Karol Herbst Steps Down as Nouveau Maintainer Due to Linux's Toxic Environment | Hacker News Reader

Karol Herbst Steps Down as Nouveau Maintainer Due to Linux's Toxic Environment

phoronix.com

64 pointsevujumenuk46 comments

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Give up 70% of the way through the hyperstitious slur cascade

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/give-up-seventy-percent-of-...

I've yet to see anyone put this quote in context to show that the user of it meant it to be racist or offensive. Absent that context I take issue with people singling it out as an example of toxicity.

I'm not even convinced that we've hit the 70% mark on this hyperstitious slur cascade. I know a lot of people take offense at it, and if this keeps going then we'll certainly hit 70% within the tech world very quickly as people drop the phrase like a hot potato, but as of right now I'm not comfortable with the way that this maintainer is being attacked for a single phrase.

If they've demonstrated a pattern of toxicity, let's talk about that pattern, not about one hyperstitious slur.

It seems to be a largely American thing to think the phrase is bad (reasonably so, given how it has started to be used) and many others seem to not know what it means, evidenced by only understanding the current law enforcement use or their admission that they had to read wikipedia.

That said, for many people, it is a hostile phrase that refers to privileges that law enforcement provide for each other and those close to them but not others. Things like letting people out of tickets, misapplying situational judgements to make a victim look like the perpetrator, lying on the stand about it, etc.

In that context, it’s a phrase with bad optics. I see presumably why they chose the phrase but that also presumes they were not aware of how it’s used by many American police officers. It would otherwise seem incredibly tone deaf; well past the 70% figure among those circles.

But "those circles" is not "the entire Linux community", and it's unreasonable to expect the entire community to keep up with a small circle's latest slurs.

For most of the US for most of history, "the thin blue line" has been an unequivocally positive phrase describing people who stand up for what's right and protect against chaos. Whether we should have seen it that way is irrelevant to the question of whether we can reasonably expect an average Linux kernel maintainer to both be aware that some people take offense at it and adjust their language accordingly.

This kind of language policing is inherently discriminatory against older people who spent their early lives immersed in mythology surrounding police and haven't been exposed to the cultural shift, not to mention against people who live outside the US, were exposed to US media, but can't be bothered to keep track of US politics.

Ted Tso is an american, living in America. He was born in California and had worked in the us for most or all of his career.

I find it highly unlikely that he isn't aware of what meanings that idiom carries with it. It's possible but I'd need some serious convincing to believe he didn't.

Asian man uses historical quote that is being abused by racists, white man steps back because the language threatens marginalized groups. I just can't take any of this seriously anymore.

Toxic? More like "not willing to walk on eggshells around a single guy who doesn't even come with a printed manual of all his sensibilities".

Not just that, he basically demanded that one of them has to go:

"A maintainer speaking those words can't be kept. No matter how important or critical or relevant they are. They need to be removed until they learn."

The word "crybully" comes to mind.

Outside of his silly comments about marginalised people, it does genuinely seem a little strange that maintainers of the project view themselves as some sort of punisher-style police force.

That’s sort of what the phrase has started to mean because of how it’s used by many American police officers. It has more reasonable historic meanings.

The "historic" meaning directly references a military regiment standing their ground against the enemy (see "thin red line"). This particular quote has always evinced a highly adversarial attitude.

So? The problem with the police using it for its historic meaning is that they are ostensibly not a military force but they act like one; using the phrase makes it almost explicit. Why is it bad if these open source maintainers use it, presuming they meant this “hold the battle line” meaning?

It probably wouldn't be bad (or at least as bad) if they used the original which isn't tied to the politics of policing. The “thin red line” inspired the “thin blue line”, but they are distinct sayings with different denotation and connotation.

> tied to the politics of policing

Another commenter makes good points contrary to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43058238

Not that it is incorrect to say that the phrase is tied to policing, just that it is similarly not-incorrect to say it is not tied to policing. It is context-dependent. It’s not so obvious that this particular use of that phrase is at all related to police work.

The context that's missing for a lot of the left leaning people hearing this is that much of the population of the US still sees police officers as heroes worthy of emulation. The thin blue line between order and chaos is a powerful image for a lot of people, and it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with being a punisher style police force.

Interesting perspective. Where I live we appreciate police but we do not see them as line that holds society from chaos. Is US this fragile?

Not really, but there's a long history of media that puts police on a pedestal in a fight against darkness.

The more cynical would call it propaganda, but I think there's more to it than that: it dates back to old westerns and draws from a rich history of hero literature. The police became a subject of that pre-existing tradition.

The US is quite violent by developed world standards, and it borders Latin America, which is insanely violent even by poor world standards.

IIRC, of the 50 most violent cities in the world, 17 are in Mexico.

This means that a lot more people who have seen grisly things (beheadings by cartels etc.) are present in the US, and this raises the awareness about what could also happen in the absence of a police force.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43057687 ("Nouveau kernel maintainer steps down (freedesktop.org)", 12 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43043312 ("We are the "thin blue line" that is trying to keep the code high quality (kernel.org)", 166 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43036904 ("Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead (marcan.st)", 966 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42926732 ("[flagged] Hector Martin: "Behold, a maintainer sabotaging the Rust for Linux project" (lwn.net)", 22 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42932105 ("A Linux maintainer admitting to attempting to sabotage Rust for Linux project (treehouse.systems)", 14 comments)

Recent related threads

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43043312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43036904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42972062

If comments as benign as "thin blue line" causes fragile entryist/activists to flee, I say Ted and the kernel team are doing the right thing. Projects as critical as the Linux kernel shouldn't be battlegrounds for the grievance of the week, nor should they be platforms for proselytizing. Herbst and others like him leave long paths of destruction in their wake. Lots of projects have been turned upsidedown by the drama they seem to bring with them everywhere. The salient point is contributors need to be more than "drive by" submitters for their pet projects. This isn't specific to Rust in the kernel, look at how much of an uphill battle bcachefs was/is.

Why are the Rust people so dramatic?

Karol Herbst was the maintainer of nvidia drivers written in C for 10 years.

This isn't "Rust people".

From https://www.phoronix.com/news/Karol-Herbst-Nouveau-No, Karol Herbst is the maintainer of https://docs.mesa3d.org/rusticl.html which is written in Rust.

He also contributes to Asahi Linux, and is apparently good friends with Hector Martin.

It's surprising people are denying his contributions to Rust.

> It's surprising people are denying his contributions to Rust.

I don't think that's what's happening here.

A lot of the rhetoric around all of these situations has a framing of "Rust people" coming into the kernel, and then getting into fights with "Kernel people." It's often combined with various stereotypes of each group, that the Rust folks are younger, less experienced, that the kernel folks have been around the block a few times, etc.

But that framing just isn't the case. The people involved are both: they've been working on the kernel for a long time, and then want to use Rust to improve it.

So if you read your parent very literally, sure. But if you read it within this context, people are not saying that he doesn't write Rust code, they're saying that this idea of "Rust people" is irrelevant to what's going on.

All of this drama is coming from the Rust email thread. Please, explain to me how this is irrelevant? I have nothing against Rust in the kernel, but Rust people are definitely dramatic.

As you said it:

   and then want to use Rust to improve it.

They try to use blackmail and shaming to push for the rust in kernel agenda down our throat when they see that the community is not willing to.

What's so wrong about the thin blue line statement? I didn't know about this phrase before so I read the wiki page. Isn't the usage correct? Kernel maintainers need to ensure the kernel code doesn't become a unmaintainable ball of mud.

The statement's recent place in the public consciousness is largely because it was used as a pro-police slogan against the BLM/"police abolition" movement in the US. The Rust community, being overwhelmingly progressive, is already sensitive about supposed dogwhistles, as well as words that cause them negative associations, in computing (in the vein of "master"->"main" renamings); having that slogan used as a metaphor for keeping out changes that they want in a technical debate would be felt by some of them as an open taunt or provocation.

Hah, maybe Ted Ts'o is a savvier political operator than I took him for. Invoking a seemingly innocuous (to the mainstream) phrase with heavy undercurrents (to a minority) just to trigger their ire and making them seem unreasonable to any outsider is a great strategy if you have as yet been unsuccessful refuting the central arguments for Rust in the kernel on technical grounds.

...except I figure that at least in the US (where most of the people who can exert pressure on Linux development are located), the phrase's use in this capacity is actually fairly widely known. (It even takes up a significant part of the Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thin_blue_line)

It seems more likely to me that he used it out of a lack of political savvy than out of an excess of it, and that the pressure will now mount and he will be forced to make an apology or resign outright. It's unlikely that activists would take ignorance as an excuse, since they tend to consider ignorance of social justice conflicts to be a moral failing in itself.

I’m from the US. I had no idea “the thin blue line” carried any negative baggage with it.

Though to be fair, I tend to assume that everything has baggage with someone somewhere, since I’ve worked with people (middle aged white men, to be clear) who managed to be offended on other people’s behalf with nearly anything I said. For example, I never learned how to refer to women: saying any of ladies, girls, guys, or women, got me in hot water. I quit that job before I ever learned the secret, non sexist way to speak of or address women.

So, while I’m not surprised a middle aged white dude is upset by “the thin blue line”, I do have a natural inclination to sympathize with whoever used it.

The secret is not to refer to woman or man. They are all persons, and the gender they have, has nothing to do with their qualifications or fitness for the job.

The association with avoiding accountability (e.g. officers lying or otherwise covering up corruption) is as old as the phrase, it's not recent.

I like and use Rust as a language but if you look at the way the foundation and community manages itself maybe it indeed would be best to keep it out of the kernel if this childish behavior comes with it.

Woke (modern, post 2010-version) looks like a psyops campaign, designed to destroy the social cohesion of western societies.

Looking at what has happened since 2010 and how the vibe has changed, it seems to have been extremely successful.

It started soon after Russia's demands around European security were denied, and it initially spread from the places where Russia historically had most support: universities.

Wait so Russia made this person a primadonna? That sounds like a psyop too.

> The moment I made up my mind about this was reading the following words written by a maintainer within the kernel community:

> "we are the thin blue line"

> This isn't okay. This isn't creating an inclusive environment. This isn't okay with the current political situation especially in the US. A maintainer speaking those words can't be kept. No matter how important or critical or relevant they are. They need to be removed until they learn. Learn what those words mean for a lot of marginalized people. Learn about what horrors it evokes in their minds.

I opened the article relatively certain about the nature of the complaint. 100% confirmed.

Seriously? Really? It seems Herbst is the one that wants a non-inclusive environment (ie. exactly conforming to his personal political preferences). Additionally this looks like an excuse as he was already admittedly burned out.

In any case, good luck to Herbst in his future endeavors, hopefully he can develop a thicker skin.

Well stated.

> It seems Herbst is the one that wants a non-inclusive environment (ie. exactly conforming to his personal political preferences).

You have to understand that "inclusive" is newspeak and now pretty much always means that.

It's as predictable as it is concerning how much the Rust community has hitched its wagon to the US progressive movement. Is this an attempt to remove an adversary in an engineering debate by appealing to a political alliance? Or an attempt to remove a political adversary by appealing to engineering arguments? Either way, both politics and engineering are bound to suffer for it.

This has nothing to do with Rust.

How does it not? His resignation is a direct reaction to the circumstances surrounding the resignation of a core Rust-in-the-kernel personality over an argument about Rust in the kernel, and as the article points out his primary area of activity is another project (Rusticl) to introduce Rust into core Linux infrastructure (Mesa).

Yes, but this person is not involved with Rust for Linux.

If the rule is you break it, you fix it, I don't see why it should be anything different for a multi-language project. If the feature makes technical sense and people want it, it should happen.

Man steps back politely until he's able to politically grandstand about it - News at 11

Guy complaints about a maintainer not being inclusive and wants the person who said some certain words that hurt his sensibility to be removed because it does not match their personal standards. So much for inclusivity.

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