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Linus Torvalds apologizes for personal attacks in emails and announces he's taking time off from kernel development
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- Title
- LKML: Linus Torvalds: Linux 4.19-rc4 released, an apology, and a maintainership note
Oh no, they broke Linus. His rants were usually deserved and it helped to keep the developers at bay, but I knew that sooner or later as Linux grows in popularity he would have to tone it down. Banter is great thing, but once the workplace gets dull and corporate it goes away, and this is an unfortunate reality of an ever growing project. RIP Linus rants, they would missed.
They were certainly fun to read but I think it drove off a lot of very skilled people from Linux kernel development, not to mention the potential ripple effect.
By ripple effect, I mean this, from a outsider perspective: Linux is seen the symbol of FOSS development for people who aren't used to open-source, so if the leader of the Linux yells at people when they make a mistake, why shouldn't the leaders of lesser(smaller?) projects? And why should I volunteer if I'm getting yelled at?
I know this isn't how it is, but it could happen.
The same end result of keeping bad code away could be achieved by denying it strongly, but politely and wouldn't drive away developers. To be clear, I'm not blaming Linus for this, I know he only yells at people who should know better, but that doesn't matter if you're getting yelled at.
It baffles me how many people defend abusive behavior, I read about this on reddit and came here to read what sensible people have to say about the issue, and it's the same thing!
You can easily twist this around: If you can't strongly criticize somebodies software contribution without attacking the contributor personally, then you have no business overseeing such a vital project!
I think if you take shitty code apart you can easily make somebody feel that they did something very wrong, you don't need to insult them for that.
Disclaimer: I'm not a contributor myself and haven't seen too many rants and what they were about.
It's good that you mention this and I agree to a large extend. What you mentioned is not a personal attack, it's maybe rough language, but it's not insulting the person writing the code.
I was thinking of stuff like 'you should retroactively aborted' or similar things, and I believe that we can agree that this is completely unnecessary. I'm on mobile right now but will look up exact quotes later on.
Edit: there you go: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495
Even that rant doesn't sound so bad if you consider that it wasn't directed at a specific person. The author of the bad userspace code isn't on LKML and I doubt that even they think reading 1 byte at a time is a good idea.
His "rants" are those of a gifted but angry teenager. I'm always surprised that the response to that is never "mind your manners" or "stfu", but almost always apologies and humility. If I wrote similar rants on a similar subreddit I would get banned. But he has the name which helps him get away.
It's not about the content because he generally seems to be correct technically, but the delivery is the worse I have seen in FOSS.
To me, driving people away from Linux kernel dev is almost the lesser issue. The bigger issue to me is how his behavior enabled so many others to behave just like him. Even if you weren't involved with Linux development at all, you could justify behavior by saying "well, Linus a jerk, but he's smart enough to get away with it - therefore it's okay if I do that, too."
I'm hopeful his rants will return, but toned-down. Having strong opinions about code quality and architecture is an important part of the BDFL role. But Linus frequently let his rants bleed over into personal attacks on the developers, which is where the line should be. That can alienate contributors, and making sure that doesn't happen is also an important thing for BDFLs to do.
It takes courage to admit fault, and his occasionally-abusive rants were certainly a fault. Good on him for recognizing the problem and working to correct it. The time off is well-deserved.
I came here to say basically this. To "look into the mirror" is hard emotional and intellectual work, and it's one of the most awesome things about humans.
Linus can use all the time and patience he deserves. I hope he'll be with supportive and caring people, too, which will make a lot difference during the journey of self-reflection.
I'm actually really impressed with this response. I've seen a lot of public non-apologies, and odds are Linus could easily have said nothing and allowed the status quo to continue with minimal backlash, but he gave a genuine response that says "I have a problem, this is what I did wrong, this is what I'm going to do to address it, and here's what I'm doing right now to prove it".
Good on him. I hope he can come out of this feeling better about the person he sees in the proverbial mirror.
I wonder if he'll stop saying stuff like this: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/3/20/845
To me it reads as high praise and gentle joshing, on the other hand suggesting someone has a diseased mind presumably breaks the new CoC?
I think the context makes it clear that is praise and not a personal attack. However if the mentioned person thought they were being insulted, all it should take is a clarifying email from Linus to resolve the issue - "oh, sorry, didn't realise it came across that way".
Sure, my musing was more "Will he self censure this kind of exchange after he returns".
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6907
Something doesn't seem right.
Is there context I'm missing? Why is a three year old blogpost from ESR warning "open-source leader[s]" that they should be excessively paranoid about being alone with women relevant?
and now this
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9go8cp/
I don't think Linus's email as a standalone case. Technical communities certainly can not hold apolitical position any longer.