept arguing, and discussing, and the nation kept waiting, and then they argued about the order of phrases, single words, as long as a single person had a complaint, and finally after half of the students involved gave up and no TV channel reported on the topic anymore, some final document was handed over that nobody remembers, just as nobody remembers the response to it.
This is a pretty stark counter example, but to me it was a huge revelation to actually be part of this experience and see it fall into pieces. It shows that you simply can't always be nice to everyone and make it right for every single individual. Sometimes you have to be that asshole that leads the way and steps onto other people's feet, because a suboptimal decision made in time is often better than discussing every detail to death. A rough tone is simply (and unfortunately) an effective way to assert your position. Call it alpha male 2.0 or whatever. This realization also helped me dealing with that kind of person, not taking it too personal.
As for Linus, I feel like these kind of rants are really an exception, he's either in normal/neutral mode, or goes all apeshit, which I think makes it rather easy to deal with him (never did so far though). In comparison, the passive arrogance that a certain developer of some init system sometimes shows seems much more annoying to deal with (also never had an interaction though).
I've seen many others attempt this transformation. Some are naturals. Some learn fast. Most fail (like me).
My point: The audience demands politicians play the role of politician. Over time, the person becomes the role (because how we talk changes how we think).
I don't think the person Linus could be successful playing the role of Linus Master of the Kernel without adopting that persona. So if he wasn't that way beforehand, he adapted.
I'm not excusing bad behavior.
I think most organizations suffer from this problem, not just governments.
For example, there are megachurches[0] that have gained huge followings only to collapse due to leaders with this personality and the will to hold onto power.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Hill_Church#Church_reorga...
--
Though I suspected, I didn't fully realize how much "playing the part" mattered until I participated in the endorsement process before, during and after my own candidacy.
I used to care about a candidate's policies, platform, positions. Now I only care about a candidate's ability to get elected.
Before, I didn't understand the "realpolitick" viewpoint, and actively criticized it. Imagine my chagrin after I flipped my worldview.
To get a glimpse of what I'm talking about, watch a bunch of endorsement interviews. Many jurisdictions post a video voter's guide. Some orgs and publications will post their interviews. Better is to show up and watch. As in join your local party (whatever flavor). Best would be to run for office and see it from the other side.
I know that a huge under appreciated aspect is learning that successful candidates are not like normal people. Going to all the same events, even carpooling with your opponents, you see what it takes to win. Politicians are super human. And have to love it. Doubly so for electeds.
--
As for the Mars Hill guy... That's a story as old as religion.
We now know that some percentage of people are predisposed to authoritarianism. Let's say 15%. If it wasn't Mark Driscoll (?), they'd follow some other charismatic leader.
Well, 15% is a lot. If you have 100, or even 1,000, devoted followers, you have the start of a movement. I've I read up on Mars Hill (and others). Their origins stories are all kinda the same. They sell a great story. Everyone believes their part of something bigger than themselves.
I still don't know what to make of all this.
Linus toxic != Linux toxic
* Chris Lattner was already mentioned in this thread.
* Larry Wall (perl, patch, rn) was unfailingly kind.
* Yukihiro Matsumoto a.k.a. Matz (ruby) is so proverbially nice that people coined MINASWAN (Matz is nice and so we are nice).
And even at pretty high level of Linux, there are people like Alan Cox who do not, to my knowledge, manage by temper tantrum.
Other people are the opposite: Exquisite manners in writing, self-absorbed assholes in person.
Who says this? Just because he is harsh, abrupt and straightforward doesn't necessarily mean he is toxic. And even if he was, nobody is forcing anyone to work with "toxic" linus. If you think Linus is toxic then don't use his kernel, don't use his software and don't read his rants.
Everything is toxic nowadays. Everyone cries about everything being toxic. If you don't praise every mediocrity or give a trophy to everyone who didn't win, you are toxic.
If only we had more "toxic" people like linus instead of people who whine about toxicity imagine what the world would be like.
If you haven't met Chris in person, by the way, you really should if you get the chance. He's as affable in person as he is online.
There's plenty of snarky, bad behavior sure. I get that a lot of people don't like it, but none of them bother to understand that these people work together daily and in the most open environment possible. Nobody considers the fact that, in the most infamous example, Mauro has been a contributor since 2006. (I don't know either, not anyone that's a major Linux contributor.) That's right, I wrote 'has' not 'had' because he still contributes to this day. That's not too excuse a behavior, but as a knock against the characterization of a "toxic environment". Maybe for some, but obviously not for others.
I for one, am glad that most of my cringiest, offensive comments were in person and that I was able to walk then back. And, of the stupifying comments that I made in an email, I'm incredibly thankful that they were private.