I whole heartedly disagree. Being angry (and making it known) at someone who broke the “first rule of kernel development” and then tried to hide that fact is completely accepted. Attacking said person with personal insults isn’t. I don’t see any of the latter here, compared to Linus’s past reactions to similar situations anyway.
I'm assuming the apology[1] from Linus must have come off on complaints raised to the HR department of companies with active contributions to the Linux kernel. Because this was Linus, this went over relatively smoothly for him, but for another person, this may not have been the case.
There is also no telling if the person is interacting in good faith and just doesn't know, in which case the aggression is a bit rude.
You can tell people to fuck off without saying that explicitly, and it also allows you to save face in case the situation isn't what you expected it to be.
Offense is taken not given. While Linus can be exceedingly colourful at times I for one don't find it offensive. Moreover you, and I, can't fathom the amount of times he probably had in depth discussions on various kernel topics, by now he probably knows that sometimes being abrasive is the only way to get message across.
The bottom line is a kernel developer, a senior kernel developer at that, should know this already, and should never violate the golden rule of kernel development, and if they did somehow, should not argue against reverting their userland-breaking changes. Seems to me, given the circumstances, Linus was much more reserved than he could/should of been. A great way to make people think twice before doing something stupid is to call them on the carpet when they do something stupid. There was no name calling, no profanity, no personal attacks here.
That's not to mention your snippet above would have received the same exact pushback (maybe more) from Alan at the time since Alan believed he was in the right.
I think we need to remember that the words and the intent of the words are two different things. If he's just given to rudeness and profanity, that in and of itself is not a big deal. There are plenty of very abrasive people who do good work and aren't trying to hurt anyone. If Linus was out to actually harm people - maybe he is, I don't know - that would be a problem IMO.
He's absolutely correct that everyone doesn't have to like and be able to work with everyone. All the people who continue to find ways to complain about his behavior just don't like him. OK. Fork the project.
See: OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD for domain examples of what to do when you have personality conflicts in an open source OS project.
> For example in today's environment when someone suggests something stupid, it is no longer acceptable to say "this seems stupid to me" because it might hurt someone's feelings.
What is no longer acceptable is to personally insult a developer for breaking things, poorly designing an API/implementation, etc. By "personally insult" I mean call someone names, curse at them, sarcastically suggest they should have been aborted, and many other such tactics.
Judging from Linus' post, he agrees that stuff like that is unprofessional.
And there are plenty of examples of Linus' posts where he clearly called particular developer stupid, as opposed to calling their ideas stupid. I can provide examples if you've never read one of them.
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've called Linus an utter asshole many times before, I have no problem calling him an asshole when he is one. I've made big career changes because I was sick of certain toxic people in open source projects. I'm not defending Assholes In OpenSource(TM). I just don't think this is an instance. He isn't personally insulting the person, the person was defending a choice that anyone exposed to kernel development should know does not meet fundamental expectations. After 3 weeks, that requires some bluntness.
There's a thicker-than-fine line between being hostile to new contributors and being unkind, and tolerating bad practices from people who ought to know better.
Most of the time, he's not that rude. But when he thinks someone is wrong, he reacts with very offensive comments (especially if the person try to insist to prove her point).
That's some kind of terrorism management : nobody would dare make an error while working on the kernel.
> People are pretending that his horrible behavior is acceptable just because they don't want to get on his bad side.
I think this is wrong. This argument does not make sense for people who are not in any way directly involved with kernel contributions, but have nevertheless formed an opinion about Linus. I, personally, find his antics to be quite entertaining and refreshing. Reacting strongly to small technical detail is something that should be encouraged, not banished.
Linus may be an ass at times but he has earned that right, and is one of the few people from whom an abrasive attitude is tolerated. I would strongly caution you that most people do not find that sort of attitude acceptable.
And yes, this is a throwaway account. It might be worth considering why I created it to respond to you, just based on your post above.
I agree, he seemed to only get personal when he knew the developer, and it seemed like it was mainly because he knew that they knew better, but were still submitting bad patches anyway. I still remember seeing an email response to someone who was just starting college and was telling Linus that he thought the way they were using spinlocks in the kernel was wrong. Linus knew they didn't know any better, so he didn't insult them, and went into a lengthy email about why they were doing things the way they did, and how the student's professor had taught them wrong.
Even though Finns can be much more blunt than people are used to, I think he recognized a while ago that he was going beyond being blunt. During a conference in Australia, someone asked him about how people perceived his attitude and it's effect on the kernel community. He told them that he's not a nice person, he doesn't know why people think he would be, and that if people enter the community with that in mind, they'll stop feeling like they're being personally attacked.
Which part of his behaviour in this email is unacceptable in particular? Let’s look at it:
> Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!
Okay, so he tells Mauro to stop talking because he apparently thinks that what Mauro was saying is wrong. To make very sure that what he wrote is read, he puts in fancy caps and some light swearing, which, however, is not directed at anyone in particular. A more polite version of this would have been ‘No.’, but I don’t see any bullying/abuse.
> It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a maintainer? And you still haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance?
It appears that this guy violated some rather important rule of kernel development which he should have known given his experience. Again, no name-calling or directed swearing whatsoever, however. Again, a more polite version could be ‘We don’t break userspace, and you know that.’, which doesn’t look particularly different to me.
> If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to understand?
I would wager the guess that similar problems pop up from time to time and Linus is getting tired of seeing them all the time, hence his question. Again, no name-calling at all, also no abuse, but a (justified, though maybe slightly aggressive) question.
> [technical details]
> Shut up, Mauro. And I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. Seriously.
Again, no name-calling of the maintainer, but only an assessment of what he wrote, which, to Linus, appears very wrong. Again, more politely, this would have been ‘No.’
> […] And you've shown yourself to not be competent in this issue
This is the first personal ‘attack’, however, it is still only aimed at the competence rather than person, and if the above holds true, is yet again entirely justified. Is this the line with which you had a problem?
Linus then goes on to explain again why this particular idea was ‘TOTAL CRAP’, with some more colourful adjectives regarding the patch. Again, no abuse.
> The fact that you then try to make excuses for breaking user space, and blaming some external program that used to work, is just shameful. It's not how we work.
This could be interpreted as somewhat personal, though it likely only means ‘I expected better and am disappointed in you’.
> Fix your f*cking "compliance tool", because it is obviously broken. And fix your approach to kernel programming.
Note that the ‘fucking’ is for the ‘compliance tool’, which apparently is broken; the comment regarding kernel programming is again directed at their competence rather than person, so I don’t see any particular abuse there, either.
The remaining question is then, why didn’t Linus just write something along the lines of ‘No. / Don’t break userspace. / No. / No.’? Likely because then someone would have called him out on not going into details or because they got the same email regarding three small mistakes and a question and now don’t know whether this issue is a similar ‘small mistake’ or something more problematic.
I don’t think that’s really what Linus wants (obviously we’re speculating here). He was trying to make it clear that breaking the first rule of kernel development is not negotiable. Anger and swearing isn’t needed to express that, let me reiterate, this is what does that:
> the threat of rejecting future commits and/or rejecting his opinions was by far the best thing in Linus' response, b/c those cut straight to your potential to contribute to the project.
He has lost his temper needlessly in the past and acknowledged it as something to work on and from my limited perspective it looks like he has.
I don't see this particular rant in question to be a personal attack though. Personally, I don't see a macho, jockish atmosphere to the Linux kernel community either. Also, I'm also not particularly concerned whether an environment is cultivated where anyone feels they can contribute. People contribute to the kernel out of need as well as want.
To directly address the part of the comment about otherwise capable contributors (and the Sarah Sharp example): There's multiple kinds of capability. Technical capability isn't the be-all, end-all in this industry. In fact, I think most of us would say that soft-skills are what differentiate high levels of success in this career. If a company's management culture disagrees with you, then you aren't capable of contributing in that atmosphere.
It's not a matter of either party being to blame but a matter of fit between two parties working towards a mutual goal. I don't think it's remotely fair to say that it's solely Linus's responsibility to facilitate a culture where anyone can feel comfortable contributing. Especially with a project as fundamentally necessary where people will have to contribute, regardless of the culture. If someone's incompatibility with the culture trumps their need to work in it, then yes, they should part ways and that should be perfectly okay.
The same applies to personal relationships, marriages, etc. I think it's good to step back from things from time to time and realize that, ultimately, you're dealing with people and they're not always going to value what you value and they're not always going to give you what you want.
Linus is BDFL. That's all you need to know in four letters. Why are people trying to give ultimatums to God? Seems pointless.
I don’t disagree that Linus has gone way overboard when chewing people out. The language in some of his rants is completely inappropriate, and he has since apologized for that. But if someone who 100% knew better did something they shouldn’t have, sometimes getting chewed out is appropriate.
“maybe finding another hobby”
It’s very easy to sit here in our armchairs and go “yeah he should just abandon his project”. I’m not sure how any of us would react to one of our projects growing to the scale linux has, but blithely suggesting one should just swap careers or hobbies (since programming is -just- a hobby apparently) is not productive at all.
>> You have to understand that the alternative to "Linus is mean" is "Linus let a fucking patch enter the kernel, and it broke millions of machines around the world, causing millions of dollars worth of damage". Every single line committed in the kernel must be carefully checked, and if you lack the skills, just go away, because it will (1) spoil the precious kernel maintainers time and more importantly (2) do damages to millions of users.
This is a false dichotomy. You can tell people to go away or get better without telling them it'd be better if they'd never been born or wishing violence upon them. I honestly don't have a problem with Linus telling somebody their code is terrible. Linus has often taken it to another level in belittling and abusing the people around him.
Linus has a pattern where his first (or second) reaction to an issue is to START SHOUTING AND NAME CALLING in an attempt to shut down discussion. If the issue blows up he comes back and gives a reasonable, considered response. It's a pattern that's not helpful.
This kind of behavior is obviously extreme and I agree with you if it comes as a surprise but I'd argue that Linus' short temper is a known fact and something you sign up for by getting involved in kernel development, not to mention I doubt any of this is actually personal.
IMO the modern trend of CoCs everywhere swung the pendulum way too much the other way in favour of attention-seekers who intentionally find things to get offended about and cause drama.
The thing is, all Linus rants that I've seen are entirely reasonable. Yes, calling someone stupid is rude, but rude things should be used in extreme circumstances. And when a single developer can negatively affect millions - wait, actually, billions - of people around the world with a stupid patch, that's exactly the case where being rude and aggressive is entirely reasonable.
This comment is ironic given your previous praise for Linus on acknowledging his rude behavior towards other developers.
The language you're using is pretty abrasive and it can come off as quite hostile even if you don't intend it. You also get defensive when someone interacts with your easy-to-misinterpret comments and you gaslight them by saying they shouldn't be quick to "take sides" about your ripe-for-polarization statement.
Maybe you could take a queue from Linus. As you said in your own comment in reference to Linus admitting he had an attitude: "Good for him. These are hard things to admit, and he's setting a great example."
If I'm so lucky, I look forward to a quippy response about how that situation is totally different.
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