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Comment by drewg123 | Hacker News Reader

Its not just women that are being put off. I'm a man, and when I worked for an IHV, I dreaded every interaction with the Linux kernel community due to the tone of the interactions. It was by far the most hostile community we engaged with. I often submitted patches through either junior developers in our company who were Linux enthusiasts, or through friends who were established in the Linux community just to avoid dealing with the people on the subsystem list.

By contrast the *BSD communities were far more helpful, as were the closed-source MacOSX and Solaris driver/kernel mailing lists, as well as the private interactions with folks from Apple and Sun.

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Ditto. I'm just done working in environments where people aren't serious about collaborating respectfully. I've tried it both ways. I do much better work when I don't have to worry about dealing with aggressive assholes all the time.

> Its not just women that are being put off. I'm a man, and when I worked for an IHV, I dreaded every interaction with the Linux kernel community due to the tone of the interactions.

It's stuff like this that also drove out Con Kolivas, who was a fairly well-known kernel hacker before he got sick of it all and quit.

One of the things that drove him out was that other kernel developers cast doubt on his loyalty the project, and in one case refused to merge his patches, because his day job isn't a tech job (he's a doctor).

He eventually started kernel hacking again, but nowadays he just makes his own patchset that he distributes himself, and he refuses to submit anything to the LKML or have anything to do with mainline.

I used to use his scheduler patches. This was many years ago. He seemed reasonable and he knew what he was doing. I only knew him through email (never met him in person), but I hated to see him go. I think others continued/improved upon his initial work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Con_Kolivas

Also, Alan Cox left kernel development in 2009 for similar reasons.

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/07/29/1925224/Alan-Cox-Qu...

Its not just women that are being put off.

I find it peculiar that you start with this sentence, even though the OP says nothing about women in general. It seems that identity politics in such discussions has become so common that it is assumed be there by default.

Not true. Quote from the post: "I did not want to work professionally with people who were allowed to get away with subtle sexist or homophobic jokes."

My 2p:

I think sexism, racism, etc. is wrong. I think we all need to be more considerate.

But, I also think Linus should be allowed to be a total ass if he wants, and so can the others, if they really have the best interests of Linux in mind. You could argue that if they are being asses, then they don't, but some communities just have people with a rough way of dealing with others, e.g. drill sergeants in the Marines.

That said, you can allow people to be asses and still not allow sexist, racist, etc. remarks.

> But, I also think Linus should be allowed to be a total ass if he wants, and so can the others, if they really have the best interests of Linux in mind. You could argue that if they are being asses, then they don't, but some communities just have people with a rough way of dealing with others, e.g. drill sergeants in the Marines.

I thought the article was pretty clear: technically brutal is completely acceptable. Personally brutal is not.

Are there any concrete examples of the homophobia and sexism that could be pointed out?

I've taken part on LKML and I've been dressed down on it and even privately a couple times and part of me wanted to crawl into a cave and disappear, another part of me took it with sort of the playful teasing the LKML hacker culture has. I had some issues with my patches, they got called out and there was some joking. It wasn't personal. Now there have also been some arguments where people up and walked away, clearly some of it has been taken personally.

I'm not trying to defend LKML, it can be harsh. Also a lot of people depend on Linux, the standards for patching it have to be pretty high and there has been a lot of abandonware patches added over the years. These higher profile flames and resignations draw a lot more attention than the incredible amount of noise from the other side of the spectrum... I've also had some incredibly helpful responses from very busy people that helped out when I clearly should have known a little more than I did. Sexism, homophobia, racism, etc.. seems a bit outside of what's acceptable though. I'm not denying that it has happened but I'd love some concrete examples if anyone has some.

e.g. drill sergeants in the Marines.

The point of drill sergeants in the Marines being that "rough" is to make sure that people can cope effectively with something far rougher: War.

My ex was career military. At one point in our marriage, I was very ill and he and I were fighting about something and I was really "this close" to just losing my shit when he accidentally physically bumped into me. And what happened next made it very clear to me that military personnel get certain things drilled into them about body language and violence and so forth that most civilians will never need. He backed up and was suddenly very deferential, otherwise I likely would have hit him. Instead, I left the house to go calm down elsewhere.

If you aren't in a situation where you need to selectively dole out violence -- i.e. to the enemy and not to your comrades in arms -- while under extreme psychological duress, you don't really need someone yelling in your face from two inches away to force that kind of discipline onto you. It is done to save their lives and make them effective tools for enforcing national security, not to defer to the massive egos of drill sergeants who have some fantasy that they have "earned the right" to just go around being assholes to everyone because they are so awesome or some shit.

> but some communities just have people with a rough way of dealing with others, e.g. drill sergeants in the Marines.

This isn't an arbitrary cultural choice. Drill instructors are hard-asses because they are training people to be able to perform professionally in life-or-death situations and sacrifice their own basic self preservation instincts out of loyalty. That kind of training requires some pretty hardcore psychology.

True. But, open-source projects are in a bit of a pickle when it comes to tools. People always cry out for "professionalism" which I think is nonsense. In a "professional" environment, there are FAR more carrots and sticks, far more tools. There is training, promotions (carrot) and the risk of being fired (stick) and a lot of subtle tools in therebetween.

I personally believe being a hardass like a drill Sargeant is in a different league altogether than racism/sexism/homophobia.

You can be dead serious without being awful.

In fact I would argue that they are the exact opposite. Hardasses are someone you respect.

> You can be dead serious without being awful.

And I agree. That is why I wrote: "That said, you can allow people to be asses and still not allow sexist, racist, etc. remarks."

I live with women and girls and respect the hell out of them. We also have homosexual extended family members.

I just think that you can also allow people to have angry disagreements as long as they don't cross the weirdo, sexist, racist, homophobe line.

Some people need to escalate in order to resolve things because they have technical skills but not people skills. If every great project had to be composed completely of people with great people skills, we'd not have many of the projects we have today (Linux, Rails, etc.).

> By contrast the *BSD communities were far more helpful

I think I'd take Linux Torvald's criticism over Theo de Raadt's any day of the week…

The Linux kernel is structured in a tree-like hierarchy such that most neophytes will likely never directly encounter Linus, but be chewed off by a subsystem maintainer long before that.

In contrast, Theo is just another hacker who also happens to be project leader, compared to the more "ivory tower" approach of Linus.

I was speaking mostly of FreeBSD -- that's the only BSD we had direct support for. We did have some friendly interactions with OpenBSD, but not directly with Theo.

You are narrowing it to only Linus. It goes much deeper than that.

Indeed -- it was the subsystem maintainer (and a few people on the list) that were the problem. We never dealt with Linus himself.

I'd be happy with a bit of criticism from either.

So, it appears, would Sarah. But that's not why she has left.

There's a huge difference between criticism, and saying you wish that someone was retroactively aborted.

If Theo ever criticised my code I'd frame it and keep it at my desk!

I'd prefer a cheque by Donald Knuth ;-)

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