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Comment by hueving | Hacker News Reader

Good riddance. Her blog indicates that she was trying to change an entire community's behavior so she didn't have to be offended. That's just as oppressive as the people slinging around insults.

Some people work better in harsh environments and some work better under environments where everyone's feelings are taken into account and you kill any behavior that could offend anyone.

The kernel dev community is not a place that censors rudeness. If you don't have the ability to read mean words, it's not a community for you.

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It sounds like she likes working on the kernel but she'd like to do with without hostility/rudeness/insults. So she took the first step that everybody takes which is to complain or try to discourage behavior they don't like. Now she's taking the step of leaving. How is she being oppressive again?

Sadly the work environment she seem to pine for is the sort where you have ass-kissing, passive-aggressiveness, and politics get ahead of actual usable results.

Are you suggesting that not wanted someone to call for you to be "retroactively aborted" is a slippery slope that leads to ass-kissing, passive-aggressiveness and politically motivated culture rather than results motivated culture?

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/7/80

It was oppressive to try to change the culture in the first place.

So the Free Software movement is oppressive because it is trying to change the software culture from proprietary to free?

Seems like a moot point given that proprietary isn't free to begin with.

Care to explain?

As I read it, it seems a tautology: if one seeks change, it seems obvious that the initial condition has to be different than the target one.

It was oppressive to try to change a culture that called for her to be "retroactively aborted"?

I don't understand what this means.

Can you clarify?

If you're trying to attract engineering talent, you need to stop pushing them away. Also, she wasn't criticizing this from outside - she was a maintainer of part of the USB subsystem, so it was absolutely her community too.

By creating a censorship environment, you push other personalities away.

An inclusive community could accommodate a range of "personalities". Apparently, only one kind of person can handle the toxic LKML environment, and that's surely bad for the long-term viability of the project. At this point a fork seems inevitable. e.g. https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38136.html

People fork the kernel all of the time. It won't be relevant though because any good patches will be cherry picked to the main trunk. Only garbage patches attract the rudeness on the LKML. So a fork that's only difference is garbage included will not likely gain a lot of traction.

So the only people who can now work on the Linux kernel are rude, abusive and arrogant people?

That cuts out a major part of the population. I think I'd be very hesitant at submitting a patch or contributing in any way. Heavens, I might make a mistake!

No.

The author herself spent years working on the Linux kernel without being a 'rude, abusive and arrogant' person.

However, her exit also shows the requirement of being able to work with 'rude, abusive and arrogant' people.

PS. This is an unspoken requirement of many development positions!

That sucks. Maybe we should try to change that.

Right. It sounds infinitely sad too. :(

this is kind of the problem, though. surely you can see there's a difference between bluntness or directness and meanness or cruelty? we can have the former without the latter.

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