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Kernel Dev Tells Linus Torvalds To Stop Using Abusive Language
darthcamaro writes "The Linux Kernel Development Mailing List can be a hostile place for anyone. Now Intel developer Sarah Sharp is taking a stand and she wants the LKML to become a more civil place. Quoting her first message: 'Seriously, guys? Is this what we need in order to get improve -stable? Linus Torvalds is advocating for physical intimidation and violence. Ingo Molnar and Linus are advocating for verbal abuse. ... Violence, whether it be physical intimidation, verbal threats or verbal abuse is not acceptable. Keep it professional on the mailing lists.'"
The entire thread is worth a read, but Linus isn't buying it: "Because if you want me to 'act professional', I can tell you that I'm
not interested. I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The
same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm *also* not going to
buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and
backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because
THAT is what 'acting professionally' results in: people resort to all
kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their
normal urges in unnatural ways.'
He also offered cookies in exchange for joining the dark side. An earlier reply by Linus further explains why he thinks it is OK to be mean: most of the time, he's only yelling at people who should know better (cultivating a crew of lead developers bound to him by Stockholm Syndrome?).
i love this guy (linus). he is kinda zen master ,he says what he think, without any fear
I once read a study of string quartets and communication methods. Some quartets were nice to each other and polite and tried not to hurt each other's feelings. Others insulted each other and said just what they thought.
The quartets that were willing to insult each other, and even sometimes get into fights, ended up playing music much more as a team, whereas the 'polite' quartets played poorer music, because instead of resolving disputes, they ended up each playing their own way.
Linus doesn't insult people, he insults what they do, when they do stupid things. Don't break the build/submit poorly written patches/etc and there isn't a problem. It is not personal at all.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Anyone who has worked with her in her capacity as the USB3 driver majordomo knows what a PITA she can be.
I don't think she is in any position to offer advice on professional behavior.
Violence, whether it be physical intimidation, verbal threats or verbal abuse is not acceptable. Keep it professional on the mailing lists.
Not acceptable? By who's standards?
It's seems acceptable by the law in most countries that matter for the development of the linux kernel.
It seems acceptable by the main dude (Linus)
It seems acceptable by the developers, as they could have forked and started their own project with a more acceptable mailing list policy.
Who is it not acceptable to? and why can't those people make their own fork or simply not participate in the mailing list? (besides Sarah Sharp) If we were losing lots of talented developers because they just couldn't bear the mailing list, that would be a different story.
There is no absolute morality of the way things should be. There is what works. If you have a way to make something work better, no one is stopping you.
Is it really a chance to grab power? If she can assert her will in this, does she become "a voice to be reckoned with"?
I saw a really mediocre movie once where it was asserted that when guys have an argument, they get it right out in the open, do a lot of chest beating, and then get to working together. Women on the other hand will play everything behind the scenes - cloaking it all in an air of civility while they sharpen their knives.
Since I saw that movie (ashamed to say I saw it, but if you happen to remember the reference go ahead and out yourself), I've notice that it's actually a very true statement.
If it's worth doing, it's worth doing for money.
Torvalds was always like that and whining won't change him.
Maybe it's time to eject him from the LKML and give the reigns to someone else ?
Does he use "violence, whether it be physical intimidation, verbal threats or verbal abuse" to get his wife and kids to do something?
I'm guessing he does not.
Being blunt has gotten me a lot further than being polite ever did.
There was this one customer/client/coworker (yeah, fucked-up business relationship), who just did not get what was going on. I tried being polite. I tried using all his lingo, "actioning" this and whatnot. I tried. It got me nowhere.
One phone call where I straight-up said "that problem was *your* fuckup, and I am tired of cleaning up your mess then getting blamed by you for it because you weren't even aware of the problem until I took care of it", and that got me further than months of politeness.
Hell, we still seem to get along. I think we've been communicating even better now that I've stopped "artificially limiting" my communications. I actually just made a note to myself to yell at him to check his code before he checks it in - there was a SQL file with an *obvious* syntax error, one that our standard IDE (which he uses) highlights...
I think you, like most of the replies, have missed my point. I don't want to do Linux Kernel development now. Perhaps not ever. However, the Linux Kernel is one of the biggest OSS projects out there, and they are very visible to the public eye, especially those people who are interested in OSS but don't have any connections with the community or any projects going on. I'm saying that this kind of abrasiveness can be highly detrimental to peoples desire to get involved in OSS, which is a terrible shame. I understand that sometimes you NEED abrasiveness, or you need to get things done quickly. But you can get that kind of performance out of people without verbal abuse, or the threat of physical abuse. Yet these actions are the kind of things that I read a lot about when I read about big OSS projects that come up quite often. Perhaps this is just an artifact of the way news about things gets reported... when things go well, we hear nothing. But the point I was trying to make is that these projects are role models for the OSS movement. And yeah, as one reply put it, no one owes me anything. But I think you have to look what kind of harm you may be doing to the community as well. Sure, you get some great developers that are willing to put up with the bullshit... but how many potentially great developers have you driven off because they don't want to deal with it? (Also, as an aside, I enjoy the fact that I got troll mods for honestly stating the effect that reports of abusive behavior has on my desire to join the OSS with open arms and willing heart.)
I've worked projects since then where I'd wished I could verbally abuse co-workers. There's a general theme there. All those people who I wanted to abuse sucked. I think the moral of this story is, if you don't want to be verbally abused, try sucking less. :-P
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
... is fucking complicated. Especially if you have a good idea of what principles need to be followed as how to make decisions on what stays and what goes in terms of quality or goal of the overall project.
There's lots of people out there who THINK they have skill but are garbage since most people suffer from the Dunning Krueger effect in a similar way that most people believe they are 'above average'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes."
The problem is as you advance in skill you have limited time and options in order to convey the vast warehouse of knowledge in your brain as whether to something stays or goes on any given project. Any project has a tendency to become a big mess or fall apart over time since. How many OSS projects are started only to be abandoned? Lots.
Someone has to make the big decisions and when you have seen and worked on so many projects you develop techniques to quickly shut down bad ideas and often time that means being direct and even rude to the clueless because you simply don't have the time, energy, means to communicate to the other party on what's and why's.
I've always thought that political correctness is just another excuse for the educated elites to look down on everyone else.
Offensiveness doesn't come from words, it comes from the thoughts and actions behind those words. We've gone from nigger to negro to black to african-american back to black...and guess what? Racism hasn't gone away. All you do is replace one word with another word that has the exact same meaning. That's not progress; that's just confusion and wasted effort. Racists will still be racists no matter what words they're using to express it.
Which is essentially the same argument Linus is using -- assholes will be assholes no matter how you dress them up; why waste time and energy trying to sweep that under the rug?
Someone recently cc'd him on a post on the LLVM mailing list, and he decided to chime in with a long rant where he was both rude and technically incorrect. It made me very glad that I don't use Linux, and just that little bit less likely to respond to bug reports that only affect people who do. Meanwhile, I recently got a bug report from one of the OpenBSD developers (a community with a reputation for being somewhat... acerbic). It was detailed, polite, and proposed two possible fixes. It was followed up by testing of the fix that I proposed. I don't use OpenBSD either, but I'm a lot more likely to fix bugs for people who do because this report was characteristic of my interactions with their developers.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I posted on Sarah Sharps' blog. I didn't use profanity, I even quoted Eleanor Roosevelt: "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent." I disagreed with her and stated that the most vile and ruinous censorship starts with a call for civility and that these are almost always from dubious motivations.
So, low and behold, it was moderated out of existence. It seems to me that Sarah has no interest in alternate viewpoints. It is her blog and she has the right to delete comments, but it is quite telling that she will silence a voice which does not agree with her while she is saying she wants to protect people's voices. Her calls for "civility" can be seen as nothing less than a call for censorship. We all must resist this sort of behavior because it is a direct attempt to diminish free speech and impose one person's morality on a larger group.
You can call code bad while still being respectful to the person who wrote it.
Would you rather me say "Your solution doesn't work and this is why" or "You're a fucking moron and your code is crap." One of those comments is what we like to call "constructive" and the other is "hostile". One of them encourages the other person to do better and tells them what they did wrong. The other just tries to make them feel bad.
We have decided that in polite society we should be respectful to others. It's not about "kissing ass", it's about recognizing that people don't like to be bullied. People like people who are nice. It is also about recognizing that by treating people poorly you do not motivate them to do better, you motivate them to leave. Corporate America is not "professional" because we are sissies. We are "professional" because it easier to encourage dialog when people are not afraid.
Torvalds believes that he doesn't have to play by the rules because he is some Linux god and the rest of us can suck it. This is only true as long as the rest of us let him. People continue to be assholes and harass others as long as we sit here silent and take it.