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> I give Linus a pass. Given the success of the project and the size of the team, I would rather have a foul mouthed Linus than perhaps no kernel and no Linux.

This attitude is precisely the problem. Being a smart or successful human being does not alleviate your obligation to be a decent human being - neither does having strong opinions and good reasons for them.

The argument you have made comes in another form, and I hope when I phrase it this way you'll see why I disagree strongly: "Do you know who I am?!"

I think there's another facet to the argument he made that he didn't make. When you're in a position of power and you have to deal with the work of other people you want to waste as little time as possible on people making stupid mistakes that shouldn't be made in the first place. You want to bring the quality of your contributors up.

One way of doing this is making people fear making mistakes. Society does this all the time: if you are a racist/homophobe/sexist people will ostracize you publicly in a number of ways. Essentially you get rid of racists/homophobes/sexists by making them fear voicing those opinions.

I personally don't think this is a particularly good way of dealing with problems, but it's what society does and it's how it works: based on mostly punishment. To then go on to say that what Linus does is somehow bad or any different seems kinda weird.

Fear, as you seem to realize, is a crappy motivator. It only work in limited circumstances and for limited periods of time. It doesn't really change behavior permanently. That "society" does it doesn't make it any better (and when was the last time a judge cussed out a defendant for receiving a guilty verdict?)

But I would argue that motivating through fear isn't even relevant to this situation. Is making death threats in order to convince somebody to stop doing something a valid way to motivate through fear? Is cursing somebody out on a mailing list really all that terrifying? If it is, is that the reason Linus, for instance, does it?

I think the answer to all of these is no.

Further, it may be appropriate to shame racists, homophobes or sexists into changing their ways (or, I would argue, just not espousing their views publicly). But is it really appropriate to do this, to this extent especially, to programmers who wrote bad code?

Programming relies on rational, careful cognitive consideration of problems. That's the opposite of what fear inspires. Fear-based "motivation" is lousy in general, and doubly lousy for open source software.

>Is making death threats in order to convince somebody to stop doing something a valid way to motivate through fear?

I don't remember Linus ever sending death threats to anyone. As for the people who did send it to the OP, I think most people agree that death threats are not OK under any circumstance and that whoever did do it is an outlier and not an example of how the community behaves.

>Is cursing somebody out on a mailing list really all that terrifying?

I think it is since public shaming tends to be effective in preventing whatever behavior was shamed, as per the racist/homophobe/sexist argument.

>If it is, is that the reason Linus, for instance, does it?

I can't speak for him but if I were in charge of an important and sizable project I can see myself doing it for that reason.

>But is it really appropriate to do this, to this extent especially, to programmers who wrote bad code? Programming relies on rational, careful cognitive consideration of problems. That's the opposite of what fear inspires. Fear-based "motivation" is lousy in general, and doubly lousy for open source software.

I don't follow why it's doubly lousy for software in general. Software has its fair share of opinionated debates that are more about differences of philosophy rather than careful cognitive consideration of problems. And as for it being the opposite of what fear inspires, I'm not sure I agree. The educational system world wide uses fear effectively and it seems to mostly work (despite whatever problems you may have with it), so I don't see what would make programming special in that regard.

>I don't remember Linus ever sending death threats to anyone. As for the people who did send it to the OP, I think most people agree that death threats are not OK under any circumstance and that whoever did do it is an outlier and not an example of how the community behaves.

In this statement I was referring to the issue being discussed in this particular thread, not to Linus. Sorry, should have been clearer.

> I think it is since public shaming tends to be effective in preventing whatever behavior was shamed, as per the racist/homophobe/sexist argument.

But as I said - it doesn't change behavior, it only changes whether or not one publicly displays one's thoughts. And even then, it's a temporary effect at best.

> I don't follow why it's doubly lousy for software in general. Software has its fair share of opinionated debates that are more about differences of philosophy rather than careful cognitive consideration of problems. And as for it being the opposite of what fear inspires, I'm not sure I agree. The educational system world wide uses fear effectively and it seems to mostly work (despite whatever problems you may have with it), so I don't see what would make programming special in that regard.

It's lousy because it doesn't inspire real change. People don't change their opinions because they got chewed out, even if it was rightfully so. They just learn to resent the people doing the chewing out and oppose them more subtly.

You use our education system as an example - but I don't know that I'd say the education parts of the system (as opposed to the discipline parts, whose effectiveness I would frankly dispute) aren't fear-based. They're generally built to be merit-based (whether they succeed is outside the scope of this discussion).

>It is not a positive characteristic. I wish he wasn't as abrasive but that is his personality.

You can't just say this. I mean, where do you put the limit? Imagine if we let all kinds of aggressive and violent behavior slip on the account of "eccentric personality". I enjoy reading Linus's rants as much as the next guy, but it makes you wonder how the other person feels. And "grow a thick skin" isn't good advice, because if something doesn't bother you doesn't mean it can't bother someone else. For example, I've long ago grown out of taking stuff on the Internet personally. But I remember how it was, and I would often be very close to just giving up on doing whatever I was being hated for. (In fact, I can bet that happened at least once.)

There is some norm of decency you have to follow when talking to someone you don't know. It's how you show that you can accept others' opinion and argumentation, and sometimes accept you weren't right. I have a hard time imagining Linus Torvalds admitting that he was wrong about something he ranted about. (If you know of any examples, I'd love to see them.) And that's not a good thing. Either he's never made a mistake, or he doesn't want to admit it. I'm willing to bet Linus has god complex issues, and instead of recognizing it as something that needs to be toned down, he just embraced it and amplified it. Some people will still say that it's cool, sure, but I, for one, would like to see him be a tad more humble. Even when you've achieved as much as he did, you can very much be wrong about stuff. That's, in fact, by definition of the human being :)

Every single time someone brings up Linus' "abrasiveness", they never fail to leave out the thread preceding it, where the target of Linus' ire inevitably was being obtuse or childish. How long would it take you to stop being polite if someone refused to respond to anything but invective? And in kernel land, there are some simple rules that must be kept to very strictly, else you can forget about things like reliability.

People also tend to ignore cultural differences.

Does Linus ever swear in Finnish? Because from what I've been told people in some Nordic countries will happily say fuck and fucking all day, but would be reluctant to use local language versions.

> I give Linus a pass. Given the success of the project and the size of the team, I would rather have a foul mouthed Linus than perhaps no kernel and no Linux.

This appears to be a false dilemma. I don't think the success of the kernel and Linux depends on Linus' foul mouth. And I think the point was that he, as a role model may influence and inspire others to adopt the same behavior.

Linus is clearly not malevolent, not ill-intentioned, but he's closed-minded somewhat. He hasn't seen what the effect might be if he was a little more inhibited about cursing people out.

I think of this as the nice vs angry coach sorta thing. There are sports coaches who are nice people and ones who are assholes and both groups include legendary successful coaches. Clearly, this is not a make-or-break issue, but also it's clear that being an asshole doesn't help, even though assholes often claim it does. Like successful asshole coaches, Linus clearly wants the best for the community, he just has this asshole way of thinking about how to achieve it, and he's wrong enough that he's clearly out of balance. And if something could convince him to just temper things or apologize a little, it would be a helpful step. He still deserves honor and respect overall regardless, but it would be better if we didn't have to qualify that.