Linus Torvalds fires off angry 'compiler-masturbation' rant
theregister.co.uk
theregister.co.uk
Really, i long for the "coolness" and "macho" around the Linux project to die. It's doing free software everywhere a disservice thanks to the project's high visibility. Maybe this makes me a wuss or whatever (i freely admit to being extremely non-confrontational), but it'd be nice if people of all cultures and communication styles would be welcomed as volunteers to great libre software projects such as these.
EDIT: I wonder if it would help if news sites would be more critical of such outbursts? This article seems to remain relatively neutral, but perhaps public condemnation of emotional outbursts would help towards taking the glamour out of it. I wonder if it'd also help stop "hero-worshipping" emulation of such behaviour.
Compared to professional liars who brought mass murder, civil wars and refugee crisis in the last decade to the middle east, admitting them later and still walking the Earth without trials, I'd say the news sites can leave their critique from Linus and give some more focus somewhere else.
The fact of the matter is that one can just as easily be a brash and insulting bullshitter, or a friendly and polite straight-talker. I am strongly in favour of the latter: it is more inclusive and comes off as a lot less macho and/or insecure.
Yes it is possible to be so, however, it is not always possible to know if a friendly and polite person is a straight-talked or a bull-shitter - the advantage of Linus' personality is that there's is absolutely no question which one you're dealing with. I wouldn't recommend this as appropriate behavior when dealing with unknown people on a new project, but for a long-running project like Linux, I can't imagine most people can't unemotionally disregard Linus' language as "just the way he is" - if he was the type of person who if you were to disagree with him, he would then try to destroy your career to teach you a lesson, now then I think you'd have good reason to condemn him. I personally have no idea how he handles disagreement though. In my experience, I'll gladly take a harsh but righteous person over a polite politically-savvy self-promoting bullshit artist any day of the week....these people are a lot more common than many people think.
Linux loses good devs because some people emulate Linus.
And I agree with him, there are so many nice bullshitters these days. Hell, most of these bullshitters seem worthless "professionals", while here we are talking about Linus.
Oh, and if you think politeness has anything to do with being inclusive... You should look at the real world. Lots of poor people wouldn't care about you being polite or not, they would care about you actually caring and helping them.
The choice here is between a 'honest civil discussion' and a 'crazy shout fest'.
Linus is a smart guy. He can also count to 10, walk around the block and then type a nice message. He does not have to behave like this for his voice to be heard.
The rants are newsworthy events. A polite message would not have been picked up by the Register and other news sources. His tone helped magnify his message.
The people who hate the tone will self exclude themselves from kernel development. The people indifferent to the tone will focus on the underlying message, and if that underlying message appeals to them, then they will be attracted to kernel development. And those people in turn will defend high quality code commits when they encounter them.
You are wrong. Because the message that was in the media was about Linus being a jerk. The actual useful discussion, about the usage of compiler features in the kernel, got completely lost.
Linus has a lot of weight in the Linux community, obviously. He does not need to yell and scream like a little child to get his concerns known. He does not need to elevate a rant to a level where media picks it up.
All he needs to do is say in polite words that he does not want this kind of magic in the kernel sources. That would be respectful and professional.
it's not the way to build an inclusive community
For small contrived tasks that will required minimal time to complete, I can see diversity and inclusion being more effective, but when a task is daunting, stressful, challenging, etc. the benefits of a strong in-group with a similar identity provides a foundation for sticking together through trying/difficult times that you would not find in a diverse group with few social ties around identity. Inclusion is valuable, but only when it can be achieved while also mitigating the group from becoming its own worst enemy when diversity of individual interests compete against shared interests.
Linus imparts a very very strong and visceral distaste for bad code. These strong opinions attract those that agree and repel those that don't agree. It's decidedly not inclusion of people who would be tolerant of mediocre code and that is generally a good thing for a critical codebase that is the foundation of so much other code in the world. A group of people that place quality of code at a greater importance over pleasant human interactions is going to produce quality code and sometimes create shitty human interactions. The don't package up and ship the shitty human interactions, but they do package up an ship the codebase. Feels like appropriate prioritization to me.
Anyways, I'm not saying inclusion is bad. I'm just saying that inclusion like exclusion has both positive and negative side effects there is no silver bullet when it comes to the makeup of a group that has come together to solve a problem.
relevant reading:
https://www.nczonline.net/blog/2015/05/14/the-bunny-theory-o...
http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...
Someone rewrote the rant in polite English: http://catcode.com/comments/2015/cf20151101.html
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
""" The rant is entirely impersonal: it rails against code, not people. Those who contributed the offending code will have no doubt of Torvalds' feelings towards it and the open nature of kernel development means it would not be hard to identify those responsible. Torvalds names no names, however. """
Linus is passionate about what he does, and as he has explained several times before, the reach and the medium make him easily misunderstood if he is all polite and politically correct, so he makes sure there is no way he is misunderstood.
Let me ask you this - after this issue, does anyone here think Linus will be willing to accept the usub()/uadd() calls into the kernel any time soon? Had Linus answered politely and politically correct, he would have had to do that about ten times as much, because (a) other people wouldn't notice or think that this response doesn't apply to their special snowflake code, and (b) those who know it applies to would feel that there is room for discussion.
Linus is herding cats without paying them, and has been doing this amazingly well for over 20 years now. Whether or not you subscribe to it, his management style works, produces amazing results. At the scale that linus manages, you (probably) have to be dictator, and (likely) cannot be a polite one.
[0] http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1510.3/02866.html
Summary: Linus is way off here.