Linus has often been a dick. Being offended at being abused for asking a question or doing a relatively normal thing is reasonable. (He's gotten better, recently, because even he acknowledges it's harmed the project.)
Moreover, I guess I have a different way to deal with offensive people even if they were serious - to ignore and scoff it off. I would never feel "offended" ever. Offense is taken and it is a choice. That's how I operate but your mileage may vary.
The guy is good a computers. He's less good a humans. Act accordingly.
That's part of the problem. A bunch of people effectively didn't have a choice but to put up with this sort of communication style because their job required them to interact with the Linux community.
> Offense is taken and it is a choice.
This is a meaningless platitude. Whether you take offense or not, sometimes the most productive response is to tell someone their behavior is counterproductive, instead of stoically shrugging it off.
It turns out when you ignore people, they get the point. You don't need to bark back at dogs. Keep your head up, mind your own business and move on.
Not getting paid for your work does not automatically entitle you to see your work used, or to ignore the standards put in place by those who would use it.
And yes, if everyone in Hollywood tried to contribute to every Tarantino movie, and showed up and didn't follow instructions, he'd probably yell at some folks too.
P.S. please add a (2012) to the topic, this is NINE years old who cares.
What a shame.
How many people contribute to the linux kernel? Let’s see how quickly you get jaded after dealing with people refusing to read basic instructions.
Also, reminder that not every contributor is desirable. Linus has a specific vision and criteria for his project. It’s true he could use kinder language, but I imagine he gets fed up having to deal with this sort of stuff over -decades-.
Also I do not accept the idea that my job exists because of him, so I have to have deference. Again, this is an abusive way to look at things, and puts people on pedestals that they deserve respect, but we do not deserve it in turn.
He can definitely do better regarding his language, that I agree with. But this specific instance isn’t even against the contributor but against GitHub.
“they deserve respect, but we do not deserve it in turn”
Nobody deserves respect. You may be referring to basic decency towards each other. He earned respect with his work and maintainership over the years and decades. Abusive language towards contributors is not appropriate, but that doesn’t mean they -deserve- respect either. The first step to becoming respected is learning to RTFM and submit patches according to how a project expects them. And for basically every rant of his I’ve seen, it was directed at someone who 100% should’ve known better, not random new submitters.
Linus has already apologized for his past outbursts, and I do not condone abusive language to people.
yikes, operating systems existed before linus.
The reality is such that Linus wrote Linux, people adopted it, and here we are.
“maybe finding another hobby”
It’s very easy to sit here in our armchairs and go “yeah he should just abandon his project”. I’m not sure how any of us would react to one of our projects growing to the scale linux has, but blithely suggesting one should just swap careers or hobbies (since programming is -just- a hobby apparently) is not productive at all.
> But if someone who 100% knew better did something they shouldn’t have, sometimes getting chewed out is appropriate.
I don't think this is unqualifiedly the case, and I very much don't think this is the case in a situation where a hapless stranger's transgressions only go as far as wasting five minutes of your time by making an unacceptable pull request.
It's selfish to assume that because you might be happy doing that, then all people should do that. Maybe he wants to work on Linux? Nobody is forced to contribute to or work on his project.
It's a good question. I am not advocating this behavior, just trying to circumvent his rants and see them as comedy.
Of course, the better choice is to not do this in the first place.
I think the negative effect that has or could be reasonably expected to have on the subjects of his comments is enormous and fundamentally unjustifiable in the context of running an open source project or a community. I sort of get it when it's aimed at an adversarial higher-order entity like NVidia (or Github for not letting you turn off pull requests on your repos), but absolutely not with human beings, no matter how frustrating it is to have to work with people who aren't fluent in your processes.
I think we should try to be kinder than that, and I don't think being kinder would have stopped Torvalds from getting useful patches out of contributors.