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Comment by luckydude | Hacker News Reader

I've known Linus for a long time and don't believe him to be malicious. Do you have context for that statement?

Linus has a sly sense of humor, I bet it was either directed at some code or it was in jest.

Here's the email. Jest may be hard to discern via text, but I if I had made that contribution (directly or indirectly) and was met by this response by the maintainer, I think it would be my last.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495

Actually, after reading it a few more times, I can't find any jest in it tbh

He’s essentially saying “this userland code is beyond stupid, but we don’t break userland so here’s how we can keep it working.”

The comment is neither aimed at the contributor (who works on kernel code) nor the reporter (who did not write the code). In fact if you read the rest of the thread you can see them concur and joke about it.

Are the people joking about it equals or can Linus decide who gets fired?

Both. The reporter is an equal, and the contributor is a subordinate (in a sense).

What ramchip said. If Linus had said that to a specific person it's unreasonable. Kernel people can be pretty salty, this is a little more salty that normal but not that much.

He's legitimately saying "yeah, we have to support this but you'd have to be bat shit crazy to think this is a good idea". And he's correct, going into the kernel for one byte at a time I/O is stupid.

"Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?"

Saying stuff like is just poor leadership and being as ass. This is like saying racist comments and brushing it off as a joke.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495

No, it was neither of those things. It was him being a jerk to someone who had the audacity to do something in a different way.

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