Comment by toothbrush | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toothbrush | Hacker News Reader

I really find it a poor show, Linus running his mouth like that, and all the others scurrying to reply deferentially and civilly to his adolescent rant (whether he is technically right or not, which doesn't even seem clear from the follow-up mails). IMHO, it's not the way to build an inclusive community, and it's not the way to encourage newcomers (who may be unfamiliar with your coding practices but could have useful expertise in their own right).

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.

    it's not the way to build an inclusive community

I'm genuinely curious where the fetishization of inclusion has come from. Everywhere I look it's is relatively homogenous groups, irrespective of the generalized identity of those groups, that actually start something and grow it to significance.

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...

Who said it is supposed to be inclusive?

I'll take a brutal honest man like Linus any day before a smooth talking bullshiter. At least he'll stand up by his words with responsibility and without excuses.

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.

So, do I get a free pass on parking tickets until your rogues gallery shows up for prosecution in The Hague?

That's a pretty serious straw man you've set up. There isn't a single-axis spectrum of characters ranging from smooth-talking bullshitters to straight-talking foul-mouthed Linuses (sp?).

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.

> 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.

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.

Except Linus' behaviour influences how other people behave, and their behaviour is off-putting for some devs.

Linux loses good devs because some people emulate Linus.

Where did he set up a straw man? He's just saying that, given two alternatives, he would take one.

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 not to be 'brutal honest' vs 'professional liar'.

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.

I'd say his opinion about software quality was heard far louder and far clearer here than if he had been polite.

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.

> 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.

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.

But are those the only choices? Wouldn't it be better to take a straightforward-but-civil approach? You can be honest, blunt, or critical without being demeaning and, frankly, childish.

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