Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DigitalSea | Hacker News Reader

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This isn't about Linus not being allowed to rant. I was merely stating that Linus is starting to come across as an old bitter programmer who hates everyone and everything. It's pretty unprofessional for a guy of his stature and influence to go on these ranting tirades, professionals don't air their disdain for things publicly unless there is a valid reason, he just comes across as a jerk regardless of whether or not he's earned the right to do so, it's unprofessional.

If he's project manager for Linux, why was he surprised that that the Linux core is getting bloated? If he's a project manager, shouldn't he be managing the team to unbloat the operating system? I'd hardly call flaming your own team and operating system a contribution. Nothing about this makes me angry, Linus is a genius and he knows it which is why it frustrates me to see a guy like him resort to sometimes school yard words and ways of dealing with things.

Linux itself has already been through what Google has, remember the whole Microsoft debacle? Regardless of the verdict, pretty much every software company that has felt threatened by Linux I'm sure has tried some kind of legal action in some way, shape or form.

I earned my right to rant the day I got an internet connection, which was a very long time ago.

He's not really a project manager for Linux, to clarify what was said above; he is the coordinator of development of the Linux kernel, the very heart of the GNU/Linux operating system. For what it's worth, this is the largest software project that has ever existed by several orders of magnitude; it's seen hundreds of changes to its source code per day for the past decade. This is not a small project, and managing it is not a figurehead role.

Also, please note that Linus' way of interacting with other people online is, at least according to him, a calculated strategy which is part of his management style. For more details on this, it's instructive to read over his brief and entertaining (to me, anyway) document on kernel management style. [1] Here, he says revealingly that he doesn't think it's possible to be polite all the time, so it's better to try to criticize everyone equally "so evenly that nobody really ends up feeling like they get unfairly targeted. Make it inventive enough, and they might even be amused." He also says that politeness usually masks honesty, and that he doesn't think anybody is likely to trust you if you spend a lot of time being polite.

I think a lot of this has to do with his character, but it's worth noting that he is not oblivious to the way he comes off. He believes he's come up with an effective strategy for managing the incredibly large and important project he's in charge of, and it's hard to argue that it hasn't had some spectacular results. Even if you disagree with how he approaches it - and I emphatically would not approach any management job the way he does - you have to admit that he's conscious of what he's doing and he believes it has a purpose.

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/105375/

> For what it's worth, this is the largest software project that has ever existed by several orders of magnitude;

Hardly. Even just talking about publicly-available open source projects, consider e.g. FreeBSD.

... and how many contributors (individuals/corporations) can FreeBSD boast of?

I don't think that's true, although I'll admit I don't know the numbers. How many people are active on the FreeBSD Core Team? How many commits per day do they see?

I can't edit any more, but I've looked around, and this clearly isn't true. For some good details on the size of the Linux project, check out the beginning of this talk by Greg Kroah-Hartmann, one of the chief kernel devs; it's from 2008, but things have only moved faster on the kernel: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2SED6sewRw

     It's pretty unprofessional for a guy of his 
     stature and influence to go on these ranting tirades

It probably is unprofessional in the conventional sense, however if you think about what that word means, it really does not matter.

Professionals are people that provide a service in exchange for getting paid, versus amateurs (in the original meaning) that are people providing a service just for the thrills of doing it. Money is not the differentiator here btw, as amateurs are getting paid if what they do provides value to people. The difference is that of the primary purpose - professionals work for the paycheck, amateurs work regardless of that paycheck.

And the word "unprofessional" is used to refer to behavior that would lead to the absence of that paycheck. For instance, if you walked into a grocery store to buy some bacon and the seller's bad behavior would drive you away ... that's unprofessional and it is discouraged because it hurts the business, as it loses money.

In this particular case, Linux is widely popular and is getting even more so every day, in usage and in contributions. Linus not only has been doing this for the fun of it, but his driving of the project has been extremely effective as there is no other open-source project that scaled so well.

So he's not a professional. Who cares when he has done such a fantastic job?

You seem to be pretty ignorant about the subject matter. I suggest you do some reading first.

> This isn't about Linus not being allowed to rant. ... It's pretty unprofessional for a guy of his stature and influence to go on these ranting tirades

So, what you're saying is that he shouldn't be allowed to rant. Gotcha.

I would have said that in his profession, openly airing your views without self-censoring is probably a qualification.

To put it another way, discouraging geeks from ranting about what they think, can seriously damage the quality of your codebase.

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