Abuse is indefensible
blog.mozilla.org
blog.mozilla.org
Now I'm really glad I never pursued that. I work in a field where all the leading figures are absurdly nice and respectful. Reading Linus' rant makes me appreciate that more.
Outside of the open source movement, managers using this kind of language would be reprimanded and even fired, as it could make employees feel stressed and suffering from constructive dismissal.
There is simply no need for being rude, or any kind of aggression in the workplace, and we should consider open source contributors as being in the workplace. Full stop.
Linus was attacking the work and ideas and cursing them. He was not attacking the person who wrote the code. Cursing is not abusive by itself. Cursing is emotional emphasis.
I would not want to work in a environment where strong emotional language used to criticize your work is considered abusive. If conflict over ideas and work does not make your blood flow, you don't care.
I'm curious about how much people take what Linus says at face value.
I'm even more interested now, because the fulcrum of Linus's argument isn't safety.
This is just my opinion.
Using a builtin operation ("addition and comparison of integers") is always safer than using a function that may or may not work the same everywhere. I.e. a nonstandard function.
Also, the proposed code has more levels of indirection, therefore places a higher cognitive load on the reader. These things tend to result in bugs down the road.
And it is also true that "an overflow could still happen", which is mentioned in Linus' critique.
All of these are objective ways to measure how "safe" the code is.
Returning to the thread: why are you so comfortable extrapolating from Linus's rant to "this code would ruin the Linux kernel"? You don't grok the code he's talking about.
Is it because "if Linus is arguing against this code with this much ferocity, the code must be really bad?" Because if that's it, you're starting to see the issue some people have with the tone he uses.
OK, sure.
That seems a bit hyperbolic.
> Kernel development isn't for everyone.
Very little is "for everyone". That's not an excuse to offer criticism in a nasty manner. The article links to a nicer response that's a) shorter and b) a lot more likely to educate and build up a better contributor.
By the time Linus is ranting at someone at LKML, the person he's ranting at has --- statistically, at least --- already qualified themselves as especially competent. These people aren't arguing over Rails template languages.
I'm coming to realize that the sociology of Linus LKML rants is pretty fascinating.
I would be extremely motivated to prove Linus wrong. If I would realize I was wrong, I would lick my wounds and be hurt. The hurt felt would be related to the amount of work and effort I would have invested. I would not claim that Linus is responsible for my emotional state. I was challenged and I lost.
Identifying with your ideas is fine in moderation but taking lasting personal offense is when your ideas forcefully rejected is madness.
Linus: "...anybody who thinks that the above is [acceptable] is just incompetent and out to lunch."
That's a direct attack on the coder (and anyone else who thought the code was acceptable.) The remainder of the rant is written in such as way as to castigate the coder indirectly by insulting the work. If that wasn't the intent, such emotional and abusive language is completely unnecessary to get the point across.
I would not want to work in an environment where strong emotional language used to criticize employees "work" is considered acceptable.
I work with someone who has an amazing ability to tell people they're wrong and make them feel good about themselves. You come out of gruelling code reviews feeling hyped and enthusiastic about refactoring your code. It's a skill I'm not very good at and one I want to learn. That's professionalism in action.
but thank you for telling us your opinion anyway.
I'll do my best to honor your request, though.
totally using that in the future.
Would you really want to work with someone who speaks to you this way? It's like a caricature of a typical "evil boss". I'm amazed that Linus can take himself seriously writing like this. It's just so unnecessary and overly dramatic, like a child throwing a tantrum.
"No sane PERSON"
"YOU damn well didn't do the right thing to begin with"
"[YOU are] just incompetent and out to lunch"
"[YOU] are so far out to lunch that it's not even funny"
The lines above would suggest otherwise. (Capital emphasis mine.)
Is this the worst Linus rant ever? No. I think its virality is a bit inexplicable too. For a Linus rant, it is unusually focused on the code and not the upbringing of the authors of the code. It's weird that this is the one everyone's glomming onto; Gizmodo even ran a story headlined "you don't need to be a programmer to understand what this rant is about", but as you can see from this thread, even programmers don't understand what this rant is actually about.
But "not the worst Linus rant ever" is not the same thing as "not abusive". This clearly is abusive language, and would not be tolerated in most professional teams, even if the rant was about something more substantial than the relatively insubstantial thing it's about.
>This clearly is abusive language, and would not be tolerated in most professional teams,
Assuming that some people can differentiate between "abusive language" and actual abuse, is it possible to have different work cultures? Some are more masculine and competitive, some are more feminine and people select the work environment they like.
I think on most well-managed teams in the US software industry, if you were a staff programmer, you could get away with a rant like this just once; you'd be warned, and if you did it again, you'd be dismissed.
Obviously, if you were the manager, you could rant like this as much as you wanted. But then that's the point, right? Even on a team managed by a raving asshole, if you were lower-status and tried to get away with a rant like this, you'd get in trouble.
I'm pretty sensitive to it because candidly it's a struggle for me not to be ranty like this particular Linus rant (thankfully, I am nowhere nearly as bad as the worst Linus rants) and I've had to work hard to suppress it.
I think you would be surprised what happens in boardrooms and how bad heated discussions between CTO or CEO can look for outsiders.
I understand that if you are managing code monkeys whose lifehood is in your hands, you must behave differently because there is huge power imbalance. But workplace where everyone is competitive individual (top level corporate, professional sports teams, hacker culture) can work well with people who test each other constantly.
But if you're talking about the board of, like, AB InBev, I dunno!
There are people who get away with it, and there are cultures that are fine with it, but my guess is that about 80% of the time, your ability to rant like this is a function of the social status hierarchy. In a Lord Of The Flies sense.
I'd be uncomfortable working on a team that allowed it, because my thought would be: we're not really allowed to talk to each other this way, and the day I piss someone higher-status off will be the day one of my rants is used as an excuse to manage me out of the team.
http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1510.3/02919.html
A worthwhile read in how to handle these situations.
That's cultural differences 101
As a simple example: in Canada one might say "please do not feed the animals" in a Zoo. In some other places, for the message to have the same effect it must be as such: "It is expressly forbidden to feed the animals! Those being caught doing so will be expelled from the zoo!"
"And yes, you still could have overflow issues if the whole "hlen + xyz" expression overflows, but quite frankly, the "overflow_usub()" code had that too"
Maybe broken is too strong a word I agree
(I'm referring to the || mtu <= 7 part), which, once you know how usub_overflow works is obvious what it means, but this might not be evident and unnecessarily complicating that snipped
Sometimes 'smart code' is not necessarily better
(I'm open to disagreement, though)
What's more interesting to me is how low-stakes this issue is. Gizmodo wrote an article about it, but really, if you understand kernel C, do you even give a shit about this code? Linus could have said "we're not using GCC builtin overflow intrinics", just like that, one line no punctuation, and the issue would have been settled.
But look at this thread at the number of people who extrapolated from Linus' rant that this code was bad, ruinous, unsafe, "one size fits all" (still scratching my head about that), &c. How many of Linus' defenders actually know what he's ranting about? It looks to me like: not many.
What's funny is, you actually do seem like you know what he's talking about, and even you overshot the mark with "broken". :)
I would argue that it's usually not, especially in large and long lived projects. “Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program”.
And judging by his response, i'd say he did - http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1510.3/02919.html
He could have just said "overflow_usub? no, not in 2015." and everyone would have agreed with him.
The "rewritten" version is short and to the point. Its clear and it uses neutral language. I read it and immediately understood what the issue is with the proposed code and why the changed code is better.
So for me, the rewritten version was many many times better because I could actually understand it without having to force myself to read something long and horrible.
That's a fundamental difference.
If they get hurt (big "if"), then they are still not saying "and that means you are not allowed to talk".
Are you seeing an inconsistency that I'm not?
How about, "you should stop talking about how that guy should stop talking"? Does that qualify too?
Does every meta-level have the same problem, or is there a limit to how deep it goes?
No, they're saying stop being a jerk.
The only way that translates to "you should stop talking" is if said person is incapable of communicating whilst not being a jerk.
There may be jerk behaviour. I'm not saying there isn't. I did not mean to address that part at all. I'm saying there's no hypocrisy.
Because they don't think it's abusive. If it isn't (I personally think it is), then pointing "out how abusive they are" comes off as passive aggressively saying they shouldn't express themselves in a certain way. That is effectively telling them they can not speak certain things that they feel are an important part of their ability to express certain ideas. It may as well be needless censorship, in their minds.
Clearly the best response would be to calmly explain why expressing themselves in that way is important. But they're on the defensive, and honestly think aggression is a good way to express themselves, so -in their minds- why should they be calm about it?
And then to the next level. And the next. Ad infinitum.
It's totally unproductive.
With that in mind, I find myself wondering every time I read a report like this: the instrument may be blunt and the punishment humiliating, but is it really unnecessary?
If just one more contributor submits a similar patch, the chances of such an error making it through code review is doubled. If you don't have a strong handle on what is being submitted you will quickly lose control.
The purpose of a rant like that is not to provide feedback to a contributor that he made a mistake, it's to send a clear message to the wider community that code of that kind must not ever be submitted in the first place. It's a first line of defence against bad code. And to that end, I'd say it's quite effective.
I've never written a line of kernel code in my life, and I probably never will. But if I choose to make a contribution to Linux, even a few years from now, I will remember what practices to avoid through my memories of this and previous rants.
This reads like fantastic satire.
Do those who claim to desire civility not understand that by hounding and inundating him and the community in general with the same talking points ad infinitum, they are themselves being uncivil? Not only by the unrelenting and hostile complaining, though. They have gone much further; Eric S. Raymond alleged yesterday that feminist groups have been repeatedly attempting to frame him for sexual assault! http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6907 The OP post title is applicable to this situation in my opinion.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#i_am_slowly_goi...
Rational Wiki certainly has its own biases, but they call out a lot of problematic items with links right back to the blog posts if you care to verify.
As for the atheist community, you will have to provide a source.
ii) Allegations have been made against Micheal Schirmer and Lawrence Krauss (not hard to find if you search for them).
And you take this seriously because... ?
Once he retires or dies, they'll say "thank goodness he's gone!", and you'll see the kernel code quality (and security) take a nosedive.
So now you see why the social justice warriors are getting so much press: their opinions align with the interests of people wishing to taint the linux kernel.
The "Constructive" version will be handwaved by submitting the same code again and giving literally any deflecting excuse like "You're just afraid of using new technology like this function.
Watch me! (not really, but if I wanted to troll Linus, rants like that would serve as encouragement)
Also using the compiler builtins is the most secure, most readable, least error-prone and fastest way of implementing overflow checks.
Right, in fact, if I were the developer who wrote that shit, I would probably think twice about doing any work on the code. Not because I was insulted but because I would be scared. I don't know about this specific situation and maybe it's political/religious. But maybe the girl/guy just wrote this code because they thought it was the best solution. Being screamed at by an authority like that (even if they don't mention you by name) would be quite demoralizing to me. But I guess you can argue that I just don't have what it takes to be a Linux contributor then..
The Linux Kernel doesn't exist to validate your opinion of yourself, but to literally support the world's software infrastructure. Which is more important.
Did you read the thread? The programmer who wrote the original patch is arguing with him, just as he would have had Linus' reply been polite. I seems that vitriol does not have the power you think it does.
The lesson a lot of people are going to learn from this is, "Don't submit any code to Linux." Not submitting code like this is merely going to be a small side effect. Especially since Linus doesn't explain his reasoning so there's no real way to know if the next chunk of code is going to displease him or not.
The lesson a lot of people are going to learn from
this is, "Don't submit any code to Linux."
It seems to have a different agenda anyway, that the shouting is unacceptable regardless of any benefit. I'm not sure I go along with that either.
>In one of the talks by Linus he spoke of a developer who felt suicidal because Linus didn't want to include some work this particular dev had done. Linus didn't cut the shit short when he should have, he let it drag out too long, which is why he acts the way he does now. It's a defence for him and the developers in the community.
What is more, people remember abusive posts and will remember the mistakes.
TL;DR: different choice of words in writing help to compensate the lack of metainformation present in human communication like body language, tone of voice and choice of venue (like closed doors).
Reposting from the other thread:
Although the polite version is semantically identical the syntax of the message in many cases as important as the message itself.
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
An addition I'd make to Eisenberg's version would be something along the lines of "To be honest, I'm extremely furious this kind of code was attempted to be submitted at all - these are basic issues that I expect everyone to adhere to. I don't want to see this kind of mistake again."
All those "the way I see it" and "I think" clauses in rewritten version is a false modesty, reeking of pretense and BS. There's also that closing "thank you" that is as disingenuous as it gets. That's just like thanking someone who just washed your car with a cloth full of sand. Yes, there was an effort involved, and the intent might've been good, but do they deserve a Thank You? No, of course, they don't.
This is child's play and someone who ultimately cares about delivering a quality end product who was offended by someone taking away from that mission. And his point was right, the code was bad and shoehorned into a magical one size fits all solution.
I'm most curious on the age / background of those in this thread who do find it hurtful and offensive.
Me too. I feel that there is generational shift.
For me, abusive means that someone picks you as a permanent target and treats you badly consistently.
I'm completely fine with people calling me with names over some issues when it's clear that they are fighting against me over some specific issue. I'm allowed to use strong words as well. When the subjects changes, there is no hostility. That's how you know you are dealing with emotional person who is not abusing you.
Picking up text fragments and analyzing one email for triggers that can be labeled as "abusive" seems so weird. I guess I feel that there is difference between "abusive language" and abusive and others don't see it.
Can you explain what you mean by this?
"Not idiomatically appropriate for the kernel" and "bad" are very different concepts.
There's an interesting phenomenon happening where people are retconning Linus's objection to this code into a value judgement on the code itself. I'm curious whether that's what you're doing, or whether you have a grounded argument to back up your assertion that the code was, as you chose to put it, "bad".
Also, it's sad, but after so many years on the internet I don't consider his language to be abusive. It's aggressive yes, but clearly there went much though into it. If I'm honest, i find it kind of amusing. But maybe that's just me.
And yet it keeps happening, frequent enough that it's something everyone knows about. If anything, he's not optimizing his own responses based on actual performance. He's doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And he's not even being efficient with it.
And, well, pretty sure he ruins his own performance by getting all enraged like that.
It seems his results are just fine, why would he expect different results? I say this supported by the slightly arguable premise that the Linux kernel is a good example of a big success in software development.
But the person who wrote the code still argued with him. They're still making the same points that they would have made whether Linus were polite or not.
Linus is the lead for the kernel project, so at the end of the day he wins regardless.
just grow a skin, Linus can say and do whatever he wants about his project (linux). don’t like it? don’t help it then.
seriously kids these days get offended by everything..
I don't think calling it an "epic rant" was celebrating it.
http://www.itworld.com/article/3000564/linux/linus-goes-on-e...
"Linus loses it in an epic rant about kernel code." isn't exactly a complimentary line, IMO.
I'm not clear if the author is from the UK or something, though.
May I quote the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression: this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
Oh, and don't paint Brendan Eich as some kind of victim of the free speech police. He actively participated in trying to deny a large class of Americans the basic freedom to marry whom they wanted. And people decided they didn't want someone with that record running Mozilla.
>His appointment sparked controversy over a $1,000 political donation Eich had made in 2008 to the successful campaign for California Proposition 8, which sought to establish that, "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."
So in a very literal way, he was pushed out due to the manner in which he chose to speak.
0: http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/citizens-united-v...
(Of course the humongous donations the decision enabled are also used to promulgate speech, which is why I have some sympathy for it, but there's just a huge difference in practice between giving $1,000 and giving millions.)
Further more I think that thanks to Linus being "abusive" it makes contributors think twice before they submit code and making sure the code is mostly valid, which in turn, results in higher quality code landing in the codebase and decreases the risk of potential bugs. Does that make some people "scared" of contributing? Sure but that's a whole different story.
As a reviewer of code, please strive to keep things civil and focused on the technical issues involved. We are all humans, and frustrations can be high on both sides of the process. Try to keep in mind the immortal words of Bill and Ted, "Be excellent to each other."
https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux....
And so what? You have never seen bullies in School ? Are you going to go in the streets and fight for moral righteousness in every corner ? Or are you just picking on Linus because it's an easy target with no controversy ?
It's not like people who work with Linus don't know how he acts and interacts with others. I'd rather have someone who is blunt and direct than someone who smiles to your face and says shit in your back. At least you know where you stand.
Of course there are bullies in school.
That doesn't make it a good thing. Ideally, there wouldn't be bullies in school. And Linus isn't a child.
> I'd rather have someone who is blunt and direct than someone who smiles to your face and says shit in your back.
False dichotomy. There are plenty of people who smile to your face without having to say shit about you behind your back.
Wasn't it throughly discussed, dissected, analysed and debated in that very recent topic?
The only new input this post beings is one more opinion among the many in that other HN post. Should it be considered a dupe?
I've since deleted 3 or 4 of the worst ones, but left up ones that disagree without being overtly abusive.
I can't wait until all these people fork the kernel. I bet it'll have literally double the amount of commits from these javascript programmers, finally able to peacefully contribute.
http://catcode.com/comments/2015/cf20151101.html
Compared to the actual rant, it's deficient in explaining Linus's viewpoint in multiple ways:
- The phrases "The problem as I see it" and "I think", which I imagine Eisenburg added in an attempt to avoid jumping to conclusions or avoid making it personal or whatever, to me come off as hesitant or unsure. There is an authoritative rejection of the patch itself at the end, but still the revised post sounds like Linus is inviting people to post their opinions over whether the code is actually problematic or not. By contrast, the original post makes it clear that he is highly convinced that the code is bad and will need extremely persuasive evidence to change his mind. Now, you could say that it's rarely productive to solve problems by shutting down debate, and that he should invite opinions - but in truth, Linus probably would at least consider a sufficiently rigorous and detailed counterargument, and him clearly expressing the force of his opinion gives other people a signal that they should take the time to write such an argument, rather than being more brief (because they think Linus is hesitant and that that is sufficient), and then being promptly overruled, even if, given the chance, they could have persuaded him.
You might not see Eisenburg's version as hesitant yourself, but that's precisely the point - all language is ambiguous, but using reserved language errs on the side of having people think your opinion weaker than it is, while harsh language is the opposite.
Of course, the flipside is that someone who doesn't know Linus's history might well conclude that he's so angry as to be beyond reason, discouraging detailed rebuttals for the opposite reason. In fact, I think that is likely to happen in this case, and that therefore his post went too far - just because I am defending harsh language in general doesn't mean I agree exactly with his tone choices. There are certainly potential midpoints between the actual rant and Eisenburg's version that would clearly establish his position without being quite so mean. But hindsight is 20/20, and the problems with Eisenburg's version show the danger in general of being reserved in online text communication, given its low bandwidth.
- The rant also makes it clear that he thinks the whole idea of using such functions is bad, and that other authors writing somewhat similar code should also consider themselves warned, whereas Eisenburg's version makes it sound more like his complaint is specific to the case at hand - e.g. the especially poor formulation of the line criticized, compared to more elegant ways to use the overflow arithmetic functions, or the implementations of those functions.
- Nethercote explicitly noted that the rewritten version is much shorter, but actually it is missing two important factual details:
1. The claims that the code is not particularly safe, and inefficient even with "magical compiler support". (Eisenburg's version just says it's unclear and inefficient /without/ magic compiler support.)
2. The reason why Linus is pulling some random line to criticize out of a bug pull request containing many patches. Issues with pull requests are usually merge conflicts, so is there an unstated issue with that here? The actual rant makes it clear that the conflict just happened to make him notice that particular bit of code, which he found so distasteful that he felt he had to jump in.
By the way, I think Linus is full of crap: while the line at issue isn't great, the use of those overflow-arithmetic functions in general is a great idea, considering how easy it is to screw up a manual overflow check in C, and how ridiculously frequently this results in real security vulnerabilities (among other issues), including of course in Linux in the past. But that's mostly orthogonal to his manner of expression.
The overflow checking functions are very compelling for unsigned multiplication and all of the signed operations. It makes sense for unsigned addition and subtraction if it's already an existing pattern for the difficult cases, but I don't think it was a good way to introduce the functions. These are definitely the most optimized way to perform the checks across the board though, especially for multiplication. Linus is just making incorrect assumptions based on his lack of faith in compilers.
I was in full agreement with the article up until this:
>Of the many things I could say about this, I will say just one: sadly, I am certain the reaction to this text would be entirely different were it written by a woman.
What the... where on earth did this come from? Completely irrelevant and not true in my opinion. This issue is about whether it post was abusive, the gender of the poster makes no difference. I'm pretty sure that female Linus (assuming female Linus had accomplished everything real Linus has over her life) would have had a bunch of loyal followers that defended her no matter what she said, and a bunch of people who thought she was out of line.
Does the gender issue really have to be shoehorned into every story?
Hardly, when talking about brash/abusive behavior in the context of an industry where women are underrepresented, I think it's plenty fine to mention that there might be a connection to be made.
> the gender of the poster makes no difference
Eh, I don't agree. It's well-observed in social sciences that men are given more leeway to be abusive than women are; one example is how often words like "abrasive" or "bossy" come up in performance reports: http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias...
Or just look at our popular media: how many male antiheroes on TV have enough audience to support them vs. women antiheroes? For every Walter White or Doctor House or Tony Soprano, how many unlikeable women are there? Roxane Gay writes about this pretty well. http://www.buzzfeed.com/roxanegay/not-here-to-make-friends-u...
> Does the gender issue really have to be shoehorned into every story?
Per above, I don't think it's "shoehorned." And I think it's fine if we talk about it more than we currently do, because there's plenty to suggest we don't talk about it enough or are insufficiently introspective about it.
It would have made just about as much sense if they'd written "This would be entirely different had it been written by a black person". But they just had to make it political and race just isn't a hot enough topic in the tech world so they didn't go for that.
It's a pathetic attention grab that sullies an otherwise valid critique.
Have they ensured that they are using identical behaviors in this comparison?
Somewhat relatedly, the supposition some people have that "women" need to be especially protected from teh scary curse words pisses me off. THAT is a gendered prejudice based on Victorian morality or something.
This is a common error, but you're mixing up the idea that the government shouldn't be allowed to penalize you for your free speech and the idea that no one at all should be able to react to you for using curse words, getting angry, or coming off as abrasive.
If I think you're an asshole, I'm perfectly within my rights to not hire you, not befriend you, make fun of you to other people, not invite you out on camping trips, "accidentally" give you smaller slices of birthday cake at company parties, write internet comments calling you a doofus, etc.
"It's a problem that women are socially punished for being abrasive because I consider being abrasive a basic human right."
It is a basic human right to use curse words, get angry, and come off as abrasive. That fact does not protect you from social punishment if you behave in a way that the people around you don't want to tolerate. Nor should it.
Some people are just too sensitive. If you don't like how Linus behaves, then don't deal with him. Noone forces you.
But why post an article on your blog which is associated with Mozilla including a gist of collected swear words? At least Linus didn't engage in some meta-drama nonsense.
unfamiliar: I don't agree though that this makes Linus a unstable person. In fact I'd say if people can't swallow some swear words, then they are in turn not emotionally strong enough.
Day to day project work is not one of those.
But they could as well just tell Linus he's a jerk. Or filter out the technical aspects of his post and ignore the rest. Or stop working with Linus.
But there is no reason to create a wide discussion around this, imho.
Linus' status in the Open Source community makes him a role model for some people (whether he likes it or not; I suspect he doesn't), and so people imitate him. It's much less palatable coming from someone with less credibility and experience.
That's a pretty steep hurdle for potential contributors to Linux.
But I suppose that's BSD's gain.
There are some people who believe it needs to be brought up more, even in places where it's off topic, because raising awareness is easy and historically it has been an effective strategy to move the needle on public perception.
Linus isn't celebrated because Linus is a famous programmer notorious for being quick to reach for the poison pen, Linus is being celebrated because he's a man, or so the story goes.
I agree that gender isn't relevant to Linus's behavior. The door swings both ways on abuse, after all. Humans of all gender identities are equally capable of being terrible to humans of any gender identity. But if the author's gripe is with the public reaction to it, it sort of makes sense why they would bring gender up. Namely: strategic political reasons.
For English in particular, this is reinforced by abundant film material: the cooler the movie, the highest the chance to have it packed with swearwords, because it makes it sexier for native-speakers. This results in non-natives (who will likely consume this sort of exceptional material but not necessarily the more average stuff) assuming "harsh" language is more acceptable than it might actually be in practice. Some productions' appeal is almost entirely based on swearwords, e.g. In The Loop.
It comes from the same place all flamebait comes from: they're picking a fight.
Oh, right, they can't.
Also, why don't you keep in your lane and only oppress the Go community with your code of conduct? There's no need to also invade Linux.
I don't care much how Linus acts since I don't work with him. Some people try to emulate him and I sometimes come into contact with them; that's not great for me, but far be it from me to tell Linus how to act on his own mailing list. All I'm doing here is pointing out the fallacies in your defence of his silly behaviour.
Do you also prefer his hysterical style? I am hardly "invading Linux" by commenting on an HN thread.
What exactly do you mean by "in his position"?
It's his project that he started years ago. His participation is likened to a monarchy, not a democracy. His further involvement is, therefore, not something that can be decided by an election.
He doesn't deserve to be in his position with respect to a project he started and owns? That doesn't make any damn sense.
Of course he can, but that doesn't mean he will.
Tough shit. It's still his project. If people don't like how he runs it, they can choose to instead contribute their time elsewhere.
Any argument for him to step down from owning and operating the Linux kernel, that doesn't accompany a complete replacement for the Linux kernel, is naught but entitlement.
Hate Linus? Contribute to FreeBSD.
The post raises the question as to whether passive aggression or active aggression is the worse offender.
He knows very well how people perceive it, but code quality and his reputation as a developer are more important to him than the reputation he gets from his rants.
Compare with some classical technical rants like, say, The UNIX-HATERS Handbook. It has a wonderful ranty tone to it, but it's also full of pretty solid technical information and reasoned technical opinions. The tone makes it memorable without getting in the way of the information. It's far from a reference book, but it's great material. It's an amazing reminder of how much the computer industry loves to forget the past and then eventually reinvent it.
Linus's rant, on the other hand, is about... integer overflow, I guess? And code readability? And I don't think he actually explains anything about either one, so I don't know why he prefers one version to the other, but I know he prefers it really strongly.
Churchill said, "Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions." Similarly, a really good technical rant is one where you call the other person a complete and utter idiot in such a way that they thank you for your help.
who is this linus guy anyway? he sounds like a typical new yorker.
lol. just the guy who wrote linux and git. He's a fin btw.
Do we really need this garbage at the end of this post? How is it f-ing relevant? Linus' post was despicable in itself, everybody sees that except a few zealots. People are condemning it on this very thread, why do we need to throw this hypothetical gender bias BS?
The rant was written by a man, it is needlessly rude and aggressive, and we all point it out. Period.
A much more relevant thing to say would have been "I am certain the reaction to this text would be entirely different were it written by the guy who created Linux."
What a useless article.