> Linus said what most free software user feel and wanted to say from the very beginning but neither had the strength or conviction, that Linus has
So it takes strength and conviction to be rude and condescending? I'd say it takes strength to remain polite in a heated argument. I'm not impressed with Torvalds' attitude.
Linus is one of the nicest people you'll ever see. He's just a massive troll/flamethrower when it comes to online discussions. He acknowledges so himself. I don't mind it, Linux is his baby and if you don't like interacting with him you can just fork it and go your own way. Nothing stopping you.
I think nobody takes Linus's insults at face value anymore. I'd actually laugh my ass off if I was a kernel developer and got told off by Linus.
There is a problem that flaming is seen as normal, acceptable behaviour in some communities.
People see Torvalds doing it, they see de Raadt doing it, they see a bunch of people doing it, and so they think it's okay to do it in their email list.
This increases developer churn and burnout, and that's not something that OpenSource can afford.
I think it's a shame if young people are learning how to collaborate with others from these broken models, rather than learning effective skills. Especially if inter-personal skills are more likely to be weak in the dev community.
Having said all that, I kind of agree that it's okay for someone to be an arse on their own pet project. If it becomes unbearable people could just fork it split and the project.
Can anyone explain or share a link explaining what was a high level purpose of the RedHat patch? (besides winning the contest, because I understand there was no such thing)
"The high-level view is this: Microsoft wants to ensure that nobody can run unapproved software on their home computers. As a first step toward this nightmare, they bullied computer makers into shipping a bootloader signature system that could potentially prevent people from running GNU/Linux. Red Hat, a multibillion dollar GNU/Linux distributor, decided to play along and got a special signing key from Microsoft. Linus apparently does not want to play along (and I commend him for it)."
He's right, but Red Hat isn't necessarily wrong. Red Hat's doing what's right for their consumers, but Linus is speaking about what's right for the ecosystem. They're different groups/people with different priorities. While I tend to side with Linus on this, I see the values of Red Hat coming up with a working solution, even if it is catering to Microsoft. I'd love to see something in userland and I don't see why the kernel team needs to concern itself with what vendors want to trust. Leave that to Red Hat and Canonical.
Regarding his words:
I honestly don't know why I'm still surprised when he does/says things like this, and I still don't know how I feel about it. The way he instantly reaches for his bag of obscenities seems a bit childish, but he does more often than not get his point across.
I have to wonder if he uses such language so often because he knows tech news is going to report on it when they might not if he were to gently rebuke a kernel dev? It should be noted that after his rant at Nvidia (http://www.theverge.com/2012/6/17/3092829/linus-torvalds-fuc...), Nvidia driver support became a hotly discussed topic and very soon became significantly better. In that regard, Linus seems to get things done and for that, I commend him.
On the other hand, he tends to curse and complain a lot on his g+. It's fairly likely that's just all him.
Well it certainly gets him some celebrity, as if he were in need of any more. It seems Linus Torvalds lashes out on someone every month, and it's probably not an attitude that makes people want to cooperate with him. Or are they used to it by now?
>Guys, this is not a dick-sucking contest. If you want to parse PE binaries, go right ahead. If Red Hat wants to deep-throat Microsoft, that's your issue.
I wonder what would've happened if he was addressing a female kernel developer. Would he have toned it down or would it have been the same? On one hand I like the straightforward talk without beating around the bush, but on another, taking it down a notch or two and getting the same idea across more diplomatically seems to be the better answer.
I wonder what the reaction from the community would be. Probably not very good... which is bad since the meaning of those words, in this context, is clear. And it's not really offensive, although there are more polite forms of course.
Wait, someone using crude, derogatory language to describe someone else is not offensive? Describing your opponent as wanting to deep-throat a competitor is merely impolite now?
How socially clueless are we around here?
I'm so very sick and tired of the apologists here. Our industry is known for prima donnas who are constantly at each others throats, with no semblance of civility whatsoever. We are the only industry I've ever seen where we take pride in being callous, insensitive, and deliberately terrible to each other.
All under the guise of "not playing by The Man's rules".
I can't tell if you are serious or not, but "beating around the bush" refers to the practice of trying to scare birds out of bushes so that they can be shot by hunters.
Frankly, I think Linus Torvalds may be the next Steve Jobs.
This is very Jobsian. He knows what's right, and he's dressing down people who also knew what was right but did the wrong thing anyway. People act as if Jobs was a tyrant badmouthing random innocent people. He wasn't. He was actually pretty genial most of the time. What would set him off was not when someone made an error, but when someone did the wrong thing and they knew it was wrong at the time, but did it anyway.
Jobs was the keeper of the flame of "do the right thing" (my phrase for it) which always involved the right thing for the customer (which is why Apple doesn't follow trends, and rather than make netbooks made the iPad, a superior customer experience.)
Linus is doing the same thing here. For Torvalds the customer is a different customer, both linux users but a lot of developers and the open source community at large. But he's keeping the flame as he sees it, and history indicates he's pretty accurate.
As to another commentators wondering if this would happened if the submitter was female, it really shouldn't matter. I'd like to think that Linus reacted to the error, not the person. It's true that taking it down a notch or two and being more diplomatic is appropriate, almost all the time. It's clear that Torvalds is this way almost all the time, which is why he has such a lovable teddy-bear image, for the most part. The power of blowing up on someone is not when you're doing it, but in the knowledge that there is shit up with you will not put. That's the power.
Also, there's nothing really that gender specific in what he said. Both men and women could engage in hypothetical "dick sucking contests".
Frankly, the average female engineer I've known is tougher than the average male engineer I've known (who tend to be a bit on the wimpy side, while the women tend to be a bit less wimpy than average for people.) But that's just my experience, and consequently anecdotal. The point being that I don't really believe that female engineers are desperate for people to protect them, and that most of the "software development is So Sexist!" people are non-engineers looking for an excuse to be outraged. Some evidence: all the hate towards "brogrammer" stuff, which it is painfully obvious to everyone inside the industry is an inside joke lampooning male programmers by contrasting those pasty nerds with the tanned jock stereotype that beat them up in high school. To act like "brogrammers" are perpetuating a male sexist culture is to, in the most profound way possible, not get the joke!
However, there is sexism... and the reaction from the sexists would be much different if he had been addressing a female. But that's not sexism on Linus's part- in this hypothetical he was saying the same thing in both cases. But if he'd said it to a female, the knee jerk sexists who want to see sexism everywhere (except in themselves) would have reacted quite differently.
> I think Linus Torvalds may be the next Steve Jobs.
Let Linus be Linus, and Jobs be Jobs. We don't need to classify people as "the next [insert name]". Not least because it does them both a disservice; Linus is in a very different position from Jobs, and admirable for completely different (but occasionally overlapping) reasons, and his merits and demerits are his own.
As for the sexism bit, I think the reaction would probably have been different had the submitter (edit: poster, rather: David Howells submitted the code, but it was mjg that the "explosion" was directed at) merely been just a "Red Hat Engineer" (which mjg is not anymore, IIRC). Garrett is a core guy, and Linus knows him well and respects his work. He chose that language to make a broader point, not merely to "explode". This isn't about emotions, it's about content.
Which is sort of the point here: the "shim signed by Microsoft" trick isn't the "Wrong Thing", really. The hardware companies absolutely need a top-level cert authority if secure boot is going to have any utility at all, and Microsoft is the only entity that has stepped up to the plate. What else are we going to do? Dell and Lenovo and Acer aren't about to add a key to their database (and test it) just because the Linux Foundation asked nicely. They're shipping windows hardware. That's not going to happen. So the Shim idea is as good as we're going to get, and as Red Hat (and SUSE, and Canonical) has to ship a product that runs on real hardware, it's the choice they had to make.
That said, I think there's a strong argument that baking this authority into the kernel is a bad idea. Linus clearly agrees (and frankly mjg probably does too, but you can't just write a feature and not try to upstream it). And he's made that point as forcefully and publicly as he can.
Microsoft is the OS vendor. They aren't the only stakeholder in this space. There was, for a time, hope that the UEFI Forum, or an entity attached to it, or perhaps Intel itself might step up and offer to be a central key authority for the UEFI secure boot standard. They didn't. Microsoft did, and even offered to sign keys for other OSes.
Third forum where I see this discussed - and same as in the other 2 a lot of the discussion here is again about his choice of his words instead about the content. I don't think that's a good sign.
> "and same as in the other 2 a lot of the discussion here is again about his choice of his words instead about the content"
Yes, and this is an important lessons to people who underestimate the importance of communicating effectively. If you walked onto the stage at the Oscars wearing assless chaps, you can hardly blame people when they can't remember what your thank-you speech was about.
Similarly, when you throw around ad hominems about your opponent performing fellatio on a competitor, you cannot blame people when the discussion recenters around it.
Definitely true. It's easy to take the "it's the content that matters" approach, but the reality is that delivery always matters. It may not be important to the message, but it's vitally important to how people receive your message: If you fail to deliver it effectively, it's your own fault when people ignore it, miss the point, or otherwise misunderstand/misinterpret your point(s) in whole or in part.
Of course, no one is always going to get that right; we're human. But that's also exactly why it's so important to try hard. You can be certain that as soon as you slip even once your message will not get across in the way you intend it.
It's an embarrassment to our entire industry. It's one of the main reasons people avoid contributing to open source projects. Yes it matters. People who have the maturity and communication skills of 14 year old boys are not the only ones that can make worthwhile contributions.
Torvalds being a meanie is dragging down the entire industry? That seems like quite the leap. Where are all of these people with patches that they have been holding on to for fear of the wrath of Torvalds, and why haven't they banded together and just ignored him?
Unlike bullies in corporations, this guy is incredibly easy to just ignore; the only reason people don't ignore him is because despite being a meanie, he still commands respect. If he didn't, he wouldn't be in the picture.
This isn't about one individual. Offensive, sexist, bigoted communication is standard in the industry. There are mini-Torvalds (and mini-ESRs and mini-DHHs) everywhere who think making derogatory comments about women or otherwise being gratuitously rude is how you prove your worth/"manliness" and a good way to run a project. Bad behaviour filters down, especially when people on HN or slashdot applaud it.
>Where are all of these people with patches that they have been holding on to for feel of the wrath of Torvalds, and why haven't they banded together and just ignored him?
On my hard drive and a million other people like me. Not for the linux kernel in my case, but other open source projects that I don't post my fixes to because it's probable that I'll just get flamed and it isn't worth the stress. If you don't realise how endemic this problem is then I can only presume you don't know any programers who aren't part of the 'boys club'.
Torvalds can get away with it because linux is huge, but there are hundreds of other projects that struggle through lack of contributions.
Next time some software you use crashes or hits some kind of bug, consider that you are probably not the first person to experience it and somebody somewhere probably already fixed it but didn't upload the patch because they didn't want to get abused.
No, Torvalds doesn't get away with it because Linux is huge. In a world where Linux is huge and people didn't value his input, then he wouldn't get away with it. The open source ejects people with bad attitudes who are not worth the trouble, just look at glibc and Drepper's reign of terror.
If there are really millions of developers sitting on patches because they don't want to deal with mini-Torvalds, then you really should start a movement.
It seems like you still don't believe me that people keep patches to themselves because the open source community is so unpleasant to deal with. We had several huge threads about this the last time some alpha jock devs got called out for being assholes. Here are some examples:
Oh, I believe it happens, I just don't believe that it is as pervasive as you suggest. If it were millions sitting on good patches for no reason other than a few people in the "in crowd" being caustic, then the developer-power represented by that group would rival the developer power of the big meanie "in group". Seriously, if that is actually the case, organize.
Here is my perspective though: for the past week I have been sitting on a few commits for git that I would get flamed for if I aired them publicly. Why am I so sure I would get flamed? Because if I am honest with myself, it is because the change is shit. The change is not backwards compatible, has only hypothetical use-cases, and has questionable support in the UI. Until I resolve those things I know it would be flamed (or worse, and more likely, ignored). Now, I'm not sitting on it because I know it would be flamed, I am sitting on it because I know it is shit. If I fix those things, and I don't conduct myself like an asshole when my baby gets curtly shot down, I am fairly confident that I won't be verbally abused. If I am, who gives a shit?
I suspect most people sitting on patches for fear of being flamed, if they are honest with themselves, are so sure that they will be flamed because they understand why they would be. Are there a few who have good changes that are irrationally afraid of being flamed? Yes, I am certain of it. Are there some projects currently headed by people who flame good patches? Absolutely, glibc a few years ago was such a project... but Linux is not one of those projects today.
I found a problem in production, figured out what was going on, wrote a workaround, mailed out a patch, and ... they hated it. I didn't want to fight forever. So, I took my ball and went home, so to speak.
Months later, a different, nicer, person came to me and asked if I still had it. Fortunately for him, I had kept a copy of the change separate from our SCM in my home directory. I handed it over, he merged it, and that was the end of that problem.
It doesn't matter what anyone thinks. Point is that a better choice of words would have prevented this 'event' from ever happening and saved us all precious time
I don't understand this sentiment. The only reason my time is being "wasted" is because I choose to click the link because I have traditionally enjoyed these sorts of controversies. You are under no obligation to participate if you don't find it enjoyable.
Nitpicking delivery is much easier than commenting on content, particularly when the person in question has a reputation of being unrelentingly pragmatic at the expense of artificially polite diplomacy.
The debate about form is about better vs worse, not about right vs wrong. The only way they would be the wrong words is if they deliver the wrong message, but I think pretty much everyone understood the message alright.
>> People act as if Jobs was a tyrant badmouthing random innocent people. He wasn't. He was actually pretty genial most of the time. What would set him off was not when someone made an error, but when someone did the wrong thing and they knew it was wrong at the time, but did it anyway.
Tell that to the elderly lady at Whole Foods who got demeaned because she didnt make Steve's slushie just right.
> .. and that most of the "software development is So Sexist!" people are non-engineers looking for an excuse to be outraged.
You should tell that to the DevChix mailing list. I agree that the "dick-sucking" comment is non-gendered, but don't for a second think that there isn't sexism in this industry.
This issue is sexist only because language itself is sexist and has been for centuries. Even so, English is in the low sexist side of the spectrum when we consider other languages as well.
A good alternative phrase to 'D#$% sucking!' is 'ass kissing!', however I guess it is hard to censor our own language in an online forum while thinking about some technical issue at the same time.
So it takes strength and conviction to be rude and condescending? I'd say it takes strength to remain polite in a heated argument. I'm not impressed with Torvalds' attitude.