Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulCarrack | Hacker News Reader

What he said wasn't even nearly as bad as what I've seen Linus say in other threads over the years. Is / was Linus Torvalds ever subject to a "tribunal" like Kent just was?

In the end, it's the users that end up suffering. The guy (Hocko) kept making mistake after mistake and Kent struggled to get him to do anything remotely net positive with regard to the issues in that original thread.

I'm not arguing that what Kent did was right or wrong, but I would be curious to hear what other ways people work with remote developers who are awful, especially when they work for other companies. You can't just fire them, so I understand the frustration here.

View on HN

Yes, Linus took some time off to “learn empathy” https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...

And I would say on a whole his behavior after 2018 has been less rude although he is still quite frank when necessary. I think it’s a positive change.

I think Linus’s message from 2018 is good perspective here: when someone behaves in a way that harms the mission of the kernel it’s better to try to change that behavior at the expensive of that person’s contributions for a limited time, rather than having the bad behavior negatively impact all other contributors forever.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/9/16/167

There is a huge difference between "frank" and "abusive."

One does not need to be abusive to "tell it like it is" (the most common phrase I heard people utter in defense of Linus's abhorrent behavior toward developers.)

Linus was a bully who let authoring the Linux kernel go to his head and inflate his ego.

The current CoC came out from a particularly bad incident with Linus, which he signed off on at the same time as he went into therapy and started working on himself. There is a remarkable difference in the before and after.

> I'm not arguing that what Kent did was right or wrong, but I would be curious to hear what other ways people work with remote developers who are awful, especially when they work for other companies. You can't just fire them, so I understand the frustration here.

They absolutely can "fire" them, by making a decision not to accept any contribution from them.

> I'm not arguing that what Kent did was right or wrong

You are actually arguing that it was right.

> The guy (Hocko) kept making mistake after mistake and Kent struggled to get him to do anything remotely net positive

That’s not really an excuse for abuse. This kind of comment is why we need a CoC committee in the first place. There is something deeply wrong when community members openly state that insulting other people is ok because they are not productive.

> You can't just fire them, so I understand the frustration here.

You can and should just ignore them. It is not mandatory to engage with people you disagree with and find unproductive especially on the internet where filtering them out is not that difficult.

Less extreme but also working is to just engage them less often. If you slow down the conversation, there is less space for them to annoy you.

But he's not arguing that it's right. That's a proactive action, not a default reaction to not arguing it's wrong.

Kent's comment is on the line, but it doesn't look abusive. Frankly I'm more curious about the assertions rather than the phrasing, which I think is only the offensive part.

Did Michal make mistake after mistake? Did he assert that crashes are better than error handling? Did his comments or actions logically lead to that happening? That does matter in system robustness.

It seems the meat of the statements Kent made were not explored, merely that he said them harshly. Holding back development because someone wouldn't apologize publicly seems pedantic. If Kent is being hyperbolic, ie inaccurate, that's the bigger concern.

Around the time the CoC was being established, Linus went to therapy. If I recall correctly, some people had spoke to him about his behaviors and he decided to do something about it. I think it was done in private so it's unclear how much of it was pressure vs his own decision. His tone has become much less aggressive since.

He's been unpleasant also after he came back. Not as extreme maybe, but certainly not nice.

He should get some tips from Theo. :D

Honesty is often unpleasant, especially when someone tells us that our work isn't good enough. But it is a required thing from a leader. The important thing is that he's cut down on needless personal insults.

But Linus isn't honest. I'm sure he thinks he is, but he's not always "objective". So while he thinks he's being honest, what he's saying can be untrue anyway.

And of course he's Linus and you're a nobody so nobody will ever listen to the other side of the completely subjective "facts"

Being honest doesn’t have anything to do with being objectively correct, unless a person is presenting their subjective feelings as objective fact.

Saying to someone “your work is not good enough for me” is a subjective statement; whether or not it is honest depends on whether or not it is reflective of the speaker’s beliefs about the quality of the work.

A leader not speaking up when they receive subpar work is dishonest, and it is fundamentally unfair to the person doing the work.

Well I can be completely honest and tell you that the earth is flat. Do you see now that being objective is also needed?

1) only if you truly believe the earth to be flat 2) the earth being a sphere is an objective fact that can be proven by multiple means.

You would either be mistaken if you believed the earth to be flat, or a liar if you didn't.

That also has absolutely nothing to do with your original claim -- that Linus has been "dishonest" because his opinions about technical matters discussed on LKML aren't objective. There is a fundamental difference between stating a fact ("the earth is a sphere") and an opinion ("this work is not up to my standards" or "I do not agree with your approach to solving this problem.")

Note: being rude in expressing their opinions might make a person an asshole, but it does not make them "dishonest."

> 2) the earth being a sphere is an objective fact that can be proven by multiple means.

Thanks for telling me the point I was trying to make. It's very useful -_-'

> There is a fundamental difference between stating a fact and an opinion

There is, but often people mistake their own opinions for facts.

I'm sure Linus knew perfectly it was an opinion and not a fact because when he spoke about the issue we were having at a conference he kinda glossed over the bits that would have made it at least doubtful he was correct.

But of course people who hadn't read the mailing list and had no context had no choice but to believe he was absolutely right and forced to deal with very unreasonable people.

Had he said the full story, nobody hearing him would have thought he was completely right.

I don't think there is any point in continuing this conversation. You originally posted that someone was being "dishonest" because he wasn't "objective." That is simply incorrect, in the same way that stating the earth is flat is incorrect.

I wasn't party to whatever conversation you had with Linus, so I can't comment on your anecdote or if or how it relates to the argument(s) you are trying to make, other than to point out that nobody is 100% objective. That includes you.

Have a nice day.

> I don't think there is any point in continuing this conversation.

Truly, you made your decision before reading what I wrote.

No, it is not a "required thing." Furthermore, a leader should set an example and be aware of how their stature keeps others from providing feedback to them about their behavior. For example, cops in many departments are taught to work at being exceptionally polite on the road, because they won't get the "you're being an asshole" feedback the rest of us do. Nobody's going to honk at them or curse them out for cutting them off.

"This isn't good enough, your code is sloppy as shit" - you're being an asshole.

"We have a coding standards and conventions round commenting and formatting. I encourage you to rework your patch with that in mind and re-submit it, because at least on cursory examination, your code looks solid."

"Thank you for resubmitting. This is much more in line with what we prefer. Now we'll be able to take advantage of the work you've done to fix this problem."

Linus did take a break to work on his anger issues and he has been very noticeably improved these last 6 years. While I don't think it was due to a tribunal, but I think enough other developers told him in private to work on it.

https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/17/linus_torvalds_linux_...

Came a bit too late for me; I spent some time fixing bugs in an ISDN driver in my teens, but Linus’ reputation prevented me from ever trying to upstream it.

From having dealt with him personally, you probably saved yourself a lot of trouble.

The CoC is new, so no Linus wasn't subject to it in the past.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com