Why GitHub Can't Host the Linux Kernel Community
blog.ffwll.ch
blog.ffwll.ch
I was hoping to see discussion of the merits of this proposal here on HN... not a regurgitation of Torvalds' positions and personal demeanor. What other projects use a monotree? does it work well? How do those projects coordinate changes across subordinate repositories?
What's wrong with branches and folders? Why are upstream repositories needed? (My hunch is the answer is just "it's slow with that much code" to which I again say "not when GVFS is ready").
Not to say Linux should change their ways, just that I wouldn't adopt them as part of a company.
But then I realized that the advantage of multiple repos is that it is decentralized: anyone can start their own fork, and collaboration works similar to the official forks, and you don’t need any centralized administration.
Having everyone share a single giant monorepo sounds like you’ll need a lot of people to support the infrastructure. Microsoft can do that. Can the Linux community?
With a huge monorepo, you can easily archive everyones contributions. That’s probably important for Microsoft. It’s not important for Linus — he only cares about the stuff he merges.
Finally, multiple repos allow people to work on stuff privately, and only contribute back to the public when they are ready.
You can do kernel development with a "we give commit access out fairly freely" model, of course (I think some of the BSDs are like that, again as historical accident of the cvs style tooling they used to use); but Linux hasn't historically been socially organised that way, and changing tools is easier than changing organisational structure.
It does. It's pretty easy to have specific branches with specific permissions.
So they should base their decisions on the eventuality of some project being ready?
[1] Nothing against them that I don't have with any other commons that depends on corporate beneficence. But companies fail all the time; I can't think of a reason GH is immune.
Change is gonna come someday. Don't get left behind because of sentiment. This isn't a judgment on the Linux project, this is reality.
Mobile operating systems such as IOS have become huge and they're many new industries that look promising (my guess is IOT based one like alexa and Google home but who knows).
However, ios makes most of the mobile profit just as windows and Mac do over Linux for desktop (I have only used Linux in server industry so I don't know how they fair in those markets too much).
In that light, How about this prediction.
Linux will continue to dominate in the server market for a long time as businesses factor in the cost of os licenses and the supply of linux users is big.
Consumer markets like desktop, mobile, whatevers next will flock to the lower personal cost (through customer time investment in learning the os).
It's hard to imagine now, but it can happen.
Or it will be GNU Hurd.
I'm not so sure. If the kernel development was on Github, I may have looked into contributing, but as it stands, its not worth the trouble to try to contribute (as I don't have anything specific to help with). And, I suspect there are more capable developers who are closer to the edge than me.
Anyway, having a slightly lower bar to get started may not get more developers involved, but instead my get them involved more quickly.
Linus has said this a few times -- in general they don't actively try to onboard new contributors.
There was in fact a talk given by Greg Kroah-Hartman, one Linux's lead maintainers, about development for the Linux kernel which he titled "I Don't Want Your Code".
He's at Linaro, specfically taking their developers to task for sending bad patches. And they indeed sound horrible, but he's good natured about it.
I'm just starting to accept patches for my project, and honestly I'm flabberghasted that people will send patches that not only don't run, but don't build. And Greg was saying the same thing.
I guess I got spoiled at my last job, where people generally sent high quality patches / code reviews. Although toward the end, I noticed some sloppiness. It wasn't the main reason I left the company, but it started to feel like the downfall... I don't want to work with people who don't know how to submit code reviews / patches.
Indeed, I've seen the same thing. I have considered automatically rejecting any patch made with the GitHub online editor (obvious because the committer name is always GitHub). They are pretty much invariably of shit quality.
This _might_ show a long-term risk for Linux.
No, the former is enough. It shows that whatever their programming abilities they are prone to bike-shedding, so they are better avoided.
Also we are arguing backwards here. They don't make it intentionally hard to keep out new contributors, it's just not important in any way to make it simpler. The goal is to make it work best for the thousands of existing contributors, especially the gatekeeping subsystem maintainers.
Generally yes, but IIRC Linus has explicitly said that he likes the process being intentionally hard to keep out new contributors.
If you won't submit a kernel patch because you feel that email is unfashionable, then you're kind that should be kept out of the gate. Sorry.
The linked article explains at length why it works well for kernel maintainers. And since it does, why should kernel maintainers change it just to make things easier on newbies? It's much more reasonable to expect new participants to adapt to a workflow that works, than vice versa.
This is not "gatekeeping," it's just the reality that not everyone works the same way.
I get the feeling most people who complain about how "clunky" email is have never actually tried to submit a patch to LKML. If I could figure it out when I was a high-school student, a professional developer should be able to figure it out as well.
That's as intended.
What makes you think Github is 'taking forever' to implement that feature, instead of refusing to implement it to help their business model?
But I take your point. This is why I drive a Nissan.
The fragmented approach means you have to learn a bunch of different services, each with their own nuances. Then you have crap like sourceforce injecting adware into the download and now I have trust issues.
You mean aside from that intended by the project maintainers?
But having everyone speaking the same VCS language has obvious advantages, especially when part of that language is where to host it and how to get a web view of it and how to share it. People centralise because it means someone else takes care of the boring work and you can go back to writing code. There are disadvantages to centralisation, just like there are disadvantages to giving up your privacy, but it's so damn convenient to do so that nobody has enough activation energy to do the opposite.
It seems this topic comes up quite frequently on HN. Unfortunately, while it sounds great in theory, no one ever has a practical way of doing this. The main problem here is the user experience.
When using GitHub I can find an open source project, copy the URL, pull it down, make changes, push and click a button for a pull request. A little bit convoluted but overall it's a very simple workflow. Now try decentralizing away from GitHub. If you have to add any steps then you increase friction likely lowering the UX and making adoption harder.
Now, if you can figure out a way to decentralize a service while maintaining the same level or less friction from the centralized version then you have a real winner and things can start happening. Until that happens the idea of decentralizing things is just going to remain a pipedream.
In my opinion, of course. I love the idea of decentralizing things like GitHub I just can't imagine a good UX way of doing it.
However, there are some alternatives for larger projects: 1- make sure your community has a business model (donations or other forms of funding) for core infrastructure, 2- self-host a Gitlab instance :-)
It doesn't completely take care of decentralisation, but nothing stops from having multiple instances and some c-i duct tape. Github can also make a good mirror.
[0] https://github.com/google/git-appraise
[1] https://git-appraise-web.appspot.com/static/reviews.html#?re...
Decentralizing git without losing the UX benefits of using a site like github is done by handling it like torrents and packaging everything into the repo/technology itself. The Linux kernel is already part of the way there, it's just the "local client" aspect that's missing, along with a focus on actually making it intuitive and fully integrated into git itself.
The repo itself should contain all of the bookkeeping, and git should host a local UI (web and CLI) that allows you to interact with it as you would with github, rather than the send-mail rituals, the relative difficulty of following development on mailing lists, and the "here's how to set up one of 20 different email clients to send mail as plain-text". Imagine get_maintainer.pl and send-mail being replaced with a built-in pull-request-like interface that is disseminated to everyone that pulls from the remote. That's what git-appraise is trying to accomplish.
The traditional mailing-list-based development is tried and tested, but at risk of displaying my appy app iPhone youth naïveté, it's really inconvenient IMO.
Instead, I would argue that not having the ability to just send a mail/post to a mailing list/newsgroup by using my favourite SMTP/NNTP client without creating any form of account in a property service and without clicking buttons in a slow js-ridden web interface in order to create an issue or post a pull request is a bad UX.
> copy the URL, pull it down, make changes, push and click a button for a pull request
All of these (except clicking a button for a pull request) are possible just with git, they are not really github nor centralised-only features.
> Until that happens the idea of decentralizing things is just going to remain a pipedream.
I find sending an email and using NNTP with the client of my choice a lot easier than using a forum and a lot easier than using the github issue/pull request interface. Thus I would argue that this happened many years ago.
Attempting to justify GitHub as a "win" because git is unwilling to fix its brain-damaged user interface is called "damning with faint praise", at best.
Ethereum
For mailing lists, most people use one of the big email providers (like gmail), their ISP's email service, or they set up their own mail server. The last option is what would make email truly decentralized, but, in order to be able to send messages to others, you would also need to set up SPF and DKIM on your MX to ensure deliverability to other servers.
For NNTP, on the other hand, you would either have to use Google groups, or one of the free Usenet providers. If you set up your own news server (which would make this option truly decentralized), then you would also need to enter into a peer arrangement with several other usenet providers in order to have your articles distributed on usenet.
I don't have first hand experience with either option, so I don't know how much effort is involved for the decentralized options I mentioned above.
This is actually quite trivial nowadays. I did hear that setting up and configuring mail servers was difficult with Postfix and Sendmail but I personally had no problem setting up qmail and opensmtpd.
> For NNTP, on the other hand, you would either have to use Google groups, or one of the free Usenet providers. If you set up your own news server (which would make this option truly decentralized), then you would also need to enter into a peer arrangement with several other usenet providers in order to have your articles distributed on usenet.
Not everything really needs to have its articles on the usenet. There are many NNTP networks that do not have that.
Hosting your own mail is roulette.
I haven't really looked into it, but at least it's not as difficult as I thought it might be. The only other problem is that a lot of ISPs block outgoing connections on port 25, so you would either need a business account with them or would need to have a server on a hosting provider that allows outgoing connections on that port.
> Not everything really needs to have its articles on the usenet. There are many NNTP networks that do not have that.
While that is true, that would require that contributors sign up for some type of account on that NNTP network to post and it wouldn't nearly be as visible to potential contributers (unless they advertise their NNTP server information and not require authentication for read only access). gmane is one example that I know of (though you cannot post articles through it as far as I'm aware).
Centralization is indeed a problem, but I think we should all thank github for having standardized how to find opensource projects and contribute to them. This really gave opensource (especially opensource libraries) the kickstart they needed. And now, this centralization is lowering with concurrent products like gitlab, so everything is fine.
> I don't do github pull requests.
>
> github throws away all the relevant information, like having even a
> valid email address for the person asking me to pull. The diffstat is
> also deficient and useless.
>
> Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, but github
> instead decided to replace it with their own totally inferior version.
> As a result, I consider github useless for these kinds of things. It's
> fine for hosting, but the pull requests and the online commit
> editing, are just pure garbage.
>
> I've told github people about my concerns, they didn't think they
> mattered, so I gave up. Feel free to make a bugreport to github.
Most of the times Linus is an asshole are completely justified. Being rude to groups like Nvidia isn't hindering progress.
Does he even bother reading them nowadays?
If anything, I would say that if git were less popular, its developers wouldn't have to deal with constant complaints that their UI scares noobs.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/9/924
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/8/873
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/8/855
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/8/760
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/6/209
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/6/219
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/6/322
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/4/634
https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/3/919
If you didn't notice from the dates, those are all (Literally all, I didn't leave any out) of Linus's emails from the past week or so. The only one that even really has a complaint in it is the ext4 one that you've likely already seen, and the rest are extremely helpful and include detailed descriptions of what he was thinking or what he'd like to see.
Technology choices are largely driven by network effects, and small variances in the seeds of the networks can ultimately dictate which networks win and which ones lose.
But even the Linux kernel and git aside, the fact that people listen to him despite his frankness speaks volumes for how respected he is.
Personally, I think I'm on "your" side -- as it were -- on the side of civility, but sometimes you've just got to get shit done. Properly, which sometimes means shouting the right things at the right people[2].
I do think it's unreasonable of you to say that Linus is not "being reasonable", as you've clearly implied in your comment. To my mind he's being entirely reasonable, just not very "polite" or "civil" or whatever you want to call it.
[1] As in: Rise up the corporate ladder.
[2] Sorkin's "Too Big To Fail" was a big eye-opener in this regard, FWIW.
I'm literally using the terminology of the person that I'm trying to refute! :P If you want to argue phrasing, take that to jacquesm.
(Which reminds me: There should probably be some sort of mandatory-quoting mechanism on HN. It seems weird that you can snipe comments by editing at just the right time. That's not what happened in this case, I'm just saying that it would probably be a good thing to have measures against it. Sorry, that's my META-rant done.)
But Linus already has.
http://www.karelia.fi/welcomingguide/the-finnish-way-of-life
What to American sensibilities are grave insults to Linus is most likely just him speaking his mind without any filter in place, the way he was brought up.
These are two extremes, and you can find a middle ground between them.
In particular, here's a middle ground from someone objecting to Linus for willfully breaking userspace because he didn't think backwards-compatibility was important (a thing that he flames others to a crisp for), in a way that clearly expressed objection but not insult: https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/5/29/541
What's the last time someone did the opposite and searched for all the times when Linus was on his best behavior?
Have you considered the parallels with the Richelieu quote:
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. "
Linus has written far more than six lines and I'm sure you'll be able to do a stellar job of hanging him. But you're going to have to consider whether your ability hinges on Linus' perceived personality or on the volume of his communications and product.
But I think it's a little weakened by the fact that Linus doesn't think that his poorest behavior was actually poor or indefensible; if pressed he says it's exactly what he should have done.
As a good counterexample involving a developer of another kernel, I once mentioned 'bcantrill making a personal attack on the Solaris development list in the midst of a technical argument in 1996, and he found the HN thread and replied to me with an unambiguous apology, despite it being almost twenty years later and him doubtless being a different person now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9040602
Even the smallest sign that Linus genuinely thinks the behavior was suboptimal (not a "I want you people to stop complaining," which is basically what the Code of Conflict was) would go a long way towards changing everyone's perception of his behavior. But he's standing by the six lines.
...see? You can be direct, even uncompromising and arrogant, without being abusive.
To quote from the original comment in this thread:
>You're a moron.
I don't believe the Finnish mentality justifies being so aggressive - and if it does, I'd better stay a long way away from Finland, which is clearly an awful place to live.
> >You're a moron.
> I don't believe the Finnish mentality justifies being so aggressive
A previous Hackernews thread referred to a reddit thread that found the now deleted comment that Linus responded to [1] [2].
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3962978
[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/tionj/linus_tor...
Well, considering that Linux is pretty much powering the world it seems to me that his style of communication tends to mesh perfectly well with the people that he's working with and that they actually get the job done. As opposed to a whole pile of floundering competitors which are of course much better from a technical perspective and tend to have more polite maintainers.
The man gets the job done, in a similar way that an army general will get the job done. Whether he would be equally effective if he would polish his words on those occasions where people get offended is something we probably will not know.
If you're easily offended don't contribute to the Linux kernel.
> If you're easily offended don't contribute to the Linux kernel.
That's a pretty shitty attitude to take. And you don't have to be "easily offended" to dislike interacting with Linus.
Why?
The Linux kernel is mission critical, that means that tons of business and individual depend on it for all kinds of stuff that if it went down would be a major event with the losses likely hard to put a figure on.
Developing for such an environment tends to be a fairly harsh affair, Linus was not bred for this, he more or less accidentally found himself the leader of a substantial software effect, the likes of which had not been seen before outside of very large corporations. The fact that he managed to make this work and managed to get together a band of developers that work well with him - regardless of style - speaks volumes to me, I know I couldn't do it, work the best part of my life to give away my work and to be scolded for the form of my delivery would be reason enough for me to throw the towel in.
Personally, I've known bosses that were a lot less reasonable than Linus is who tends to simply be direct, to the point and sometimes (rare enough that people feel the need to point out their favorites) makes social faux-pas that I feel are minor issues, stuff that if it is part of someone's personality you can easily step over.
I've yet to be in a work environment where there aren't one or two 'hard cases' and typically they have their reasons for being short tempered, such as that when the shit hits the fan it is their shoulders that a disproportionate helping of manure will land on.
Being the maintainer of a large open source project has to among the the most thankless jobs in the world, being the chief maintainer of the Linux kernel is probably one of the worst of those.
The only other person in the open source community that gets such treatment is RMS and I really fail to see what the big deal is.
A lot of people subscribe to the idea that if you don't have a thick skin you shouldn't be in tech. That's a terrible attitude to take, there's absolutely no reason why that should be true, and it discriminates against a lot of people (including women). This attitude just contributes to the current toxic tech culture.
Just as it does not prove the opposite.
> And it doesn't mean that he should get a free pass on treating people badly.
From you? Or from those people?
If you're not the one that he was talking to why do you feel so strongly about it?
> A lot of people subscribe to the idea that if you don't have a thick skin you shouldn't be in tech.
I didn't say that. And I don't subscribe to that. But if you want to be in a project with a BDFL that tends to be a bit coarse then it certainly won't hurt.
> That's a terrible attitude to take, there's absolutely no reason why that should be true, and it discriminates against a lot of people (including women). This attitude just contributes to the current toxic tech culture.
Yes it would. But that is something that you mixed in all by yourself and you're making Linus the scapegoat for this particular shortcoming of the tech community, whereas Linus is just one person in an arguably un-enviable position who gets a lot of shit thrown at him for a few minor gaffes which the participants took a lot better than the bystanders. And personally I'm more inclined to see these as in the heat of the moment and soon forgotten afterwards, the fact that they are archived forever doesn't take away the dynamics of the original situation. Heck, if I got the kind of hate that Linus gets for his occasional flare-up I'd stick to solo projects. It's bordering on the ridiculous how this is pulled out of proportion.
My assumption is you aren't a woman, but I thought I would stop in and ask if you are. If you aren't, what is the basis for your idea that his communication style would discriminate against women?
If you don't do something because of a personal dislike, and expect others to cater to your culture and personal preferences, then the problem is you.
I've yet to work for a company where there wasn't some people I personally disliked working with. part of being professional is putting aside things like dislike and focusing on the core mission/goals and finding ways to work together despite how you feel.
Those that CANNOT work with linux I would say are those that are easily offended. Some may choose not to, but that is their own personal choice.
Now I see where the Klingon language drew some of its inspiration. :D
Things that don't conform to that standard are 'garbage' or are simply in other words 'non compliant'. Linus could express all the same ideas without profanity, if people cared about quality as much as he does.
Strictly enforcing some compliance to their developing process doesn't make Linux development 'unreasonable', because trying to change their developing process just because of some external web tool doesn't constitute 'reasoning'.
Trying to change their development process is just fire and motion ( https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ ) from a third party.
I doubt you will find many people who think that the state of GitHub PRs today represents less progress than the state of the `git request-pull` workflow. And, to be clear, there are a lot of things I prefer about `git request-pull`, starting with the ability to provide inline commentary on the commit message itself. But it's clear that GitHub has built a better product that keeps improving and has enabled a lot of teams to successfully build their own software. `git request-pull` is easily available to anyone with email, and I use it myself when there's no PR interface for a git repo, but people still tend to prefer the GitHub-style workflow.
Seriously: Everyone calling Github "garbage" should be forced to use sourceforge until they're willing to reconsider. Or Bugzilla. Or trac. Or whatever it is that ubuntu is using to make it impossible to ever find anything.
But "whatever it is that ubuntu is using" — Launchpad — was pretty awesome. I used bzr before git, and I really liked Launchpad.
He is firm, strongly opinionated, and doesn't waste time catering to irrelevant feelings. That isn't "unreasonable", more "difficult" in my mind as far as personal interaction goes.
His actual opinions are usually very reasonable, just not communicated in ways that come across as such. At least in my opinion
Why, from his point of view - if GH lacks functionality he needs and git proper delivers this functionality in conjunction with email, GH is just about as useful as an empty beer can ;)
But sure, outsiders with zero idea of what is being discussed love to take his words out of context and derive all sorts of bizarre conclusions.
Easiest way to herd cats on a mailing list.
> I see all his points but it doesn't make these things pure garbage.
Well.. you see his points and his opinion. People are always in a hurry to take affront to this, but really, he's just putting the argument where it's ultimately going to end up anyways, and in the process, he gets to avoid the dozens of follow-up emails that fruitlessly attempt to convince him out of this opinion.
You're really only left with two options, disagree and move on, or fix the problems he has with it and try to get him to use it again later.
There is always compromise. We can ask Linus to compromise, or we can. Are his inputs better put in at a technical level or at a human touchy-feelie level? What do you think is the best use of Linus' time?
It is incredibly easy to offer criticism, but very much more difficult to offer real and implementable solutions.
Can anybody explain a little more about this module? I thought 'pull request' is Github only.
GitLab apparently does call them merge requests, though.
The base repository is behind the forked repository and the forker is asking the base to incorporate (pull) the changes (commits).
For "private" repos, the recipient would be a specific repo maintainer/owner. For "public" repos like the Linux kernel, the recipient is usually a publicly-archived mailing list.
[1] https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-request...
(You can't fake a fork without hacking the torvalds account, though, so maybe it really was him.)
> I don't do github pull requests.
> github throws away all the relevant information, like having even a valid email address for the person asking me to pull. The diffstat is also deficient and useless.
> Git comes with a nice pull-request generation module, but github instead decided to replace it with their own totally inferior version. As a result, I consider github useless for these kinds of things. It's fine for hosting, but the pull requests and the online commit editing, are just pure garbage.
> I've told github people about my concerns, they didn't think they mattered, so I gave up. Feel free to make a bugreport to github.
> Current state makes it very hard to mange/search/fork/open-issues etc
> especially for newcomers,
> please move the project to github so we can have nice disussions
> forks/prs etc goodness.
No. Never. Github is proprietary communications tool which requires
users to accept a terms of service and login. That gives power and
influence to a single entity (and a for-profit organization at that).
Contributing to unicorn is *socially* as easy as contributing to git or
the Linux kernel. There is no need to signup for anything, no need to
ever touch a bloated web browser.
The reason I contribute to Free Software is because I am against any
sort of lock-in or proprietary features. It absolutely sickens me to
encounter users who seem to be incapable of using git without a
proprietary communications tool.
I think his point about Tridgell's actions with BK reverse engineering were right, and El Reg was playing the OSS warrior card. It looks to me like Tridgell was trying to create a way to steal BK metadata - BK specifically required you to have a license to get that data.
OSS warriors annoy me as much as SJWs do, and seem just as narrow minded.
Why was that?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/14/torvalds_attacks_tr...
History has proven that necessity is a much better incentive, and produces better products than ideology.
I don't care much about the github website, because 99% of the time I use git from the command line.
Edit: or if your default sans-serif font has a super light variant installed, it might look very different from what was intended.
100 is a "sometimes food" for that giant header or over-sized pull quote.
Designers that insist that entire documents/web-pages must be "light and airy and always 100 font-weight" have A) never struggled with contrast or accessibility issues, B) maybe don't understand typography. "light and airy" also means "easily blows off the page and is unreadable".
Why not? Reader mode is just one button press away in Firefox for example.
It drops all of the non-article content on most sites and leaves you with a centered, decent width, blank-and-white version of the article that's almost always easier to read than the original.
[0]https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dom-distiller-read...
If you're arguing it's not a (implied-to-be-evil) monorepo because, well, it's really managed as independent fiefs who do all their work in separate integration stages... well, that's basically how every other major monorepo project does it. So if Linux isn't a monorepo, then there's no such thing as a monorepo in practice.
These are still centralized, but each organization can host its own server. A true decentralized solution would federate issues/tasks, pull requests/diffs and their comments, etc. similar to how Git federates changes.
I don't mind periodically using reportbug, but using something like Bugzilla is way more convenient.
Made me giggle.
Issue tracking you can already file against one or more repos and link them together. It's not ideal, but it'll do the job.
Is "pr against different repos of a monotree" not what submodules let you do? Update whatever things you want in whatever repos, and pull the submodule pointer update(s) as a single change in your monotree repo.
The issue tracking just won't fly for a community that large. Imagine the hours spent keeping everything aligned relevant and updated: all that is wasted time, plain and simple.
Why does this blog need to be whitelisted with Adblock Plus? See data-adblockkey in HTML source. Are there any ads in this page? (Maybe owner wants revenue from domain parking?)
Why is this blog not working with simple user agents that do not process javascript (e.g., curl, etc.)?
Problem is misconfigured DNS:
1 blog.ffwll.ch:
77 bytes, 1+2+0+0 records, response, authoritative, noerror
query: 1 blog.ffwll.ch
answer: blog.ffwll.ch 3600 CNAME danvet.github.io
answer: danvet.github.io 3600 A 192.64.147.142
Try that one with curl, firefox or elinks.
Correct address is 151.101.53.147.
Not sure about the Linux kernel (no enough experience) but same issue across multiple projects looks something necessary...
THE REST
M: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
L: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Q: http://patchwork.kernel.org/project/LKML/list/
T: git git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git
S: Buried alive in reporters
Are you serious? If Linus is a complete asshole and tells you to fuck off, and you don't like that, the problem is with you? How can you possibly defend that statement?
Consider that he might be right and not a complete asshole. Also, consider that you are not the person he insults but someone else. You're making up this strawman very craftily but it is still a strawman: people are coarse in their conversation all the time, it's not a big deal until the recipient declares it to be a big deal. And then they - not you, unless you are the recipient - have all the right in the world to feel offended and to respond in kind if you feel like it or to do it a bit more precise and with more grace if that's your make-up.
But for all the weight given to 'free speech' the fact is that all you're doing is trying to control someone else's language and I find that a far bigger problem than someone throwing out the occasional insult in the process of communicating with others, there are plenty of reasons why that could happen, personality, lack of patience, culture and so on and all of those would be less of an issue than someone deliberately trying to control how others communicate.
Now if Linus had said something like 'you're dumb because you're a woman' or something to that effect I could understand the outrage. But calling someone an asshole - justified or not - when you're not the person being addressed is not enough grounds to embark on a moral crusade and is not enough grounds to lie the diversity problem in tech at that persons feet.
> You're making up this strawman very craftily
I'm not making a straw man at all, and I resent your attempt to frame my argument in this way. Since this is how you choose to argue, I'm not going to engage with you any more.
If there is a specific case where you disagreed with Linus and he insulted you then I understand why you want to take this up in this way but I notice that Linus is not a participant in the discussion here so you're going to get the general case, not the specific one.
You've made up your mind about a person based on an online interaction that clearly left you seething and I'm perfectly ok with that. For all I know it was the defining point of your career and you've chosen to go into crusade mode, there is a good reason why I don't contribute to open source, I don't feel like getting heat from both maintainers and users. At the same time if I would go and do that I'd wear my flameproof jacket to work just in case. In short: lighten up, likely everybody but you has forgotten this interaction and it is a huge deal to you and hardly anybody else noticed. You should have seen some of the stuff that came my way on a public website, heck, even on HN I've been threatened with bodily harm.
Question: Did you contact him about this off-line, and did you try to work it out somehow? If not I'd suggest you do that, maybe you can get this behind you.