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>1 byte reads with sys-calls is a beginner mistake. Kay was/is not a beginner. He also had at that point had repeated complaints from Linus about the quality of his code, and showed no sign of listening. This conflict eventually culminated in Linus making it clear he'd had enough, and will no longer merge code from Kay until he cleans up his act

Then this is all Linus had to say. This, exactly, is a great sentence on why you'll no longer be accepting code from a party, and sums up both what they can do to get back in, and what other developers can learn from this. There's no need to sink to insults, especially at the level Linus can dish out.

We have to deal with clients so clueless, I don't know how they manage to even email us with the stupid questions. But we're polite to them and when speaking about them publically. We keep the abortion-comments private, between the developers whenever we go out for happy-hour. It's not very hard for the open-source community to do the same. (I know the majority of the open source community does not do this. But a vocal minority do, and the rest of the community seems to be okay with this, when it's not okay).

Yeah, me too. We're paid for the lip service - that's our incentive.

Linus has no incentive, financial or social, to be nice to Kay. Chewing him out, however, probably lowers his blood pressure and saves him the time of refactoring his immediate emotional reaction into a polite response, both of which are probably critical metrics to him.

I hope Linus is not that emotionally stunted.

If he were emotionally stunted, he would have difficulty expressing his emotions. Evidently, he does not have that problem.

> If you can't handle a message like that, then perhaps it's just as well.

Such conduct is not tolerated in workplaces, where people are paid to contribute, why do you consider it acceptable in an environment where people contribute for free?

Well, when the quality problems are severe enough to get someone fired from a workplace...

I wasn't aware FOSS projects were compelled to accept code contributions...

The point is that this situation wouldn't exist in a workplace. So talking about what conduct is tolerated there... doesn't really apply.

Okay, fine, remove workplace if you want to quibble about semantics and broaden it to "Most human interactions". Most human interactions consider a modicum of respect for the other party to be a basic requirement.

Then they get fired, normally after being counselled. They don't get told they are so worthless they should have been aborted.

Because, you know, in your workplace, you are in an actual inferiority position. Your boss is the one that says how much are you going to be paid next month (or IF your are going to be paid), or whether you are going to work in a nice project or maintaining a 20 years old codebase. If he bullies you, verbally or otherwise, facing up or quitting might have dire consequences.

On the other hand, in most open source projects you contribute what you want, where you want, and if you don't like the project lead, it takes you as much as closing the browser window to quit.

That said, I don't really know if this is the situation of the people working directly under Linus. ¿Aren't the key kernel developers usually paid by big corporations to work there?

> Because, you know, in your workplace, you are in an actual inferiority position. Your boss is the one that says how much are you going to be paid next month (or IF your are going to be paid), or whether you are going to work in a nice project or maintaining a 20 years old codebase. If he bullies you, verbally or otherwise, facing up or quitting might have dire consequences.

Even between two coworkers of equal status, this behaviour would not be tolerated by a good employer.

> While I don't think I'd be as caustic as Linus, I can totally understand the level of exasperation that saga must have caused him given the series of issues in question. And at the point of this outburst, nothing appears to have worked: the stream of crap had kept on coming.

I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but are you saying that being exasperated is justification to be arbitrarily caustic?

There are plenty of open-source project leaders who deal with incorrigible people and do not talk this way.

It's a style choice, and I think both the choice to utilize it and the reception to it are heavily dependent on the participant's cultural background and upbringing. A lot of people see this kind of message, applied to someone who Really Should Know Better, as a form of tough love and half-tongue-in-cheek way to place extra emphasis on an important message.

Some people can form that understanding as the basis of their relationship and continue on happily, able to both give and receive this kind of criticism. To others, it is completely foreign and incomprehensible and they don't see the tongue-in-cheek at all and just interpret it as blatant, outright hostility, which is generally not the actual subtext.

I'm saying that sufficient exasperation makes it understandable whether or not it is justified. Linus is human. Humans are not flawless.

> There are plenty of open-source project leaders who deal with incorrigible people and do not talk this way.

And a lot of people who "do not talk this way" are a lot worse by dealing with these kind of issues through backstabbing or veiled insults.

While some are saint-like and never say or do a bad thing to contributors, I don't buy that the lack of abrasive language in any way is a reliable indicator of civility.

I think Linus (and others) choose to stay verbally abusive because there they exist in a community that both facilitates and defends that poor behaviour.

There is a choice to be made. The choice stems from the basic mindset: am I fundamentally ok with verbally abusing people around me, or should I try to stop doing that?

I don't know what's in Linus' mind. Perhaps he is utterly incapable of never resorting to verbal abuse. But I doubt that's true.

It is in part a cultural issue. Realise that this form of "abuse" does not carry much weight in a lot of cultures. A lot of the strongest criticism of Linus comes from a cultural background where people are hyper-sensitive to direct language.

Verbal abuse and direct language are unrelated.

Direct language, without verbal abuse:

"I am upset and angry that you keep making the same mistakes."

That's clearly communicating how he feels, without verbally abusing his audience.

"I am upset and angry that you keep making the same mistakes."

No, remember the context: you've already used nice, direct words, and Kai has ignored them multiple times. Now you need to shake Kai's cage. Linus might have gone overboard, but his technique has more chance of success than yours.

Also, this is not a sterile corporate environment. The LKML is more like a dive bar than Applebee's and that's the way they like it.

If you equate 'sterile' with 'not verbal abuse', I suppose that's true.

Given that direct words were ignored multiple times, I would suggest that the next action is simply to not merge, without comment, after a final "You are ignoring us, we can't the time to keep correcting you. Your bad merges will be ignored without comment."

Such a path will get a developer's attention, and it involves no verbal abuse.

A problem with flinging abusive words around is that it artificially and needlessly limits the diversity of your community. Though, it might be that that's t he intent:

"The LKML is more like a dive bar than Applebee's and that's the way they like it."

This debate exists on a spectrum of gray areas, but I'm pretty sure "you should be retroactively aborted" crosses the line from "shaking someone's cage" to "flagrantly excessive verbal abuse", if for no other reason than it equate's the target's worth as a human being with their skill as a developer, which is obviously not a healthy viewpoint.

I'm a big believer in 'spectrum of gray areas'. This particular quote from Linus is particularly bad.

What I want to firmly point out is the general community's level of acceptance of verbally abusive language.

There could be a debate about what constitutes verbal abuse, on a case by case basis. And that would turn into a mess.

What I'd love to see is the community acknowledge that using and even encouraging such language is bad for everybody, and it's bad for the open source movement, big time.

I agree with you. The problem I'm seeing in this thread relates to this point:

> There could be a debate about what constitutes verbal abuse, on a case by case basis. And that would turn into a mess.

Right now, a lot of people simply do not make the distinction between verbal abuse and direct language. In other words, they are arguing that we should not bother discouraging verbal abuse because it "shouldn't" affect targets any more adversely than direct but non-abusive language.

I guess it's a debate one can approach from many angles. But maybe you're right, perhaps focusing on highlighting why one thing constitutes verbal abuse and others don't is too semantic of an argument, and it's more productive to focus on the fact that just because one person has never been truly bothered by verbal abuse doesn't mean that should be the universal expectation.

Yeah, I don't really have anything more specific in mind. I think your analysis is spot on.

Universal expectation? It seems you two are railing against a straw man. Abusive behavior, even on the LKML, even by Linus, is rare. If you feel as strongly as you seem to, please subscribe, form a first-hand opinion, and maybe contribute to positive change. (I contributed around 2001-2003 and really enjoyed it; I don't subscribe now).

Too many misunderstandings have been caused by well-meaning people reading too much into cherry-picked HN comments.

Hm. Because these comments are WAY off topic and have now drowned out the article and any rational discussion, I won't comment any further. Diederich, I hope you'll show more restraint with the Reply button.

The problem isn't that it's too abundant. The problem is that people make excuses for it every time it happens, instead of just saying, "Yeah, that was really verbally abusive."

I'm not trying to be pedantic here but, despite your quote marks, Linus never said that.

My interpretation of that email chain reads: anyone who is stupid enough to continue reading byte-by-byte after being told that it's a bad idea should be retroactively aborted.

The implied subject makes a big difference. (I still think it's over the line but I understand that everyone makes mistakes in the heat of the moment)

WRT what specifically Linus did and didn't say, that's a fair reading.

And everybody, myself included, says things out of frustration, in the heat of the moment. That's not what I'm talking about here.

I'm talking about how many (most?) open source technical communities are very much ok with language that is abusive. Indeed, many take pride in that fact.

When I say something that's inappropriate, I'll make a point of retracting it later on when I'm calm.

In the same video interview where Linus famously gestured toward Nvidia, he also said that he believes people capable of being offended should be offended. I suppose one could think of it as a way of filtering out people who focus too much on the messenger and medium rather than the actual message.

Random theory time: People who are harmful to the project, should be removed from the project. If you're not a company but an "open" project that can't fire people, you pretty much have to do this my making them not want to say. So if someone causes enough trouble, just pile on the verbal abuse until they get fed up and leave.

I think this is another false dichotomy. It's quite possible to efficiently limit the damage someone can cause to a project without resorting to verbal abuse.

Most simply, refuse to merge their stuff unless it has quality. You don't have to hold their hand; say: "You are making the same mistakes over and over again. Your stuff isn't going to get merged, and we're not going to spend any time explaining to you why."

> and we're not going to spend any time explaining to you why."

"any more time", please. The context should imply this, but some situations require high clarity.

I don't think 'high clarity' requires the use of verbally abusive language.

That is both obviously true and bears no connection to the post you're replying to.

Note that the above referenced "retroactively aborted" rant was not directed at Kay. It was instead directed at some unnamed developer who had set up kernel log handling in Debian with a "dd bs=1 if=/proc/kmesg of=/var/run/klogd/kmsg", which was copying the kernel log one byte at a time to a FIFO (presumably because something reading the log was better able to deal with a FIFO than whatever strange semantics /proc/kmesg has).

Kay had then made /proc/kmesg semantics somewhat weirder, by not blocking but instead returning 0 when the available buffer wasn't big enough to read into; normally, returning 0 to a read indicates that the file has been closed, while if there simply isn't data available yet the call is supposed to block until it is.

So Linus was asking Kay to fix the issue, but also making an aside about how stupid it is to try to read one byte at a time from the kernel.

Now, there was the other incident you mention, in which Linus did get upset enough at Kay for not responding very well to a big report, but this one was not that; he was merely asking Kay to fix a bug, and cursing out some unnamed other developer for having done something as dumb as byte-at-a-time reads.

Not really defending either side here. I find Linus excessively caustic on these issues, and Kay a bit too unwilling to admit when he needs to fix a bug. I feel like Lennart gets way more hate than he deserves; he can be a bit difficult to work with sometimes, but it's crazy how some people think that he's single handedly out to destroy the Linux ecosystem.

I run a lot of software originally written by Lennart (Avahi, Pulse, systemd, heck, I recently even started using ifplugd on systems that still needed to use ifupdown but we wanted to respond properly to network cables being connected and disconnected), and find that it tends to be higher quality, more well designed, and more stable than a lot of the other code in the stack. Due to the fact that much of it changes the "traditional" way that systems worked to a very different but friendlier way, there tend to be a few integration issues along the way for early adopters; if you don't want such integration issues, it's probably best to use a stable distro like RHEL/CentOS or Debian Stable, rather than a quickly updating distro that ships code that's not yet ready for primetime like Ubuntu, Fedora, or Debian testing/unstable.

For such a smart guy, Linus was being extremely dumb in this. Ok, I admit that's my opinion.

Most people are not going to see the context of that statement. I'm sure he had his issues with the developer and the relevant code, but that doesn't excuse such a public display. All he did in that matter is make himself look bad and, to a degree, made his project look bad. As it's been stated elsewhere, such actions most likely just drives people away.

Open source software, especially the big projects, are a public facing entity. Just like any large corporation. A public lashing with this type of language should not be considered healthy for the project nor the open source movement. It only causes negativity within and towards the project with the additional issue, as you show yourself, of not always actually solving the problem.

Each to their own I suppose.

> Most people are not going to see the context of that statement.

Most people are never going to contribute to the Linux kernel in the first place. Anyone who is likely to, is likely to 1) actually get at least some cursory knowledge about the community and the process, 2) not deal directly with Linus until they've spent a lot of time getting up to scratch, including submitting patches to sub-system maintainers, 3) get only polite responses from Linus if/when they do deal with him.

I don't think Linus has any reasons at all to be concerned about whether or not people see the context of the statement. The people who don't are not likely to affect his ability to do his job.

> All he did in that matter is make himself look bad and, to a degree, made his project look bad.

Any reasons why Linus should care?

> As it's been stated elsewhere, such actions most likely just drives people away.

Linux does not have a problem with lack of developers trying to get stuff into the kernel. If it drives away some good people, then so be it. If it makes some shitty developers think twice about ignoring repeated admonitions from Linus, then it seems to me like good use of his time.

> A public lashing with this type of language should not be considered healthy for the project nor the open source movement. It only causes negativity within and towards the project with the additional issue, as you show yourself, of not always actually solving the problem.

From my point of view, the negativity tends to show up in discussions like this, rather than in forums where people are actually concerned with these projects. The level of desire for political correctness annoys me greatly. I find a lot of the responses here far worse than the direct language Linus sometimes uses because of insinuations and underlying implications of the statements.

I got it. Since so few people are likely to see the conversation then I suppose it's okay for him to belittle someone in such a manner. If no one sees you behave badly, then all's good.

If someone involved in a public facing project open to the masses doesn't care in any way how they appear in public, then that's just a problem that will likely never go away. I suppose as long as people are willing to accept the abuse then it won't negatively affect the project that much in terms of contributions.

Another one, got it. As long as people still continue to desire to contribute then other people's behavior is totally acceptable.

So far, I have yet to see any one person's comment reach the level of the quoted statement. If you can't see that then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. Also, you are assuming quite a lot about my level of tolerance for political correctness. Simply pointing out that someone behaves in a bad manner and suggest that maybe there was a better way is not political correctness.

Again, we shall have to agree to disagree. Projects will carry on regardless.