I had the great fortune of meeting Steve Bourne, inventor of /bin/sh. If ever there was a guy who could accept any and all accolades it would be him. Instead he was most gracious and humble and spent all his time showing interest in our work as well as answering our questions about the invention of the shell and Unix.
Speaking of; did you know he was the first alpha tester of Unix? When Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie were writing it they would hand the magnetic tapes over to Steve Bourne and have him test it.
Most indie dev. are like that, they don't have anything to show but act like they know everything and that everything they say is pure gold.
I think it's sort of made its way around as the way to act if you know what you're doing and that's a shame. I know a lot of great devs who are lost in the shuffle for not being boisterous enough.
I'm of the opinion that it's not. And, it provides a really poor example to the younger people in the field.
I've known a lot of programmers. Many of them far smarter than Linus. Funnily enough, the better they were; the nicer they were.
Seriously, there's no productivity benchmark beyond which you shouldn't treat people with respect. There are broken cultures where you can get away with it, but you'll still be an asshole.
Linus is an asshole not because it's some deep essential part of his nature, he's an asshole because people give him a free pass.
While it's not preferable, I think that we can be understanding of the fact that people can sometimes have outbursts due to stressors in their life. That said, whenever I've seen people bashing a Linus outburst, I've gone and read said outburst. It's never as bad as the "tech press" make it out to be.
Sure. The question is, do the rest of us treat those incidents as mistakes where somebody went over the line and behaved poorly, or do we defend the behaviour and even try to argue that it's a sign of good project management that should be emulated because it 'tells it like it is' and keeps away the 'idiots'? Sadly the latter is a common attitude, as seen in other comments in this thread.
The level of rudeness in conversation is very dependent on cultural background and those ignoring it display cultural insensitiveness
Europeans are more straightforward than Canadians and Indians where everything is said in a mild passive-aggressive tone that goes nowhere.
"Mauro SHUT THE FUCK UP"
"I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. "
"fix your approach to kernel programming."
"There aren't enough swear-words in the English language, so now I'll have to call you perkeleen vittupää just to express my disgust and frustration with this crap."
It's ridiculous to claim that that's just avoiding unnecessary civility. Those statements aren't "blunt", they're just him being a dick.
But in the written medium it really come across is the most harsh way.
But while maintaining the kernel sometimes he needs to get the point across and saying "this is unacceptable, I am disappointed" will not work.
For those examples, when reading the context I (usually) agree with Linus (and with his attitude), and this usually happens when the situation has been building up and people keep repeating those mistakes.
Also, there are people much worse than Linus on the LKML (and subsystem lists), also some people are very polite and helpful.
What I find remarkable is that people always talk about the same half-dozen remarks - from an history of 20 years of kernel development completely in the open.
Linus is a fucking remarkable example of civility. He just doesn't have an office where he can shit all over people in private, like so many managers.
If everybody was just saying that those were unfortunate incidents where he lost his temper and agreed they were inappropriate then this debate wouldn't keep happening. Some people aren't prepared to admit that Linus is ever at fault in any way during these episodes. There is even a group of people who think that those episodes are examples of 'telling it like it is' and 'sticking it to the PC crowd' and thus should be replicated as much as possible to make sure your project isn't 'swamped by idiots'. Unfortunately some of the people with that attitude maintain open source projects (and have downvote powers on HN).
I have found buffer overflow bugs in widely used open source projects that I have not informed the developers about, because when I've made previous bug reports they acted like assholes. I don't feel inclined to open myself up for public humiliation just to contribute to their project.
Except the people he usually deals with in a harsh manner are not inferior, rather, from the examples, it is usually the top collaborators
> I have found buffer overflow bugs in widely used open source projects that I have not informed the developers about, because when I've made previous bug reports they acted like assholes
I understand, but did you follow the bug reporting procedure?
Also, some projects may act polite towards outsiders then direct criticism (and bugs) to /dev/null
I don't think it's the best way to manage anything, but I also don't think these outbursts are a big deal.
Your commend would be relevant if my comment was the top of a thread or something. Take a look at the context of the conversation. I wasn't popping in out of context out of nowhere and saying "Linus is an asshole, look at these comments!". I was responding to the specific assertion that these asshole-ish statements can be attributed to cultural differences. I in no way disagree with the idea that "Linus was being a dick in these cases" is very very different from "Linus is a dick".
Also, Linus isn't representative of Finnish or Swedish culture (none of which put a lot of stock in assholishness) as much as he is representative of early 90's hacker culture and he never had to grow out of it. It doesn't work as well for a guy with a lot of power though, it isn't cool when he kicks downwards.
I'm not saying he's representative, but it certainly plays a part.
Unless you want "Continental Eastern European", which makes Linus sound polite?
kryptiskt is right and not nitpicking. You are trying to take widely diverse people groups and lump them all together based on a general ignorance of the places you are talking about.
Of course it doesn't make sense, that's why I never said it, but the cultures share some traits, even across language borders.
Having lived in more than one country in Europe I think I know something about the differences (and similarities) between them.
Linus is of course from the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, and I don't know if it translates. But anyways, like others I find it a little weird that you speak of a singular European stereotype. It's not something I can understand at all, really, but I suppose yours is an outsider's perspective.
I also think that your opinion on why Linus behaves as he does is wishful thinking, sorry. There's a decent chance he'd take his ball and go home if the above were done. That would be bad.
But if you cannot take having a new one teared when you do something stupid - you are in the wrong field. Bullshit, stupidity and thin-skinniness should not be tolerated.
But it seems there is a kind of tradition among hackers of people that are exceedingly smart but also jerks.
They get away with it if they are sufficiently smart, because many hackers tend to value a certain kind of cleverness above most other things. And honestly, I would rather deal with a smart jerk, as long as he/she was not trying to feed me bullshit than a friendly but ignorant buzzword-slinger.
Having said that, let me repeat that I would prefer a friendly smart guy over both of these extremes, and so far, I have been lucky.
What's intolerable is when untalented people cargo-cult Jobs or Linus and pretend that their personality is what caused them to succeed. There is nothing more scary than an untalented manager reading one of the many 'inspirational' leadership books about Steve Jobs - they are likely to pick up every single wrong lesson.
Has anyone ever complained that Terence Tao is apparently a genuinely really nice person? People would still work with Tao if he was a misanthropic asshole because he is probably the smartest person in the world, but it's not like being a kind and generous human being detracts from his genius.
We haven't seen Carmack when someone tries to contribute naff code to one of his game engines. He doesn't develop in the open the way Linus does.
I also don't like strong emotional confrontation.
Can you see why I wouldn't want to work with someone abrasive like Torvalds? Part of me will always be on edge expecting to be chastised, even if that were never directed to me. So it isn't only the targets of his abrasion which are affected, but also those who think they might be targets, even if that belief is wrongly held.
I just think that his abrasiveness (even if it only manifests itself in a few circumstances) is a negative that people tolerate because he is such an exceptional project manager and programmer. The keyword is 'tolerate'.
Too often, people think that his success comes not from his technical mastery (which is very difficult to imitate) but from aggressive rants and call outs - and try to imitate those and justify it as 'well that's how Linus runs the kernel'. It's even more prevalent with people cargo culting Steve Jobs' personality flaws thinking it will make their company the next apple.
He needs to be able to trust people because he needs to merge thousands of patches and make sure nothing bad gets in.
This is the only reason you should ever do what Jobs or Torvalds have done: trust.
Romero
Yes, some other, less talented developers are being jerks and decide that they should try to hide their deficiencies by imitating Linus Torvalds. That does happen. But I'm sure that to a far larger extent, imitating the style of the great leader is just something that happens subconsciously.
That is really the reason why I disagree with nkozyra's grandparent comment. Even somebody who really knows their stuff must be conscious of how they communicate, because of the potential problems that arise when their style is inevitably adopted by those who don't really know their stuff.
http://www.amazon.com/System-International-Computer-Science-...
It was somewhat outdated by late 80's but it was still "the book" for newcomers to Unix environments.
Next, look up what AWK stands for...
He's always been humble, engaging, friendly, and most of all, passionate about what he does without becoming fanatical about it.
I think this is a consequence of a lot of these languages getting a lot nicer tooling recently, as well as other FP ideas being pulled into newer languages.
Either way, his tweets are always entertaining.