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Comment by Stratoscope | Hacker News Reader

> I have no idea why Linux attracts so much drama and carnage amongst its constituents, but it does.

It starts right from the top, just like the similar situation in the Rails community.

When your founder and leader behaves a certain way, it gives everyone in the community license to act like that.

Edit: I seem to have touched a nerve here. My apology to anyone my comment offended.

Nonetheless, I stand by the idea that the culture of a company or open source is heavily influenced by the behavior of those at the top. How could it not be?

As an example of the other end of the spectrum, when I worked at Adobe it was a remarkably courteous place where people treated each other with respect even when they disagreed. I really appreciated that, and I think a good part of it came directly from Adobe founders John Warnock and Chuck Geschke.

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But then by this logic, OpenBSD should also be a dysfunctional mess. It's not. It has almost the same number of contributors per 6-month release cycle that systemd alone gets in only about 3 months, yet it is a remarkably productive project.

No, I do not think Linus is at fault here. I think a more likely explanation is that (GNU/)Linux is the go to alternative operating system, and it gets a lot of cocky newbies who think they're special for using a Unix-like operating system.

I don't know, BSD seems to attract a lot of people who seem self-congratulatory that they're not using Linux, just like how MacOS has been the Anti-Windows since circa 1995.

My theory is that it's straight-up due to how many people use Linux compared to other non-Windows OSes and the fact the average people have more say (or think they do) compared to The One Apple Way. Any large group will have assholes, and the number of assholes is a simple percentage of the total.

My personal experience is that BSD people by and large care about Linux mostly out of necessity, but nonetheless they're still knowledgeable about both. Mostly they're angry whenever the Linux community feels the need to reinvent yet another square wheel (as was mocked in the OpenBSD 5.2 release song), because it slows them from doing their own innovations and necessitates them to emulate Linux's interfaces.

In contrast, a disturbingly large number of Linux users remain willfully ignorant about other Unices and, worse, they attack them without knowing the first thing about them.

But yes, Linux users are dominant, so more idiots overall.

So because BSD attracts people who seem self-congratulatory that they are not using Linux it begets a productive non-asshole environment?

The parent poster was stating that OpenBSD also has a strongly opinionated leader at the top (Theo de Raadt) who has been known to rant and rave like the best, yet unlike the Linux community the OpenBSD community as a whole does not behave like that and ships functioning code quickly and efficiently.

The Linux community is mostly just like the BSD community. It's just larger so there are numerically more assholes because the proportion is constant.

> But then by this logic, OpenBSD should also be a dysfunctional mess

Theo is unsavory but not abrasive. He is very principled and well-spoken.

Linus doesn't care who he offends, and he wears that chip on his shoulder with pride.

> Theo is unsavory but not abrasive.

What is your definition of unsavory? I have seen him be blunt, but that is a long way from unsavory.

I love Theo, but a lot of people have differing ideologies from him, and as well all know that isn't okay in the OSS ecosystem.

Is that the same Theo who threw a tantrum because nobody notified him ahead of time of some OpenSSL vulnerability after he specifically declined an invitation to be on the cross-distro security mailing list where such notifications get posted?

http://lwn.net/Articles/601958/

At best, people are imitating what they think Linus is doing. But most people miss out on just how rare Linus's rants are, how deserving his targets are when he does let loose and how much they should've known better, and most people aren't as authoritative as Linus.

> ...how deserving his targets are when he does let loose...

I think I see the problem here.

I don't follow the Linux community that deeply but I've read one of his rants which was belittling and insulting to a volunteer maintainer and the context behind it didn't justify the abuse in my opinion. If you don't appreciate their code, get rid of them. They're probably not trying to intentionally screw up. And if they are, tell them it's not working out and stop working with them.

P.S. Would be interesting if "Gaming is misogynistic" folks decide to focus on the Linux community. I can almost see the headlines: "Linux users are dead!"

So you're saying that a "my way or the highway" policy is more polite and better for the health of the project and developer community than the occasional bit of colorful language? It seems to me that the former is a much bigger insult in an "actions speak louder than words" kind of way, especially coming from people for whom the primary concern is producing working code, not politics.

1. I'm not complaining about colorful language. There's a difference between that and insulting people.

> I don't understand why it's so hard to fucking understand how Linus' behavior is abhorrent.

> wtallis, you've got to be the biggest fucking idiot to not understand how Linus' behavior is abhorrent.

See the difference?

2. I'm not familiar with the way the Linux kernel contributions are managed. I assumed from what I've heard that Linus is in charge and can reject patches. If that is the case, than a "my way or the highway" policy is the current policy. I may be wrong in this regard so please feel free to clear up any misunderstanding I may have.

For your first point, the difference will only ever be very small when the topic of discussion is something that is inherently associated with a particular person, such as a patch with a specific submitter. The phrasing of the former example is more passive-aggressive, but usually no less targeted.

For your second point, you said:

"If you don't appreciate their code, get rid of them. [...] tell them it's not working out and stop working with them."

That implies more than just rejecting bad patches, it implies rejecting the developer himself. That's extremely rare. The Linux kernel developers are very forgiving of mistakes: your patches will get rejected if they're bad, but they'll still get looked at until you establish a really bad track record of not learning from your mistakes.

For Linux, the "your patches will not be accepted" responses comes approximately after you've ignored a dozen or so Linus rants, each of which will generally first come after you've ignored advice and suggestions from dozens of other people and still insisted on submitting broken stuff. Probably, if you manage to get "banned", at least one rant about you will have featured on HN or Reddit.

Rejecting patches happens often, and usually for mundane reasons. Rejecting people is extreme, and something that's only happened a very, very few times. Off the top of my head I can only remember Kay Sievers [1]. Even then he left the door open ("Let distributions merge it as they need to and maybe we can merge it once it has been proven to be stable by whatever distro that was willing to play games with the developers").

It's hard to get Linus to rant at you in the first place. It is many times as hard to get him to refuse to deal with your code. Basically, you have to persistently be submitting code that the kernel team considers total junk and persistently refuse to acknowledge or deal with the suggestions given.

[1] http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01331.html

I disagree. I think some people are just irrationally upset about perceived threats to something that is very important to them.

It has nothing whatsoever to do with Linus.

> I think some people are just irrationally upset about perceived threats to something that is very important to them.

Some opponents of systemd seem to think that a move to systemd is an irreversible move in the wrong direction -- that once a distro moves to systemd, there's no going back, because systemd is large, complex, and monolithic, unlike the simple and modular SysV init system. If one is strongly attached to Debian, and feels that the distro is moving irreversibly in the wrong direction, I can see why one would strongly oppose such a move.

I dunno why this is getting downvoted.

The elephant in the room here is that this is behavior that is largely people imitating Linus's "personal style". Although he doesn't resort to death wishes, the tone he's famous to setting on mailing lists pretty much inevitably leads to other people thinking "this is OK".

It's not.

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