Linus Torvalds Explodes at Red Hat Developer
linux.slashdot.org
linux.slashdot.org
So it takes strength and conviction to be rude and condescending? I'd say it takes strength to remain polite in a heated argument. I'm not impressed with Torvalds' attitude.
I think nobody takes Linus's insults at face value anymore. I'd actually laugh my ass off if I was a kernel developer and got told off by Linus.
People see Torvalds doing it, they see de Raadt doing it, they see a bunch of people doing it, and so they think it's okay to do it in their email list.
This increases developer churn and burnout, and that's not something that OpenSource can afford.
I think it's a shame if young people are learning how to collaborate with others from these broken models, rather than learning effective skills. Especially if inter-personal skills are more likely to be weak in the dev community.
Having said all that, I kind of agree that it's okay for someone to be an arse on their own pet project. If it becomes unbearable people could just fork it split and the project.
Better explanation here linked from Slashdot here (the actual mailing list site is down.) http://www.muktware.com/5276/linus-torvalds-secure-boot-supp...
Taken right from the comments on the linked article: http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3492573&cid=43...
Regarding his words: I honestly don't know why I'm still surprised when he does/says things like this, and I still don't know how I feel about it. The way he instantly reaches for his bag of obscenities seems a bit childish, but he does more often than not get his point across.
I have to wonder if he uses such language so often because he knows tech news is going to report on it when they might not if he were to gently rebuke a kernel dev? It should be noted that after his rant at Nvidia (http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/17/3092829/linus-torvalds-fuc...), Nvidia driver support became a hotly discussed topic and very soon became significantly better. In that regard, Linus seems to get things done and for that, I commend him.
On the other hand, he tends to curse and complain a lot on his g+. It's fairly likely that's just all him.
You can only take so much.
It elicits the same emotional knee-jerk response, just don't.
I wonder what would've happened if he was addressing a female kernel developer. Would he have toned it down or would it have been the same? On one hand I like the straightforward talk without beating around the bush, but on another, taking it down a notch or two and getting the same idea across more diplomatically seems to be the better answer.
Wait, someone using crude, derogatory language to describe someone else is not offensive? Describing your opponent as wanting to deep-throat a competitor is merely impolite now?
How socially clueless are we around here?
I'm so very sick and tired of the apologists here. Our industry is known for prima donnas who are constantly at each others throats, with no semblance of civility whatsoever. We are the only industry I've ever seen where we take pride in being callous, insensitive, and deliberately terrible to each other.
All under the guise of "not playing by The Man's rules".
This is very Jobsian. He knows what's right, and he's dressing down people who also knew what was right but did the wrong thing anyway. People act as if Jobs was a tyrant badmouthing random innocent people. He wasn't. He was actually pretty genial most of the time. What would set him off was not when someone made an error, but when someone did the wrong thing and they knew it was wrong at the time, but did it anyway.
Jobs was the keeper of the flame of "do the right thing" (my phrase for it) which always involved the right thing for the customer (which is why Apple doesn't follow trends, and rather than make netbooks made the iPad, a superior customer experience.)
Linus is doing the same thing here. For Torvalds the customer is a different customer, both linux users but a lot of developers and the open source community at large. But he's keeping the flame as he sees it, and history indicates he's pretty accurate.
As to another commentators wondering if this would happened if the submitter was female, it really shouldn't matter. I'd like to think that Linus reacted to the error, not the person. It's true that taking it down a notch or two and being more diplomatic is appropriate, almost all the time. It's clear that Torvalds is this way almost all the time, which is why he has such a lovable teddy-bear image, for the most part. The power of blowing up on someone is not when you're doing it, but in the knowledge that there is shit up with you will not put. That's the power.
Also, there's nothing really that gender specific in what he said. Both men and women could engage in hypothetical "dick sucking contests".
Frankly, the average female engineer I've known is tougher than the average male engineer I've known (who tend to be a bit on the wimpy side, while the women tend to be a bit less wimpy than average for people.) But that's just my experience, and consequently anecdotal. The point being that I don't really believe that female engineers are desperate for people to protect them, and that most of the "software development is So Sexist!" people are non-engineers looking for an excuse to be outraged. Some evidence: all the hate towards "brogrammer" stuff, which it is painfully obvious to everyone inside the industry is an inside joke lampooning male programmers by contrasting those pasty nerds with the tanned jock stereotype that beat them up in high school. To act like "brogrammers" are perpetuating a male sexist culture is to, in the most profound way possible, not get the joke!
However, there is sexism... and the reaction from the sexists would be much different if he had been addressing a female. But that's not sexism on Linus's part- in this hypothetical he was saying the same thing in both cases. But if he'd said it to a female, the knee jerk sexists who want to see sexism everywhere (except in themselves) would have reacted quite differently.
Let Linus be Linus, and Jobs be Jobs. We don't need to classify people as "the next [insert name]". Not least because it does them both a disservice; Linus is in a very different position from Jobs, and admirable for completely different (but occasionally overlapping) reasons, and his merits and demerits are his own.
Which is sort of the point here: the "shim signed by Microsoft" trick isn't the "Wrong Thing", really. The hardware companies absolutely need a top-level cert authority if secure boot is going to have any utility at all, and Microsoft is the only entity that has stepped up to the plate. What else are we going to do? Dell and Lenovo and Acer aren't about to add a key to their database (and test it) just because the Linux Foundation asked nicely. They're shipping windows hardware. That's not going to happen. So the Shim idea is as good as we're going to get, and as Red Hat (and SUSE, and Canonical) has to ship a product that runs on real hardware, it's the choice they had to make.
That said, I think there's a strong argument that baking this authority into the kernel is a bad idea. Linus clearly agrees (and frankly mjg probably does too, but you can't just write a feature and not try to upstream it). And he's made that point as forcefully and publicly as he can.
I get the impression that it's a lot easier to be the first at bat when you own the ballpark.
Yes, and this is an important lessons to people who underestimate the importance of communicating effectively. If you walked onto the stage at the Oscars wearing assless chaps, you can hardly blame people when they can't remember what your thank-you speech was about.
Similarly, when you throw around ad hominems about your opponent performing fellatio on a competitor, you cannot blame people when the discussion recenters around it.
Of course, no one is always going to get that right; we're human. But that's also exactly why it's so important to try hard. You can be certain that as soon as you slip even once your message will not get across in the way you intend it.
No, spectators on slashdot and HN do not actually matter, despite how hard our ego may make it to internalize that.
Unlike bullies in corporations, this guy is incredibly easy to just ignore; the only reason people don't ignore him is because despite being a meanie, he still commands respect. If he didn't, he wouldn't be in the picture.
>Where are all of these people with patches that they have been holding on to for feel of the wrath of Torvalds, and why haven't they banded together and just ignored him?
On my hard drive and a million other people like me. Not for the linux kernel in my case, but other open source projects that I don't post my fixes to because it's probable that I'll just get flamed and it isn't worth the stress. If you don't realise how endemic this problem is then I can only presume you don't know any programers who aren't part of the 'boys club'.
Torvalds can get away with it because linux is huge, but there are hundreds of other projects that struggle through lack of contributions.
Next time some software you use crashes or hits some kind of bug, consider that you are probably not the first person to experience it and somebody somewhere probably already fixed it but didn't upload the patch because they didn't want to get abused.
If there are really millions of developers sitting on patches because they don't want to deal with mini-Torvalds, then you really should start a movement.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5112713 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5112665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5112513 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5112763
Here is my perspective though: for the past week I have been sitting on a few commits for git that I would get flamed for if I aired them publicly. Why am I so sure I would get flamed? Because if I am honest with myself, it is because the change is shit. The change is not backwards compatible, has only hypothetical use-cases, and has questionable support in the UI. Until I resolve those things I know it would be flamed (or worse, and more likely, ignored). Now, I'm not sitting on it because I know it would be flamed, I am sitting on it because I know it is shit. If I fix those things, and I don't conduct myself like an asshole when my baby gets curtly shot down, I am fairly confident that I won't be verbally abused. If I am, who gives a shit?
I suspect most people sitting on patches for fear of being flamed, if they are honest with themselves, are so sure that they will be flamed because they understand why they would be. Are there a few who have good changes that are irrationally afraid of being flamed? Yes, I am certain of it. Are there some projects currently headed by people who flame good patches? Absolutely, glibc a few years ago was such a project... but Linux is not one of those projects today.
http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2012/10/14/2gb/
I found a problem in production, figured out what was going on, wrote a workaround, mailed out a patch, and ... they hated it. I didn't want to fight forever. So, I took my ball and went home, so to speak.
Months later, a different, nicer, person came to me and asked if I still had it. Fortunately for him, I had kept a copy of the change separate from our SCM in my home directory. I handed it over, he merged it, and that was the end of that problem.
Perhaps this is the case but people who are naturally timid online are also less likely to organize?
Tell that to the elderly lady at Whole Foods who got demeaned because she didnt make Steve's slushie just right.
You should tell that to the DevChix mailing list. I agree that the "dick-sucking" comment is non-gendered, but don't for a second think that there isn't sexism in this industry.
A good alternative phrase to 'D#$% sucking!' is 'ass kissing!', however I guess it is hard to censor our own language in an online forum while thinking about some technical issue at the same time.