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Comment by DonaldPShimoda | Hacker News Reader

> I never thought Linus was in bad form. His project, his rules.

I think this is a problematic way to view things.

Linus was usually right on the technical aspects, but he often made personal insults that were really just irrelevant. There's no need to attack people personally to get your point across. Honestly, his attitude in many of those famous comments strikes me as immature — he presents himself as someone who would rather spend time berating a person who tried to make a contribution and didn't do a good job than simply explaining why their contribution isn't good enough.

Sure, "his project, his rules", but that doesn't give him carte blanche to be a dick to people without any repercussions. Just as he is entitled to speak his mind, so too are the people who felt that his comments were out of line.

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Insults are technically irrelevant but aggressive tone one proven way to manage open and popular projects (it's not the only one).

The problem with successful open source projects like Linux is not lack of good people, it's too many people wanting to contribute and push their ideas. Increasing the emotional stakes for committing, commenting or contributing helps. If your heart starts pounding before you press send, and you decide to read and think it again, the quality of communication and contributions increases.

Insulting someone is not as bad as politely not engaging. "Than you for participating." There is very popular and extremely PC open source project where the leadership politely avoids conflict. You try to push new ideas, corrections and features and the leaders never explains what is wrong with them or where they stand on things. People waste years before they realize that there is invincible barrier and passive-aggressive culture.

ps. I think SJW's have their place when the insults become gender based and diverge from the technical aspects. Linus-type leadership can evoke copycat behaviour that is not called for.

> he often made personal insults

Was it often?

I was never an ardent follower of his -- I primarily work in another field -- so I certainly haven't read or listened to all he's said. I did catch those handful of instances where he rocked the boat, but I don't recall the personal insults. Obviously that isn't to say it never occurred, but I'm wondering if he personally insulted people as often as you state.

Yeah, it used to be way more often > a decade ago. Most of the famous rants people know of are from more recently, and are fairly insulting.

I don't store old mailing lists, but the thing I generally point to is his statements towards the security community and, back then, specifically PaX team. I've stumbled on tons of personal attacks from him, either escalating an already negative conversation, or starting it himself.

I also challenge the "usually right". To my knowledge, Linus is quite often wrong. And that's fine, really, everyone is wrong a lot of the time. But hero worship, or feeling the need to excuse his behavior even somewhat due to a false sense that it's helping things, is not a good idea.

If you walk into my house, or request entry, I can treat you however I like. It's my house, my property. If you don't like it go somewhere else. We are all individuals. If he wants to be angry and make personal insults then people can choose not to interact with him or the things he works on. It should go no further than that.

>If he wants to be angry and make personal insults then people can choose not to interact with him or the things he works on

They did. Enough people said "hey if you keep behaving this way we will no longer want to interact with you or the things you work with" that Linus stopped acting that way.

It went no further than that.

And that's, in essence, what's happening...?

People are saying that "we will not work with you unless you stop being an asshole". It's just happening at the organizational level.

Linus is more than free to say whatever he likes, and people are also free to tell him to buzz off. That's how the rest of the world works.

This project influences a ton of people, and if we have a lot of contributors going somewhere else, we'll lose progress we could have gotten otherwise. Linux is bigger than he is now, progress on it helps millions of people directly or indirectly.

Think of it more like a company instead of a house. The founder doesn't have free reign to do whatever he wants to his employees. Everyone deserves to be treated respectfully, regardless of the situation.

I both agree with you, and disagree. Using your analogy... you've got 20,000 guests over at your house, and a bunch of them are telling you that you're being an asshole. You like the party you're having, and want to keep the party going. Do you listen to them and consider that there might be some validity to what they're saying? Or kick them out?

There's nothing saying that he must listen to them, but it's pragmatically probably a good idea.

The thing is with linux is the the party is going to keep on going regardless. He should just ignore them, because what are they going to do ? leave ? fork ? Then go ahead fork.

Not pay him hundreds of thousands of dollars every year, not contribute billions in development time, etc.

This is already happening. People already choose not to contribute to Linux and Fuschia isn't just some hobby project.

I don't think all of this really matter to him anyway. He started this linux thing for free.

Then why the attitude adjustment?

Which i don't think he should do.

You don't think Linus should reflect on his behavior from time to time and maybe change it if he no longer feels that it's a good idea for him personally or professionally? He should keep doing the same things, damn all the consequences, just because other people--people he may respect and trust--have told him it's probably not a great idea?

That's a hot take, indeed. Me, I think one should be constantly reevaluating what one believes and making sure one's actions are congruent with the life one wants to lead, but--you do you, I guess.

>You don't think Linus should reflect on his behavior from time to time and maybe change it if he no longer feels that it's a good idea for him personally or professionally?

He should, only if he is truly care about that.

And yet all your posts implicitly assume that he doesn't care.

Doesn't that level of cynicism...hurt? Like, personally hurt? It's not good, dude.

Thats the trait i personally like and admire about linus, the fuck you，my way or highway attitude.

So because you, for reasons that if I'm being frank don't seem great, like that he does that, he shouldn't reflect on his actions and decide if they're actually congruent with the life he wants to lead and the example he wants to set for other people?

Hm.

He should but every person definition on what life one want are different.

For example, someone want to just work on project according what his style and if other people feeling get hurt by this, as long as this project owner happy and fine by the situation then the logical action he should take is to just ignore the them.

Some other people who do care about other people feeling then sure, they should listen to them.

These 2 people are different so too differ on what life they want and what makes them happy.

There are no right or wrong from any this.

> He started this linux thing for free

In 1991 as a college student. The situation has changed drastically. I'd guess his primary source of income matters greatly if it were to disappear or drastically shrink.

So were are back to "if you offend me, I take your job away".

He clearly has added value. He has run one of the MOST successful projects EVER. Most CEOs are never this successful, to so say he is not doing something mostly right is weird to say.

> so say he is not doing something mostly right is weird to say

He has done a lot of things right! But that doesn't mean that he needs to continue with personal attacks during patch reviews and feature discussions in a public forum.

Does it seem possible that the quality of the project could have remained the way it was without things like this being said to contributors (no matter how misguided they are):

> 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?

Yes, reading anything one byte at a time is generally a bad idea. That patch should not be accepted. But... saying things like that probably isn't necessary to get the point across. People have been telling him that for a long time, and he's finally sat back, reflected on it, and decided to change.

I don't think anyone's suggesting that the project hasn't been wildly successful, nor that it hasn't generally been a great project to contribute to. But over the years there's been some pretty wild things said to nominally-valued contributors, and some of them have left over it.

That is if you care about other people feeling.

He's not a CEO. I'd be shocked to see a CEO behave this way and have a board that continues to support them.

Fuschia isn't existing because Linus occasionally flames people though. It's because Google has tons of employees who want to write operating systems, and maybe because of the desire for driver ABI stability.

One problem with your nuance here is that this is the internet. Numbers mean basically nothing when one group with extreme views can then go 'alert' their echo chamber to an 'incident.' Whether the only comment you receive is me or whether it's me and my 50,000 adherents should not sway you more or less. What should or should not sway you is the logic in what I say. And so too with Linus whether 10 people say something or a million people say something is nowhere near as relevant as what they say.

"The logic in what [you] say" is part of it. Your humanity does, too.

"That hurts me and you should stop" need not be "logical" to be deserving of respect.

Do you not intuitively see the problem with your argument?

"You claiming women should be treated equally to men hurts me, you should stop."

Do you care or respect this view? What if you consider the fact that there are hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people that would completely genuinely state and agree with the above? Does that somehow make it a more legitimate claim? Obviously not. This is precisely why logic is what matters. Appeals to emotion can be used to argue for great or awful things using the exact same language which ultimately makes the entire notion completely pointless. This is likely the reason the word pathetic has the etymology that it does. At the point one is appealing to emotion, they've long since lost the thread.

I'd also add here that behind nearly all great travesties in history there was some charismatic leader who likely thought he was in the right, swaying people largely through appeals to emotion to his cause. And this is because emotion sidesteps the necessity of actually having to show that e.g. the people you are demonizing are actually bad.

I see the asserted problem. I discount it, in this very specific sphere, because at present the protests of "but the logics!" is acting as a sinecure for shitheads.

Not empowering shitheads is more valuable to me than Emerson's foolish consistency.

When the situation on the ground changes--and it hasn't yet, don't @ me--I will reevaluate my position, because my brain works and I do not feel tethered to immutable positions (on topics like this, at least).

I fully respect the honest reply. That is surprising and refreshing. This is the point that most people begin to engage in mental gymnastics. The one thing I'd clarify is that I'm not critiquing what your opinion is. Everybody is entitled to their own perspective on issues, and like you implied many of those those views will, and should, change over time. Imagine if you held all the views you did when you were 16, or 20, or so on upwards, depending on your age. That'd be quite the underdeveloped individual!

The only thing I'm critiquing is how you came to your view. It's a rationale that, as illustrated, leads to views you'd obviously never endorse. So should the views of masses of people mean something? Of course my opinion on this is clear, but I think if you want to argue that it does surely you must be able to find some form of logic or evidence to support the view. Alternatively, you might even focus on how Linus' behavior is likely harmful to himself. I think it's extremely likely that he changed his views not because he changed his actual view, but because he got tired of years of harassment because of his behavior. But of course such harassment is to be fully expected when you act like a dick. Catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and all that. I don't really agree with these notions, but they are at least reasonable and mostly logical.

Expect you are wrong. Its like having a party of 20,000 guest over and a hand full of them are complaining. I have read enough comments to know that nowhere the majority of people seem to care what Linus says.

Enough seem to have a problem that Linus thinks that, to be a better and more effective leader, he has to improve his behavior. Nobody made him do it. He listened and reflected and changed. That's what a decent leader, and a decent human, does.

Why does that have you, to use a Linus-ism, so hot under the T-shirt?

I don't buy that for a second. I think Linus is smart, and knows there is a mob out there ready to enforce and pounce for language they don't like.

Its odd, that people keep saying this. He is the leader of one of the largest most successful projects mankind has seen. He has the most diverse portfolio from around the world. But yet, some how what he has done has not worked, and is not working...

Linus has always struck me as a decent guy. Decent people look at what they're doing and decide if it's actually the way they want to live their lives. The cynicism in your take speaks more to you than to him.

And the rest of your post blows my mind--the idea that something can work and yet be imperfect, can work and yet can be better, is so foreign to you?

Me, I'm always trying to improve. Why shouldn't he?

> something can work and yet be imperfect.

I never said it was perfect, I just commented on what he was doing was worked well considering the goals of the project.

> can work and yet can be better, is so foreign to you?

Absolutely not, I just think the methods being used to achieve the "better" in question is actively making it worse.

And yet you immediately discount the notion that Linus might thing that it's...not making it "worse".

Which I find kind of interesting, you know? He might just actually know what's going on in his own head.

Yes, that's why people asked him to get a handle on himself. Because he has driven away dozens of talented contributors with his bad behavior.

Nope, Linux stopped being Linus's house a long time ago. the fact that thousands of developers have contributed to it made linux what it is right now. you cannot ignore the millions of lines of code contributed by non-linus humans purely because of the virtue of it being opensource. This childish mindset that its 'mine' (mind you not Linus but other projects) has led to unnecessary fragmentation in opensource world and led it to the state it is in now.

regarding the situation at hand, linus is effectively a project lead for linux. though I understand the need to create a certain persona or quality-barrier for maintaining quality of linux, I feel his personality & the name calling attitude is actually hurting the kernel community and hindering more active participation.

> the fact that thousands of developers have contributed to it made linux what it is right now.

If I invited you over to help me work on a car in my garage do I now not own my car?

Linux is much more than just the code. And the fact that it simply was not forked to remove Linus shows you this. It is his project, he is the gate keeper.

The communications which people are talking about are those which were seen by the world, which is quite beyond anyone's "home", and the public having commentary about it is a kind of natural reciprocation. "It should go not further" (than the home?) is a little odd when things are being hashed out in front of an audience of thousands.

> If you walk into my house, or request entry, I can treat you however I like.

If you then give out keys to dozens/hundreds/thousands of other people to come over whenever they want and tell them "Make yourselves at home", you can't be surprised when they start calling you out for shitting in plastic bags in the living room and leaving them there for guests to find.

You can try to kick them out, but you'll find it difficult at this point, and you'll lose a lot of your friends in the process.

Choices have to be made: do you stick to your guns, or do you choose to reevaluate how you're living your life?

> If you walk into my house, or request entry, I can treat you however I like... If he wants to be angry and make personal insults then people can choose not to interact with him or the things he works on. It should go no further than that.

This is inconsistent. Even if you believe OS projects are like “homes” and bullies have the right to treat people however they like in their homes... By the same logic everyone, typing on keyboards in their own homes, has the right to criticize bullies and express their opinions. By proclaiming “it should go no further” that keeping quiet you are implicitly placing restrictions on what they can do in their homes. Heck, they can even do it in your home if they want, until you uninvite them.

"Linus was usually right on the technical aspects"

Memory overcommit. OOM killer. "Security is just a bunch of masturbating monkeys"

Linus is frequently extremely wrong on the technical aspects, in addition to being a huge jerk

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