Maybe this will finally end the myth that "you can be rude and insulting as long as you're right" that people seem to attribute to Linus's outbursts
Social skills and emotional intelligence aren't fluff that smart people don't have to deal with. If you want to make great software and create great organisations you have to treat people with professionalism and respect.
Well...That seems to be the actual case. Our current system seems to not to respect people, or the planet (or other animals besides humans.) It seems to respect money, 'productivity', 'efficiency' and 'growth'.
Absolutely the rest of us who are just nice and pleasant as part of our day to day should continue to do so, we just need to remember that their isn't really a justification for ad hominem attacks as part of professional discourse.
So far as that goes, my mind works the same as Linus. I err on the side of praise, which makes me different - although my lack of praise for some individuals probably speaks as loud as Linus' vitriol. Your ability is not a reflection of your character, i.e. "you are not your code."
I have no interest in maintaining Linux, maybe I would 20 years prior to now when choices were generally more than "drivers." That being said, Linus would make an excellent mentor for those who can separate their code and themselves.
He is an artisan, in the most classical sense. Every one of his maintainers is an apprentice. It's an incredibly unpopular perspective to have - but the epitome of professional decorum is to attack a person's work without attacking their life.
Smart people are able to discern the difference between their work (which is fallible) and themselves (which is infallible). I am a great developer, but the fact that even better ones exist is inspiring and I'd hope they would tell me what I'm doing wrong.
My assignment for the next N sprints is to clue up employees on debugging prod. I will destroy that assignment but, hell, I would prefer to work with people who cared enough to research it themselves; as I did.
There is a difference between blunt honesty and being rude. Honesty is pointing out that you're not pulling your weight, or how you did something was incorrect and not up to the teams standards. Rude is calling you names or otherwise insulting you. The insults also often lack any reference to the issue. Telling someone they are an idiot does nothing for that person or the team.
To be fair, he has incredible judgment and we defer to him when it comes to being the road block to merging bad code.
He doesn't seem to hesitate to get extremely personal.
Show me an instance where his cursing is not related to kernel code.
I think I and many others are reading your statement as:
"Hey, as long as the person wrote horrible code, it's OK to call the coder anything we want".
The whole discussion isn't about how he behaves outside the kernel development. It's about how he behaves within that context.
That's objectively not true. He may intend to curse the code, but he is clearly cursing the coder.
He wrote:
>I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F*CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted
"retroactively aborted" is a dark joke, if you have a sense of humor, and conveys how bad a decision Linus think is to make a system call to read each byte.
saying "should die as a baby" is a spin. To be precise is important.
I'm not sure why it would be any different. Just because I make a mistake (sometimes leading to a chain of mistakes) doesn't solely make me an idiot.
Similarly would I contribute to an Free/OS project with such people for free? Hell no.
Many things fail when they get pecked to death by ducks. His forceful personality carried the day on many occasions.
BUT - there's a world of difference between being 'forceful perceived as jerk' and 'demeaning and needlessly insulting or derogatory'.
Never a reason to put people down.
In Linus' 2008 speech at Google talking about Git, he said he created it partly to avoid politics - he can just have people copy his stuff into their own repo and go off yonder and not have to deal with them.
What would Steve Jobs have been known for if not for his turtleneck? /s
Haven't heard that idiom before, but its interesting.
He probably would, because he's a fairly prodigious developer working on hard problems. He was already noteworthy long before the modern era of the Internet, simply for getting early Linux working.
Being a jerk didn't create Linux and git. Hard work did.
EDIT: That having been said, my personal opinion is that Linus could stand to tone it down a bit. He often goes beyond "unrelentingly firm on quality" and into "personal attack", the line between them can be subtle but hopefully he'll figure it out without becoming a pushover.
Yeah, reading the comments here, I'm not so hopeful.
It is not the trueness or falseness of that myth that has changed, but the mainstream in the society.
The truth is you can have both but if you put such a high importance on being right, all the time, then you’ll drive most people away.
> And rudeness can be very called for in response to evil.
You have constructed quite the strawman to argue against the myth, well done.
The point being that while less than ideal it isn't unsuccessful in itself. Extremes are useful for extrapolation - even if it will never reach that point it is helpful to have the worst in mind to be vigilant of the flaws it may start to drift into.
How one handles human failure is important, just as it is with handling bad input in code.
A quack no matter what redeeming factors they may have is in the "wrong" even if his potions help via placebo effect or sheer accident like treating unrecognized dehydration simply by being water based.
Indefinitely was defined in the sense of viablility in flows. An actual business who provides a real product for sufficient margins can sustain itself indefinitely. Others may do better or circumstances may conspire against it but there is nothing stopping its success. It is a matter of ratios of course - right but rude may succeed with a sufficient base but if he alienates too many they are still doomed.
One which is fundamentally based on something wrong like say Theranos would collapse inevitably. Even if the entire world bought in. No matter how much they tried to work on fingertip blood testing they would find it inaccurate because the composition isn't the same as veinous blood. If they never lied about their viability it would merely be a noncriminal failure that ends when investors pull the plug or they run out of money. Unless they shifted to something viable successfully of course in which case they are no longer wrong.
Ironically noninvasive scanning of blood would have more potential for research success - while a very hard problem there is at least the data hidden within to be decoded. Alt-Theranos that shifted to it may still go bankrupt before they get a viable product from the tech not being ready but they would be on the right track and success before others were ready would pay off. Doctors loved noninvasive blood pressure measurement and would love a second by second view of blood chemistry.
You can absolutely be rude and insulting as long as you're right.
What is the basis for this "might makes right" axiom when it comes to collaboration? I mean, obviously, anyone -- winners and losers -- can choose to be rude and insulting for any reason they'd like, they aren't barred by law or regulation. What tangential or moral benefits do you believe come from adopting a "winner has the right to be rude" mentality, particularly in an open source community? I think it's almost self-evident what the drawbacks are -- for example, that the risk of humiliation might stifle people's willingness to debate at all -- so what are the upsides to fostering that kind of environment?