Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

Sarah according to those who know more than me wrote "the entire USB3 stack" and then in one discussion

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.stable/58049/focu...

thus reacted on Linus claims:

On Fri, 12 Jul 2013 08:22:27 -0700, Linus wrote: "Greg, the reason you get a lot of stable patches seems to be that you make it easy to act as a door-mat. Clearly at least some people say 'I know this patch isn't important enough to send to Linus, but I know Greg will silently accept it after the fact, so I'll just wait and mark it for stable'.

You may need to learn to shout at people."

Seriously, guys? Is this what we need in order to get improve -stable? Linus Torvalds is advocating for physical intimidation and violence. Ingo Molnar and Linus are advocating for verbal abuse.

Not _fucking_ cool. Violence, whether it be physical intimidation, verbal threats or verbal abuse is not acceptable. Keep it professional on the mailing lists.

Let's discuss this at Kernel Summit where we can at least yell at each other in person. Yeah, just try yelling at me about this. I'll roar right back, louder, for all the people who lose their voice when they get yelled at by top maintainers. I won't be the nice girl anymore.

I think she's definitely right. Keep it professional. The implementation of any piece of something can be stupid. It's often not because we want to make it that way, or because it's stupid as it is, it's stupid in a given context. Somebody like Linus is somebody who must handle at that level. There bluntness can help. Still it's about the context, not about what people who produce work are or aren't.

Just don't call people stupid, don't intimidate, threat or abuse them personally.

Linus' reply:

  Because if you want me to "act professional", I can tell you that I'm
  not interested. I'm sitting in my home office wearign a bathrobe. The
  same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm *also* not going to
  buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and
  backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because
  THAT is what "acting professionally" results in: people resort to all
  kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their
  normal urges in unnatural ways.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.stable/58049/focu...

Everyone should wear a tie from time to time, it's fun!

In all seriousness, this line of reasoning is pretty fallacious, Linus has somehow jumped from "not actively abusing anyone" to the conclusion that this inevitably leads to backstabbing and passive aggressiveness.

He provides no evidence to support this claim, and I think many of us who work in reasonable office environments know that this is just simply not the case. Don't let Linus's stature cloud the fact that he's making unsubstantiated claims and just expecting you to go along with them.

Linus just says that he doesn't want to "act professional". Remember that he may still feel that it is a hobby for him to work on Linux. He started it in his spare time and, even if he is technically payed to work on it by the Linux Foundation, he has the right to do whatever he wants with this project, including still considering it is a hobby. Would you like someone to tell you how you should speek with your friends outside work? By the way, people sending him patches are not his coworkers, except perhaps Greg KH. He can see them as friends or strangers or even as business people wanting to sell him stuff. You cannot compare his situation with the situation of people who "work in reasonable office environments".

Until my current job almost all my open source work was in my volunteer free time as well. Whether his fellow contributors are coworkers, friends, or just strangers who happen to know how to program, the abuse isn't acceptable.

Almost all my open source work was in my volunteer free time as well. And I try to be very polite and nice to others in my open source work as well as in my regular work and on forums.

But I don't try to impose my standards, or any work place standard, upon others.

Why do you think there is any abuse?

If you see 2 guys in the street, one insulting the other one, how do you know there is any abuse?

Couldn't they be very good friends that have been talking to each other like that since years? In this case, is there any abuse?

Isn't there a big difference between "this is shit" that Steve Jobs would say and something like "shut the fuck up"?

With first you can argue. With second, you're just suffering an attack of a bully.

On another extreme, I can imagine going buzzwordy like Microsoft would mark the death of Linux it is now.

It's reasonable to point to the cases where Linus crosses the line from "this is shit" (I think everybody can agree that he definitely has contributed enough to get the right to claim something like that, even in these words) to personal abuses.

Negative feedbacks are the only thing that protect every physical system and people too from going full wacko. Linus has the right to give a negative feedback, but should be expected to receive it himself when he crosses the line.

I'm a programmer and I do swear a lot, but I make 100% sure that I never swear at other people directly, especially if it's in a professional setting, especially not in an email. People don't get paid to hear you swear them, no matter how much they fucked up (and I don't even want to understand why "open source" contributors take up this shit without even being paid).

Maybe it's because I don't live in the "civilized" West, where the act of swearing has become something of a "look how cool he is", the parts of the world I live in you risk being beaten senseless (or worse) if you swear at someone in his face.

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