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Godwin's Law Invoked in Linus/Gnome Spat

Posted by Zonk on from the can't-the-nazis-stay-out-of-just-one-internet-argument dept.

lisah writes "The flame wars between Linus Torvalds and the GNOME community continue to burn. Responding to Torvalds' recent claim that GNOME 'seems to be developed by interface Nazis' and that its developers believe their 'users are idiots,' a member of the Linux Foundation's Desktop Architects mailing list suggested that Torvalds use GNOME for a month before making such pronouncements. Torvalds, never one to back down from a challenge, simply turned around and submitted patches to GNOME and then told the list, '...let's see what happens to my patches. I guarantee you that they actually improve the code.' After lobbing that over the fence, Torvalds concluded his comments by saying, 'Now the question is, will people take the patches, or will they keep their heads up their arses and claim that configurability is bad, even when it makes things more logical, and code more readable.'" Linux.com and Slashdot are both owned by OSTG.

3 of 828 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Links to the patches? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Even just bump for the response

    http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/deskto p_architects/2007-February/001129.html

  2. Re:Not about look by SoapDish · · Score: 5, Informative
    Just to back you up on this...

    People should read the thread where all this happened: http://lists.linux-foundation.org/pipermail/deskto p_architects/2007-February/thread.html

    After someone asked about where the patches were, Linus said the following:

    I sent them to the gnomecc list (the changes to let control center enable
    it were bigger than the changes to the metacity ones, but more
    importantly, control-center actually had a mailing list address in its
    README).

    The metacity patches I also sent to maintainers that I tried to google
    for, because there isn't even any submission address in the sources that I
    could find.

    Of course, the gnomecc mailing list is "by members only", so I don't know
    if the patches ever got accepted by the moderator.

    Quite frankly, I think it's interesting how (a) no developer contacts were
    listed and (b) the one that did list it doesn't even accept email from
    outside. ...

    (and maybe give hints
    to them that if you have a README file that says "REPORTING BUGS AND
    SUBMITTING PATCHES", it might be good to actually give an email to send
    things to, instead of saying "Send me mail" with no email address actually
    ever mentioned!)
  3. Re:Please take care of Linus by macaddict · · Score: 5, Informative

    As the mother of an autistic (PDD) child--thank you for saying all that.

    I'm so fucking sick and tired of these geeks who think autism is some sort of neato cool thing to have which makes your life a magical fairyland of math and science genius while explaining away their aversion to dating and soap. That attitude alone tells me they have no fucking clue what they are talking about.

    Autism is not a benefit and it's not fun and games. It's a fucking nightmare! I can't even begin to imagine what my son goes through when he "short circuits" on sensory overload. And he's old enough now to realize something is going wrong, but he can't do anything to stop it. How come none of the "autism wannabes" out there ever talk about that aspect? Maybe because they're not actually autistic? Trust me, if I could I'd take my son's autism away from him and give it to one of those "autism is so kewl!" geeks so their dream of being autistic can come true.