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Comment by _bxg1 | Hacker News Reader

I would be terrified to ever try and contribute anything to Linux, lest Linus yell at me and call me stupid. Seems like he does that in every excerpt that gets posted here.

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> Seems like he does that in every excerpt that gets posted here.

That's because only messages in which he is yelling at someone get posted here. AFAIK, most messages he posts are neutral, but these are boring, so they don't get posted here. I just scrolled through LKML and found a random example of his normal tone (https://www.spinics.net/lists/kernel/msg2852881.html):

"So none of the patches looked scary to me, but then, neither did earlier versions.

It's the testing that worries me most. Pretty much no developers run 32-bit any more, and I'd be most worried about the odd interactions that might be hw-specific. Some crazy EFI mapping setup or the similar odd case that simply requires a particular configuration or setup.

But I guess those issues will never be found until we just spring this all on the unsuspecting public.

Linus"

I don't know about you, but the organizations/people that I work with would not tolerate repeated yelling/anger at people trying to do their jobs, or in this case, contribute to a free community project, let alone to the point of becoming a stain on the entire project and a frequent topic of discussion around the world.

You're quiet right that Mr. Torvalds is not in some permanent state of rage and does not respond inappropriately to all, maybe even most, messages on the lkml. But the fact remains that he and thus his project have a serious problem with hostility. I could understand flipping out on someone who was paid to do a job and didn't even try, someone who was deliberately introducing bugs, etc. But a simple disagreement between highly intelligent and dedicated FOSS developers never calls for this sophomoric behavior.

there is nothing fundamentally wrong with violent disagreement about technical issues, as someone who has been on the pointy end of the stick, you cant take it personally, its debate with people who have very strong feelings, about highly technical issues.

> organizations/people that I work with would not tolerate

Almost all organizations are highly dysfunctional...and in my experience particularly the ones that are intolerant of passionate discussion.

There is passionate discussion and there is personal attacks and insults.

The few cases I've seen posted seem to be exactly about someone deliberately inserting bad code and MOST work is done by people who ARE in fact being paid for this mediocre work AND know better.

Example https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=mty1mza

Glass door estimates Kay is presumably paid 80-160k for this work and people have somewhat a right to be angry if code like this is pushed.

And how successful these organizations and people are, compared to Linux?

There's a form of survivorship bias at play there..."Linus responds sensibly" doesn't normally get posted to HN or anywhere beyond the actual forum where he responded, for that matter.

That's probably true

Note that he only yells at people who have a long track of submitting patches, so he already has an established relationship with them. From what I hear repeatedly, he's polite and helpful towards the newcomers.

Linus is running one of the largest open source projects, he has probably communicated millions of times, everything is out in the open, but its only the handful of times he loses his cool that it gets posted here without context, without all his previous attempts to fix the issue, with people being difficult or obtuse, without context.

This kind of out of context discussion that gives rise to comments like yours seems far worse than anything he has said.

How many CEOs have managed companies out in the open for 15 years plus without ever losing their cool? There is no way to know as there is no transparency.

This is the open source equivalent of "We need a distributed system with sharded data replication to three regions in case we hit a billion users." If I ever get yelled by Linus on anything, I'll consider it great success.

Having been subscribed to lkml for years and generally followed the discussions at least at a casual level, this really isn't an accurate characterization of how Linus treats people in general.

However, your attitude is kind of what Linus intends to instill in those easily deterred by such behavior. He's not interested in your contributions if you're going to be a thin-skinned child about the development process and ongoing maintenance. Your contributions won't be perfect, and he's not interested in having to waste time beating around the bush in telling you so.

I don’t think that should stop you. The worry comes much later when your contribution is significant. Furthermore, his rants are not absurd IMHO.

I'm not a systems programmer so that wouldn't actually be the thing stopping me. That said, the validity of his rants would just make it worse...

For the record I was mostly making a joke, everybody

Jokes always have an additional truth payload. :j

Yeah, and when Linus gets put to pasture and betrization [] becomes mandatory, we can all stop laughing. Probably laughing won't be allowed either, anyway, too aggressive.

[] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_from_the_Stars

Why are you terrified by the idea of getting yelled at? What ever happened to sticks and stones?

Humans aren't robots.

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