Linus Torvalds defends his right to shame Linux kernel developers
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
But there are lots of other companies that are successful where people don't act like jackasses. For example, Google culture is anti-jackass, Googley means not being a dickhead. If you have a problem, explain what's wrong calmly and coherently, it's more efficient. Simply telling someone that they, or their code, is a piece of shit is not likely to be as efficient.
IBM is another, when I worked at T.J. Watson, people were very civil.
Civility is not about being "fake" or "politically correct", it's about being able to communicate your position by reason instead of by emotion, by shouting, by abuse, by reptilian brain.
Linus gets a lot of leeway because of his work on Linux, and we will forever be thankful for that. But I don't believe good works earns you a pass from criticism of behavior. The founders of the United States are forever thanked for the Constitution, but that doesn't let them off for being slaveholders.
I expect there will be some reflexive downvoting on this for criticizing the prophet, but honestly, Linus makes geeks look bad socially. Say what you will about Richard Stallman, there are lots of things he says I disagree with, but he says them with integrity and positivism and love, and not with angry denouncements.
Clearly, that was an angry denouncement... /sarcasm
We used to think that DRM on desktop PCs was bad, but for mobile devices it's 10x worse.
Now, see how I just explained the issue with Steve Jobs, instead of saying "He was a piece of shit who passed of Woz's work as his own, lied to him about money, denied paternity of his daughter, verbally abused employees and kept them in a state of fear, maintained an 'enemy list' of journalists, .....!" That's inflammatory rhetoric, and not relevant. The only thing that is relevant is the sea change in DRM'ed computing platforms have been popularized and his role in them, which is what Stallman was alluding too -- the effects of his leadership.
And? I mean, it's tasteless right after his death, but is it equivalence to personal attack and intimation?
Is the world black and white, and if someone says even one negative thing, then it's a full equivalence?
You can delete the Stallman reference, and the point still stands.
The question might be that because Jobs/Linus/Gates are in positions of power and management, should they have to adjust their personality when working with other people?
I'm not convinced that should be the case. Choosing to work with someone is largely voluntary.
[1] http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/No-Bull-Bill-Gates...
Sure, you can fork the kernel, but good luck with that!
The only barrier to forking is the fact that most kernel developers are not bothered by Linus. Which raises the question of why we should want a fork if nobody wants a fork...
The other barrier is the effort required to compete with what is currently the most used Linux kernel base. It's not like forking OpenOffice, KDevelop, or Eclipse where you can compete as an alternative on top of a standard OS. It's replacing the basis of the OS that everything else is written to work for.
The problems with forking are social. You are only going to have a handful of people working with you instead of Linus (because nobody cares that Linus can be a meanie) and as a consequence you are only going to have a handful of people using your fork instead of Linus' (because nobody cares that Linus can be a meanie). Because of this progress on Linux will progress faster than progress on your fork, which will make your fork obsolete (but nobody would care, because nobody would be using it, because nobody cares that Linus is a meanie).
These are not problems with forking Linux. These are problems with forking anything if nobody cares about your fork.
The thing with being abusive is that people won't actually tell you what they really think.
But criticism of developers is apparently too difficult for him. He doesn't distiguish between "this code is bad" and "YOUR code is bad" - indeed, he seems to enjoy pinning the perp and assuming they are an idiot and not just ignorant.
This slippery slope argument is garbage and YOU are a piece of shit for advocating it! You must watch Fox news and are a devotee of "shock jock" radio that tickles your reptilian brain and amps up the right neurotransmitters in the risk reward system to crave impolite and rude behavior!
(I hope I drove home the point with that bogus rant that individuality-through-angry-shouting doesn't elevate the debate at all, it just incentivizes the other party to become even more recalcitrant and unreasonable)
Hot tempers and passionate are not the problem. Strongly worded rebuttals are not a problem. Direct ad hominem attacks are just unnecessary. You can be strong and aggressive without telling people to "SHUT THE FUCK UP"
Trust me, being a dick isn't only way to be adversarial.
Literally? No. Nobody is suggesting that we weigh down others with chains.
Of course I don't think Vonnegut was being literal either...
That observation aside, I easily see what your point is, but I don't agree with the principle of it. In this case this wasn't a direct ad hominem attack by Linus. I fail to see that given the rest of the email thread. More importantly however is the fact that the individualism involved is what makes things interesting and gets the points across. Since you like literature it seems, you should surely understand the importance of the reviews and critics of such works. Often these were quite brutal, but again they drove home the points, whether they are right or wrong isn't the issue either. A sugar coated world just isn't a reflection of a real world.
There is nothing inherently superior about "I think this patch could use work" vs "This patch is garbage", outside of emotional response, and to some people, the first is actually worse, for the reasons he stated. And just as it would be out of place for someone in google to state "You ought to be expressing your code reviews with less weasel words and more profanity to be more honest", it is wholly out of place for someone to come in to the linux kernel mailing lists and demand everyone stop swearing as much to be more "professional".
They think your communication sucks because it is indirect and dishonest. You think their communication sucks because it is vulgar and excessive. Maybe the best solution is to understand that in a different culture, similar ideas may be expressed differently, and be tolerant of these cultural and personal differences?
I've been online since the 80s, and I have seen this attitude over and over, that somehow, SHOUTING and INSULTS are "just part of the process" of engineering culture, and if "you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen"
It's really an excuse for people, in many cases with ego problems, to justify behavior that most people find distasteful. It's no wonder many people are turned off from STEM fields where this kind of "alpha male" behavior is wide spread.
We need more Vulcan and less Klingon, especially in fields where people consider themselves intellectually superior, more educated, and supposedly, more rational.
People notice his swearing but not who he attacks. My observation has been that he's exquisitely careful about picking his targets, always picking people who've been in the group for a while, and never attacking a noob. This sets an extremely egalitarian tone for the group: nobody is immune, and anybody can be questioned on their actions.
(I'm a lot less sanguine than him, though, about the effect this confrontational ethos has on the participation of women in the group.)
You're setting up quite a straw man there by making it look as though Linus's first reply to things he doesn't like is "this is a piece of shit". In fact, if you go through these threads, in almost every case there is an escalation where he explains his reasoning first, in detail and repeatedly. When someone really doesn't get it, he will indeed escalate to foul language. Is that a bad thing? I don't think so. Unlike established corporations, the Linux community doesn't have options like subtly threatening to fire someone.
Yes it's true, his first responds isn't "this is a piece of shit". It's "YOU are a piece of shit".
Here is the C++ rant: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643...
As far as I can see, that was his first post to that thread. He said his target was "full of bullshit", then proceeded into a rant about how C++ programmers are so bad he wants to deliberately keep them off his projects by pissing them off.
I think it's a good example because there are plenty of criticisms of C++ one could make but Linus does a terrible job of putting forward those criticisms. He seems to be so blinded with rage that he can barely form a coherent argument.
Additionally, as far as I can tell the people involved here were not old timer core git contributors, they were new people making an honest attempt to contribute, so the argument being put about that he only targets old hands who have a thick skin isn't true.
Come on, you should be able to construct an argument without making up quotes to support your point:
DK: "No idea why [Git is written in pure C instead of C++]. Please don't talk about portability, it's BS."
LT: "YOU are full of bullshit. C++ is a horrible language. [7 paragraphs explaining why]"
> Google "management by perkele".
> Do you really want to oppress a minority? Because Finns are a minority compared to almost any other country. If you want to talk cultural sensitivity, I'll join you. But my culture includes cursing.
That made me chuckle. Based on my experience having worked with a few Fins; they are quite efficient and straight to the point. There is also a Quora answer [1] on why Nokia phones are so durable.
Israelis have a similar mentality. From [2]:
> Whenever there was a bombing, Israelis would run TO the blast to bandage people and help out. They risked their lives without a second thought to help each other with an 'of course' kind of attitude. Israelis don't even realize this is unique to them. Most just silently believe everyone shares the same attitude toward helping people in danger.
> When you're in that kind of society, fake politeness is actually offensive.
I've also experienced this mentality with Punjabi Sikhs.
[2] http://www.quora.com/Israeli-Culture/Why-are-Israeli-people-...
Linus is advocating for what you might call personal tolerance; as a human being, you should be prepared for the fact that not everyone in the world is like you, not everyone shares your standards or your culture, and that some people may be abrasive by your standards in a way that is acceptable in their culture or microculture. (And while it is talked about less, the alternative can occur too, where you encounter a culture that is more deferential than you are used too, and similar misunderstandings can easily occur.) It is for each person to accept these differences and learn to deal with them.
The American left/liberalism has embraced a different definition of "tolerance", what I might call social or societal tolerance, which is that each individual is responsible for learning what is offensive to the person you are dealing with, and treating them as the other individual expects. This is what has given birth to the concept of "political correctness", and this is the domain in which "You have offended me" takes on moral overtones; you have abrogated your social responsibilities in that case.
I mention this without endorsing one or the other. (I'll freely admit to thinking the former is generally more scalable and a better idea, but I could easily write an argument in favor of the latter as well. As a personal matter I tend towards a mix of both.) I just don't think you can really understand the full context of this discussion without having this idea clearly in your head.
I didn't sign an agreement to act according to some US code of conduct - I assume Linus is feeling the same way. Although I certainly wouldn't do what he does, I respect him standing up against the American CoC mafia.
I heard Steve Jobs was very rude to his employees, if they did a poor job as well - I guess all of this happened inside the Apple HQ as well - its just easier to be angry with someone who is not your boss (oh, and if everything happens on a mailing list).
Sarah Sharp isn't criticizing Torvalds merely for using profanity. That's not her argument at all.
Also, consider the different impact the same words have when you're using them in person and the target of those words can assess body language. Consider also whether every person in your office is someone you'd feel equally comfortable using that language with.
It's beyond me why people expect Linus to beat around the bushes like he were on an audition with the queen when he's not in a position to care enough to bend over third party social standards.
Neither does he. He's not creating a caricature, he's engaging the part of the argument that uses the same language on Linus that we normally reserve for wife beaters, child molesters and rapists. "Violence" and "abuse". It's not out of line to draw the parallel and question whether the language is appropriate for the situation, especially since the topic to begin with is language and it's appropriateness.
Because it's pretty obvious that there are plenty of people with enough enthusiasm for working on the kernel that they're willing to work with a profane curmudgeon, or perhaps people who do it because they actually enjoy that type of environment.
And trying to frame this in terms of Linus being an abuser or advocating violence or preying on the weak is just extremely dumb and insulting to people who are actually victims of real abuse. It's emails on a mailing list calling your code shitty and/or calling you stupid for writing shitty code. For fuck's sake, if you're victimized by that, maybe every open source project isn't for you.
> Good lord. So anyone that is one of your "top maintainers" could be exposed to your verbal abuse just because they "should have known better"?
> You know what the definition of an abuser is? Someone that seeks out victims that they know will "just take it" and keep the abuse "between the two of them". They pick victims that won't fight back or report the abuse.
And look at the sexist flak she's getting https://plus.google.com/photos/116960357493251979546/albums/...
Take a guy like me who grew up in a house where everybody sat quietly and read books and nobody ever raised their voice. Maybe I don't feel entirely comfortable when I go someplace where everybody is loud and open about everything, including their unpleasant feelings. In a different time, I would just call them animals. I would judge them for all the danger and aggression that I intuitively attributed to them. And for a long time such judgments were unquestioningly accepted. But times are different. You can't hold someone responsible for whatever meaning you read into their behavior. You have an obligation to question your interpretation and see if your assumptions are reasonably consistent with the facts. Is it reasonable for anyone to fear violence because of harsh comments directed to them by Linus Torvalds? Of course not. We all suffer from unreasonable fear because of cultural preconceptions, and we ought to doubt ourselves first before claiming that other people should change because of how we emotionally react to them.
There is absolutely no pretense here, no guessing, no fakery. If you work with Linus, you know exactly where you stand. He doesn't hold anything back, including criticisms that are critical to your own growth as a developer.
And there can be no question - NONE - that what he does WORKS. Linux is on BILLIONS of devices worldwide, affecting BILLIONS of peoples' lives in as literal a sense as can be imagined. You have to be strict about that sort of software, you have to be hard, you have to have a very sharp edge, and you absolutely cannot afford to make mistakes.
You don't have to like it, and you don't have to agree with it, but you certainly don't walk into Linus Torvalds' kitchen and tell him it's too hot.
When I use to do farmwork, there was no shortage of people like this. If you did something wrong, you heard about swiftly and clearly. That clarity wasn't limited to just informational content, the person delivering the news made a point of making sure you got the message, that requires clarity on an emotional level too. You don't get "Dear, please don't loosen that bolt until you jack up the rest."; you get a string of profanity and information so clear and targeted that I am unable to give it a fair representation. In that culture the "familiar" tone that people used with each other was a symptom of mutual respect. You wouldn't "baby" people that you respected.
"Please, don't loosen that bolt until you jack up the rest." is perfectly fine.*
You really are demonstrating and promoting the "yell on my employee to make them work better" attitude that just don't work on the long-term.
* Anecdote: My grand-father decided to take evening studies after the war to get out of this blue collar mentality of cursing and not getting much more done. He rose from one social ladder to the next and always made it clear the senseless profanity, bravado and fake expertise (the fuck do you need an expert to lift haystack or push wagon in the mines as he did in his 20's was his conclusion) was what he was fleeing from. And the fact they could be pretty good at back-stabbing too.
There is no respect in insulting someone else when trying to convene information.
Are we going to have that bro-grammer fad all over again ?
jlgreco's example of working on a farm is incredibly relevant because one tiny mistake on a farm can literally cost the lives of anyone or everyone in the family. If you're working on a tractor and you get something remotely wrong then suddenly you can't harvest this season, and everyone is broke and starving. Or the tractor falls and kills you and anyone else working under it.
One thing's for certain, if you get caught doing something wrong in that situation, you're going to get an earful and it will most certainly NOT happen again.
I am really tempted to play the "citation needed" card on that one but in my experience yelling on someone has never prevented them doing the same mistake again. Quite the contrary.
Are the geeks on HN that were yelled at senseless during PE better at basket-ball or sports ? I Thought so.
Oh I don't say that encouraging someone with swearing or cursing to rise the adrenaline is bad. Cursing someone or yelling at him to get information conveyed ? Ridiculous.
> One thing's for certain, if you get caught doing something wrong in that situation, you're going to get an earful and it will most certainly NOT happen again.
When do we really man up and just punch the other guy in the face ? That should make sure he doesn't make the same mistake again since we just associate something physically to make things connect.
> jlgreco's example of working on a farm is incredibly relevant because one tiny mistake on a farm can literally cost the lives of anyone or everyone in the family. If you're working on a tractor and you get something remotely wrong then suddenly you can't harvest this season, and everyone is broke and starving. Or the tractor falls and kills you and anyone else working under it.
Right. Because on the farms, they are dumb enough to let newbies who saw a cow for the first time in their life on the tractor when real dangerous work is needed. I have worked on a farm for some days and my SO's cousins are all farmers. They ain't that dumb.
> "Please, don't loosen that bolt until you jack up the rest." is NOT perfectly fine if it does not sufficiently drive the importance of that sentence home.
Yes, it does. We don't need cursing words as big punctuation sign to get our attention focused on the task at hand. We need words like "now, listen boy, this is dangerous and this is how you do it safely". It works as well and you don't perpetuate violence and intimidation disguised as manhood.
That jack example was a real example. I was disassembling some greenbean processing equipment to move it across the plant floor (a scrubber/rinser, iirc), and decided to take a shortcut. It probably would have taken my hand if I hadn't have been stopped. You can be damn sure I never made that mistake again.
This may seem alien, it may seem like something I should have been able to get through my thick skull with kind words after the immediate danger was neutralized, so I'll give it some background:
Lots of things can take limbs on a farm; damn near everything has a warning label about that. Most of the time the labels are for stupid shit like "make sure you have this turned off, unplugged, and disabled before you stick your hand in there". Most things you do have very long drawn out procedures that seem over-engineered for the sake of safety (similar to the procedures people being trained to use firearms will learn). It is very easy to become complacent, particularly when you are being worked hard, but when somebody chews you out for something for five minutes then you know that in this case something is deadly serious.
No, in fact I hated P.E. and sports, and you know what happened? I chose not to participate. I had no interest in sports, and I was not cut out for sports, and so I did not participate.
> Oh I don't say that encouraging someone with swearing or cursing to rise the adrenaline is bad. Cursing someone or yelling at him to get information conveyed ? Ridiculous.
Linus is not a professor, he's not here to teach. When people go to work on the Linux kernel they have huge amounts of experience and it is expected that they already know what they are doing. That expectation is critical, and they are held to the highest standards.
> When do we really man up and just punch the other guy in the face ? That should make sure he doesn't make the same mistake again since we just associate something physically to make things connect.
That's an entirely facetious statement and not remotely related to what Linus is doing when he calls people out on their mistakes. But sure, what the hell, I'd say we can draw that line right about at the point where someone's "contributions" start to have a net negative affect on the development of the kernel. I'd say that's just about punch-worthy.
> Right. Because on the farms, they are dumb enough to let newbies who saw a cow for the first time in their life on the tractor when real dangerous work is needed. I have worked on a farm for some days and my SO's cousins are all farmers. They ain't that dumb.
I recommend going back to the farm for more than a few days.
> Yes, it does. We don't need cursing words as big punctuation sign to get our attention focused on the task at hand. We need words like "now, listen boy, this is dangerous and this is how you do it safely". It works as well and you don't perpetuate violence and intimidation disguised as manhood.
Since we just went right back to where we started, I can see that there's probably no way I can convince you of my (or Linus's) position. I'm okay with that, I think I've laid out my arguments fairly well and you have yours. I still disagree with a lot of what you say, but that's fine, in a week or so the only place this argument will exist is in our HN comment history.
Well, I feel the same (no hard feelings either). Moreover I am pretty sure I hit my limit regarding my ability in having a nuanced conversation in a foreign language.
I'll just chime in some personal experience regarding the matter at hand: - I was bad in PE: insulted, made fun of and awkward, the "I don't look at the ball so nobody will pass it to me" attitude. Then around my 15's summer I started hanging with some childhood "friends" who had turned delinquents. Mostly played basket-ball with them all days and night long on the playground. They played hard and were cursing a lot, yet they were somehow supportive. Come a new year school and I got much better at sports in general and finally enjoyed PE. Some got in really bad situation regarding the law after that but I can't recall a situation where one of them would be as aggressive towards another player as Linus is towards others on those mailing-list.
But I remember reading him once saying "cursing comes after a lot of trying to get my point across and not being heard". My main grief is: I don't believe in shaming and I am under the impression cursing and yelling is really close to shaming and that this is what people try to defend when justifying any of Linus's occurrence of cursing.
This style of communication is a hard metal needle that allows you to mainline information.
>http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24108913
>Android and iOS, the number one and number two ranked smartphone operating systems (OS) worldwide, combined for 92.3% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013
What?! iOS is not Linux, smartphone market is not all phone market and shipments/marketshare is not equal to usage share.
Lets go with this instead. 92.3% of all smartphones are connected to projects headed (present or past tense) by blunt 'assholes' who have hurt many feelings.
2. Professionalism means different things to different people, and in Linus's case it means being uncompromising in his expectations of the people he allows to work on his code.
3. Yes, he's an asshole. He wears that badge with pride (just look up the origination of the name for "git"), but he's also been an asshole for the past twenty years or so. I think people ought to know what they're getting into by now, and if not then it's their own fault.
4. He has the right to run his project how he sees fit, and so far that's working pretty damn well. Would that work for me? No. Would it work for you? Probably not. Does it work for what is potentially the most important software contribution to the world? Yes, it most certainly does. And that's the bottom line.
by yelling and cursing at them... anyone with enough self-respect and high enough self esteem wouldn't work a day for a guy like that. I don't care what the cause/product.
| 4. He has the right to run his project how he sees fit, and so far that's working pretty damn well.
yes, I use to work for a company that had primadona dev leads who'd yell and demean their junior and senior devs in public about checking in bugs against apps that were also working pretty damn well. we also had a revolving door (lowest employee retention of all the other departments) for developers in the company.
I agree that he's wrong, but clearly his behaviour is accepted by his colleagues, because they continue to work on his kernel.
http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.g...
She's a USB developer and it looks like the primary maintainer of the Linux xhci driver.
He appears to have the social skills of someone recently released from maximum security prison. He's like a homeschooled kid who bites the other children at birthday parties.
Honestly, at this point, Linus has so much credibility he could communicate exclusively in Esperanto and people would still take him seriously.
On the other hand Linus' father is a Member of the European Parliament for Swedish People's Party of Finland, and was until 2011 the party vice chairman. But he (Nils) has been quite relaxed about things like mandatory Swedish education, which most Finnish Swedes dearly cling on to.
"This is specifically contrasted to the Swedish consensus decision-making, where the manager makes sure that everyone involved has been heard before decisions are taken."
Ergo the "management by perkele" - as a Swede, you probably know what perkele is ;-)
More about it here; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_perkele
Also acted out in this commercial; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8_7yPocGPg
What planet did you just descend from? And what are these "peers" that exist in our profession? In my profession I have a team lead who doles out work, with a manager over him, with a manager over him and so on. The basic structure is no different than that of a dictatorship.
What's this "basic respect and human dignity" you find in your corporation which you can't find on lkml? Steve Ballmer throwing a chair across the room when a developer says he's leaving because he is going to "fucking kill Google?" Who are we to look to for these examples of professionalism and basic respect and human dignity - Steve Jobs? Larry Ellison? Who is the one with the vivid imagination? I hope you never have to keep the network and desktops of a Wall Street trading floor running.
Back in 1999, when VC was handed out like candy and blockbuster IPOs happened every day and companies were desperate to hire even middling IT workers, I suppose a veneer of theoretical collegiality seemed to hang over dot-com's for a moment. When 2000 and 2001 rolled around, and a lord of the flies atmosphere appeared at these same startups, it was a different story.
Your peers are people you work with to achieve a common goal.
> I have a team lead who doles out work, with a manager over him, with a manager over him and so on. The basic structure is no different than that of a dictatorship.
The basic structure is also no different from a democracy. Or a large open-source project.
> What's this "basic respect and human dignity" you find in your corporation which you can't find on lkml?
I hope this doesn't come as a surprise to you, but you're not supposed to rage out and flame your peers. It shows a lack of self control. Those examples you gave of CEOs losing control are notorious for a reason.
> I hope you never have to keep the network and desktops of a Wall Street trading floor running.
Do those still exist? (serious question)
> What planet did you just descend from?
Regards,
Nothing stopping you from forking the kernel, developing it yourself and calling it Sensetivlix: The GNUspeak conformity project.
Weirder things have happened
The linux kernel is like that: it's Linus' project that he lets some people help with. It's a dictatorship, largely ego-driven, and he has the last word on any philosophical, design, architectural, or even political decision. For better or for worse.
People are trying to say that Linux could be better if it didn't have bullying in its community. "Go away if you don't like it" isn't really an answer to that, regardless of which side you're on.
Linus is overly abrasive and I can't say I would want to work with someone like that, and at the same time, Sarah Sharp and Linus' critics are exaggerating and being overly dramatic (e.g., Linus is "advocating violence") and I wouldn't want to work with someone like that, either.
Emotionally violent people, in my experience, aren't like that. They get stuck in anger, and the situation is usually about them personally (they've been insulted, are not getting their due, no one recognizes how smart/gifted/good they are, etc.) I don't read that in Linus. His ego doesn't seem so involved in those rants, which is probably why, even when he's yelling, there's an accompanying lightness.
I have no idea how accurate that impression is. One would have to know someone personally to say.
You are completely correct: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/ManagementStyle (ch. 2, but the whole thing is worth reading)
Two examples:
1) Nigger. The word in itself is so politically incorrect, that it's inappropriate to use it even in conversations about the word itself! (E.g. to point out the "reverse"-racism, how blacks can use the word "nigger", but whites can't.)
2) Almost any topic that people have a very strong opinion about. E.g. feminism, chauvinism, and using rape threats against Adria Richards - for example, I could argue that people are wrong of accusing those who threatened her to be chauvinists, because if you want to threaten someone, it makes perfect sense to threaten them in the worst possible way - death, rape, hurting their children... so the problem aren't rape threats, but threats in general. But most people only hear the part of the argument "rape threats aren't the problem" and totally disregard the rest of the conversation or even the fact that I don't necessarily believe what I'm saying, I'm just presenting the rational argument!
In words of Aristotle:
> It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Many people don't get this. Attacking a good person because they swear is usually the symptom of this.
Context matters: if I point a gun at you, should you get upset? Why, I mean, I haven't actually _done_ anything to you, it's just a threat! Sure in an abstract sense a gun imposed no inherent harm. It's how you use it.
Also, this isn't very 'rational,' for example:
> so the problem aren't rape threats, but threats in general
If threats are a problem then rape threats are a problem.
(see?)
Please, show me where Linus is advocating for this. Sounds absurd.
Yes, it is. But it's his kernel and people choose to work on his kernel, and not a fork, in spite of his well known behaviour.
He gets away with his antics because of his rock star status. On the other hand, I find Linus' own behaviour much less bothersome than people who behave like Linus who aren't even remotely at his stature.
Your perspective is not universal.
I give a ton of credit to dhh and Joel Spolsky for bringing development to the masses by speaking in terms people not completely socially inept would respond to.
As an aside, most developers I've worked with who put on the dickhole computer prodigy facade were just unhappy shitty programmers with zero communication skills.
Obviously Linus is not who I'm referring to, but I think buffoonery displayed in abusive emails is emblematic of that attitude and sets a terrible example for developers who aren't Linus Torvalds. I can just picture a thousand mid level managers running around yelling at their reports thinking they're the next Steve Jobs.
Sadly for most people, it is more about Corporate Culture and Interpersonal Skill and Street Smart and blah blah blah than being really competent and getting real things done.
And worse, once people like Linus start advocating it, all these fan boys (who have in no way made a significant contribution like Linus) will start following suite. Imagine, that guy who setup your repo at work or your QA, come and tell you to diaf and jump off a bridge in front of everyone in the office for making an off by one error.
I think people need to realize the insignificance of the things they're doing. Yeah you think you optimized the hell out of your app, ok big guy, take a trip to Africa, no one gives a shit.
I can't tell you how many times I've told people to make a phone call instead of wasting time parsing out the tone of something their clients or coworkers wrote in an e-mail.
It occurs to me, there is no such other person. Maybe, the way Linus sets standards and decides who to communicate and how, works for his situation.
If most people are put off by his philosophy and would rather contribute through intermediaries, well, mission accomplished. Somehow he has to whittle down the 10,000 people who would like to communicate with him constantly to maybe, 20.
However, contributing to Linus's git repository is not the same as working for an "equal opportunity employer."
I think it's unfortunate that, being a dad, and with all that he's given to the world, he doesn't show a little more kindness and empathy. I think this would benefit everyone.
Maybe the linux community could just try being super extra nice to Linus, and see if it wears off on him? Every time he says something mean, we try even harder to respond with polite and kind language. I'd like to see that.