Slashdot Mirror
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?).
Torvalds was always like that and whining won't change him.
Nerdy news for your nerdy needs? http://www.soylentnews.org Soylent News is people!
if you ever worked well any job you know what hes talking bought. people nice to your face wile they back stab you in backroom office talks.
i love this guy (linus). he is kinda zen master ,he says what he think, without any fear
I just recently graduated with a degree in mathematics, and a minor in computer science. I can program well, for the amount of experience I have, and I would love to get better. I, personally, think that one of the best ways that I could get better is to contribute to OSS projects. However, I can't lie, reading stories about the abusiveness of the community is a huge turn off. Now, I realize that I am probably not one of those people who 'should know better,' and I realize that really extraordinary outbursts are rare (which is why they get reported on, obviously), but I still have enormous trepidation about joining the OSS community. I feel I may have talent and ideas to contribute, but when I see stories about the way that people get treated when they make mistakes, it makes me want to avoid the whole thing. I wouldn't be doing it for money, I would be doing it for fun, and to learn. And as far as I'm concerned, if I'm going to be abused for making mistakes, I am not having fun, and I am likely not learning much either. Now, again, I understand that this is not usually the case as far as OSS development, but I'm just relaying my gut reaction to hearing about behavior like that.
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.
Sarah:
> Let's discuss this at Kernel Summit where we can at least yell at each
> other in person. Yeah, just try yelling at me about this. I'll roar
> right back, louder, for all the people who lose their voice when they
> get yelled at by top maintainers. I won't be the nice girl anymore.
>
Linus:
That's the spirit.
Greg has taught you well. You have controlled your fear. Now, release your anger. Only your hatred can destroy me.
Come to the dark side, Sarah. We have cookies.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Sarah: Hey assholes, let's not be so mean, ok?
Linuz: bitches, please.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
If someone else managed to do his job better than him it would be trivial to do a fork. That this has not happened is a testament that his way doing things works. Simple as that. So what if he is verbally abusive.
The fact Linux is awesome and Linus is an abusive and profane manager doesn't mean the profanity and abuse is necessary to make Linux awesome. It could be it helps cut through the BS and makes things more clear and efficient, it could also be being clear and direct would be just as effective and the profanity actually makes people emotional and irrational.
The fact it's working doesn't mean it can't be improved.
I stole this Sig
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.
Honestly I can't tell if you're serious, but that's the funniest thing I've read all day on Slashdot.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I find that language offensive. Please use the word 'appendage'.
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.
Not being a dick != political correctness
There are few things more dickish than 'you must behave the way I tell you to' political correctness.
What some people call "political correctness," others call "having some fucking consideration for people other than themselves."
It all derailed when it started referring to "verbal threats" and "verbal abuse" as "violence". Sorry, but unless a dev is at my door with a baseball bat, it's just words. Additionally, we've all dealt with people who are crude, terse, mean, or just flat out obnoxious prima-donas. It only impacts you if you give a shit. I've dealt with some of those in my career and all that matters to me is whether they are productive and talented. Telling me "you made a stupid fucking mistake" isn't any worse than "Please don't take this too harshly and please don't think I am picking on you. I like you and you are a swell fellow and all. However, I feel it is necessary that I impress upon you that this isn't really a bug and having this trivial and non-broken thing filed as a bug has consumed a little bit of our time that we would rather not be wasting on things like this. Also, here is a pat on the back and an atta-boy so you don't feel I am being mean to you, okay?".
Granted, it might be a little unprofessional to use crude language with people. CEOs and other muckety-mucks do it all the time, however. It's also a little different between using crude language and lashing out at people with crude language to insult them and put them down. But, again, that's just the way things are and it is just the way some people are. It really does not have to impact you in the slightest if you don't want it to (and it doesn't hurt to learn to give it back - especially if you can do so cleverly, with wit, and without the matching vulgarity).
I don't doubt this sort of thing does put some people off from contributing and participating. I sure as hell wouldn't participate in anything that involved Linus and other well-known and super-smart guys, because I know I'm not at their level and I would just constantly be on the receiving end of "how fucking stupid can you be?!". But you know what? Maybe that's okay. Maybe it weeds out people who don't have the spine to deal with it or who take everything so personally that everything has to become a drama rather than just getting work done.
Of course, Linus could be less of an asshole (even when his points are very fair). But I don't see why he should feel he *has* to be less of one. *shrug*. I also think it's a little different than if he was someone's direct boss in a workplace and he was walking outside of his office to constantly berate, ride, ridicule, and harass his employees for being totally incompetent.
This may actually show how HEALTHY the Linux kernel developers community is. Where else can a junior person tell the CEO he's being an asshole in front of the whole company? You'd be fired.
What's this got to do with political correctness?
Nothing at all. That is just the "PC Card" that is played whenever rude or abusive people don't like to be told they are acting like wanton children. It's their excuse to act as rude as they like for the sake of the attention it brings them.
...with their faux outrage at Linus' "tantrums." They're not, if you read context, but this isn't about context. This "controversy" is all about slamming Linus personally and Linux by implication by comparing his management style against a non-existent ponies-and-rainbows environment. And this isn't the first time it's happened here.
Such bullshit.
--
BMO
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...
The English have mastered delivering withering insults very politely. Simply being polite does not make you "nice". Is it more "professional" to wrap your disdain for an idea in language that is courteous on the surface? Maybe. Is the emperor going to change? Unlikely.
They got nothing on the French. Voltaire's criticism led to suicides. But regardless, this represents a change in Linus' historical behavior. It could just be stress, or it could hint at the onset of a mental illness. Increased aggression, changes in mood or attitude, impaired judgement, black and white or "us versus them" thinking... while many might chalk this up to poor manners on the internet, it could hint at something more substantial.
Either way, people are focusing on the behavior, but are neglecting to take notice of the fact that while the kernel-dev mailing list has always been, achem, heated... this is still a significant departure from baseline -- it's starting to make headlines in a big way too. People do not simply wake up one day and decide they're going to be abusive assholes -- there are triggers, changes to the person's environment or biology.
Separately, I'm not sure abusive language is ever good for the long-term health of a cooperative project -- it may not be a professional environment, but it's not exactly amateur hour either. Repeated abuse and disrespect is not conducive to a productive and cooperative environment. See also: The reason why there are so many flavors of BSD.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe.
Linus is one beard away from becoming RMS.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
If you ask a humble question or make a polite request to someone who represents a system (political, corporate, cultural etc.) and get an aggressive response, you have acted politically incorrect. It's what you say to whom, not how you say it. Linus Torvalds might be a rebel in the world of tech giants but in the community of linux kernel developers, he is a person of power and should take it seriously when someone points out a problem.
When asked why, the answer is almost always: "It's 2014".
There are few things more dickish than 'you must behave the way I tell you to' political correctness.
Like the "you must tolerate my gratuitous abuse because I am more important than you" 'tude?
If Sarah cannot stand the heat, she should go back to the kitchen.
See - now that is political incorrectness.
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?
Or we can just wait until he dies and someone else takes over.
You can accept this or not, but neither you, I nor Linus are going to live forever, nor is Linus' propensity to abuse people who are partially responsible for his own success.
As you say, "this is a part of what he is, and he won't change." Evidently you think that this is a quality worth respecting.
This is wrong. More importantly, this is "fanboyism" at its worst. I'm personally glad someone finally stepped forward and made Linus look like the childish brat he's become in the past few years. Just because he made that kernel you like doesn't mean every decision he makes is fucking gold. Get over it.
Because writing a terse couple sentences with vulgarities targeted at you in a mailing list that you voluntarily subscribe to for a project you voluntarily participate in is exactly the same as someone stalking you in meatspace, on your property, incessantly harassing you?
"The fact Linux is awesome and Linus is an abusive and profane manager doesn't mean the profanity and abuse is necessary to make Linux awesome."
No. But the fact that Linus is sometimes abusive, plus the fact that he thinks that sometimes he has to be abusive, plus the fact that he leads no less than Linux as a testament to his management abilities does mean something.
He has a theory, he practices it and he has success backing him. You have a theory and... what else?
I think (2) is something people often miss. If you're a n00b who posts something stupid on LKML, you are not going to get massive old-school-Usenet-style flames. When heated LKML arguments make it to Slashdot, it's almost always a case where both sides are actually reasonably known, like the maintainers of two different Linux subsystems having strong disagreements over direction. You don't find Linus flaming a college kid, both because that would be unnecessarily mean, and because it wouldn't be worth his time to write out long heated posts just to rebut n00bs.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You need to have the skin of a thousand rhino and the determination of the super-est of all supermen to push your idea across the many seasoned, and equally thick-skinned developers.
So having a good idea well developed and code that is written cleanly and clearly isn't important, it is more important to be able to browbeat others into liking it.
The so-called "abusive languages" is but a mechanism to weed out ideas which are not fully thought-over.
And here I thought that a clear and concise technical discussion would be a way to weed out ideas that are not fully thought-over. Or simply saying "your idea is not fully developed and it will not appear in the kernel." Who knew that the only way to do that was to be verbally abusive and insulting?
I think it speaks volumes that the concept of "acting professionally" seems to mean only not wearing a bathrobe when in private to some. I think the phrase "unclear on the concept" was developed for people like that.
If you can't stand the heat, dear Sir, I suggest you to get out of the kitchen.
It's interesting you use a kitchen analogy in this discussion. For several years I've been watching Gordon Ramsay in his various rant-prone self-promotional programs. For the last couple of months I've been watching MasterChef on BBC America with Michel Rue. The difference is that Gordon Ramsay is a foul-mouthed abusive fellow who can do nothing but yell and insult the people competing in his programs when they make the tiniest mistake, and Michel Rue's harshest comment has been along the lines of "that needed more seasoning" or "that was too pink for my taste". When Ramsay's folks bring him poorly produced food he throws pans and pots; Rue wrinkles his nose a bit and says "that wasn't your best work". The other difference is that Ramsay's contestants produce zero-star pablum and Rue gets one-star creative performances from his. It seems one feels the need to express his superiority at every chance, the other wishes to develop talents in others. They are both good at achieving their goals. I'll leave it to the reader to guess which goal I think is more worthy.
When did civility become a disease?
Most of the time when people complain about political correctness, it's because they the self-discipline or the intelligence necessary to compose a polite reply. Clearly Linus is not lacking in intelligence, but he seems short on common sense here.
Political correctness, when done well, is a more effective weapon than boorishness. Calling someone a fool is easy, but crass and wasteful. In the eyes of the audience it lowers you to the level of the fool, and you have to work harder to prove you aren't. Giving someone else the opportunity to open their own mouth and prove themselves a fool, now that's economical. They'll happily blather out their inanity on their own, if you let them.
John
I'm very honest and direct with the people who work with and for me. And yet magically I'm not an asshole like Linus. If you're incapable of delivering an honest and direct message without abusing people, then you're a shitty human being.
Honest and direct: "This is not good enough. The logic is flawed and the code is sloppy. Go back and do it again".
Asshole: "How fucking stupid do you have to be to write something like this crap".
See the difference?
Life needs more saving throws.
However this is also what many people complain about with bad managers. There are many ways to handle problems and not all of them involve yelling and abuse. It affects more than just the person receiving the chewing out, the bystanders are also influenced and may feel that they're in a hostile environment (ie, stressed out to never make a mistake lest they get same treatment). There are managers who strongly felt that yelling was the proper way to motivate people, however those managers are now much more rare because companies are more aware of the problems and crack down on it.
Ie, the old saying of "you attract more flies with honey than vinegar" covers this subject, as well as books like "How to win friends and influence people".
In this case I think the abuse is in doing the chewing out in public. That is fully intended to embarrass that person as well as intimidate others. A private message would have also served the purpose to correct the developer, and especially if the developer doesn't mind emails full of expletives then Linus could go crazy in that private email. I am certain there are people out there who shy away from Linux kernel development precisely because of the culture on those mailing lists. Some people thrive on stress and others wilt under it.
the CEO, a few execs, and star sales members, can get away with being foul mouthed and abusive but absolutely everyone else has to be polite.
That may be the case in the corporate world. But Linus will take it as well as dish it out.
I have often seen this same "enforced politeness" tried on other mailing lists, and the result is always the same. The "wizards" soon migrate somewhere else, and the mailing list becomes nothing but a bunch of clueless (but polite) noobs commiserating with each other.
"Can I come to your door and swear at you all day long?" No, but if *I* come to *your* door you can swear at me all you want, because I can always leave.
What's up with the assumption that women are delicate little flowers that need to be protected because they can't handle...anything? Seems to me like your POV is a bigger problem.
Yeah, as a Brit I'm somewhat confused by this article; is Linus being hauled over the coals for telling people off for making mistakes? Or for using "cuss" words? Or just both at the same time?
In the type of circles I move in, I really only think I've witnessed the following three attitudes when it comes to dealing with/confronting failure:
People who'll call you a fucking idiot
People who'll call you a pusillanimous carbuncle with the intellectual capacity of a particularly forlorn used condom
People who won't really tell you whether you've fucked up or not, but will often go away thinking you've failed, and acting upon it, without giving you the chance to learn from your mistake or even show you you made one, all under the guise of "politeness" or "professionalism"
Assuming of course they're correctly identifying faults, of the three types, IMHO the first two are capable of forging a good working relationships whereas the third passively destroys relationships by having no feedback system. Sure, there's a difference in the degree of skin thickness required between types 1 and 2 but if you're the sort of person that can accept constructive criticism in the first place you're already doing better than most.
There are various degrees of the above of course, depending on the magnitude of the mistake, but when I fuck up, I'd prefer someone to tell me I've fucked up. Disguise the swearing with some floridity if you really feel you want or need to, but the intent is still the same and it's the intent that's all important IMHO.
Linus' job is more than just that of a manager, he's also a mentor and a teacher as well. Occasionally this means hauling out a particularly daft member of the school for everyone else to see and making an example of them. If Linus doesn't tell people off when they start going wrong sooner or later someone pushes there luck and eventually you get 20MB patches dumped in rc8 to break the last 10MB patch that went in in rc7.
I don't know if it's a cultural taboo about the word fuck and friends (it seems that way on slashdot sometimes with lots of people self-editing themselves with pithless hackronyms like "BS") but I've not met anyone in/from europe (including Finns) or any commonwealth country that doesn't make liberal use of swearing, just adjusting the level of it for the audience. "I've fucked up the teas" has the same literal meaning as "Bloody hell, I've put too much milk in" or "I'm sorry ma'am, but the head footman appears to have upended the teapot", merely adjusted for either politeness or expediency. Fuck is a highly expedient word. Linus isn't polite (he's spent 20yrs herding cats and to be honest given the intractably varied milleu he inhabits I would consider politeness an actual hundrance) and is expedient and to be honest I think he uses much less profanity than I'd expect for a person in his position. Every time I've seen a /. headline about Linus going off on one, the ticking off he's given always seems to have been warranted for technical reasons, I've never seen him threaten someone. As far as most technical people go, I'd go so far as to cal him highly eloquent, and I don't see what's ineloquent about the occasional "fuck". He didn't even use that this time, he was merely telling people in his own sardonic way that they need to rattle sabres once in a while, and his response to Sarah's email was spot-on, deadpan, and attempting to defuse the situation:
That's the spirit.
Greg has taught you well. You have controlled your fear. Now, release
your anger. Only your hatred can destroy me.
Come to the dark side, Sarah. We have cookies.
Linus
Storm in a bloody teacup.
More directed to the OP, for what it's worth, I don't think there's anything inherently superior about british/english swearing, I just think it's sometimes seen as supe
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
There is nothing wrong with being polite when you judge it to be adequate. There is a lot wrong with being forced to be polite when you don't judge it adequate because someone feels offended.
Language's main objective is to transmit information. When you stop using words and expressions because you think they are rude, or offensive, when you stop saying things because you think people will be hurt you are altering the meaning of what you want to transmit, because no two words mean exactly the same thing.
Sometimes it is necessary to do so, but doing so as a principle cripples the language, and when you cripple the language you sooner or later cripple critical thinking that opposes the mainstream thinking.
That is the whole technique used in 1984 by introducing the Newspeak. You should read this book, it will be enlightening I promise. You will see a lot of similarities between the the Politically Correct doctrine and the books's Nationalist doctrine that was indoctrinated into people.
And here comes the nut of the issue: how many time does Linus tell somebody that "made a stupid fucking mistake" and it resulted that in the end it was not a stupid fucking mistake?
You do not correct other people's mistakes by publicly humiliating them. That's how you make enemies.
From one of the more recent things he engaged his primary flame-cannon over, the person he aimed it at did screw up pretty badly and for no apparent reason (I mean, seriously, submitting code that you don't know if it works and you admit is probably not necessary? Don't do that).
So no, I don't think he's a dick for the sake of being a dick - he's a dick because people shouldn't be submitting things that are broken and that kind of person deserves to be told off.
As the main target for said outburst, it was definitely an epic f*ckup on my part. When I got the email, I pretty much chuckled and then said I need to do some damage control. I was not in any way offended. Linus later said:
For example, my latest cursing explosion was for the x86 maintainers, and it comes from the fact that I *know* they know to do better. The x86 tip pulls have generally been through way more testing than most other pulls I get (not just compiling, but even booting randconfigs etc). So when an x86 pull request comes in that clearly missed that expected level of quality, I go to town.
That is part of why I don't get offended when Linus curses at me.
The fact that he is only abusive to stupid ideas, and very rarely, stupid people, is a good thing. Not suffering fools or stupidity is a good way to move the quality of the kernel forward.
It is important in a creative-technical environment. To be creative you need to be comfortable and many people will be very uncomfortable if they hear a lot of verbal abuse going on, or are worried knowing that any mistake will result in a tirade, or are just tired of the non stop use of "fucking" as the only adjective and adverb ever used. Sure, if it's rare occasions that you're down right rude then that's ok, but this sort of behavior is often regular and ongoing.
I know a few "cool women" who hate being the "cool" one, but fear retaliation from guys if they actually speak up. When you work in a "man's world" and you hear guys say things like " although there are women that are cool and reasonable and men who are drama queens, this one is a stereotypical female drama queen in all her glory, and people like her are those that make the lives of other competent and cool women a lot harder." what are you to do? They then shut up and suffer because they like the challenge of their job, just not the hostility of their coworkers. They suffer as the "cool woman" because they don't want to risk retaliation or ostracization.
To me, she is a "cool woman" - she's willing to tell guys, Linus no less, to fuck off. Literally - read her email, she drops a few f-bombs herself, not what I consider stereotypical drama queen.
Not being a dick != political correctness
No... but you really can't expect normative social behavior from an aspie, particularly after he's been the effective king of a feudal society for about 22 years now. Lieutenants who are effectively feudal lords who have sworn fealty to the king, it's a classic mutual security game.
The biggest problem this arrangement has is ... it works. It doesn't work as well as other mutual security arrangements, such as globocop, but it can be successful, particularly for volunteer organizations.
One property of the arrangement, however, is that feudal lords build walls between their fiefdoms. This makes it very hard to change anything that requires crossing multiple fiefdom boundaries, so if you want to change an API, a globocop arrangement is more conducive to negotiating API contracts (think of it as agreeing on diverting the location of a stream crossing between neighbors). Linux demonstrates similar problems.
Either way, unless there is someone elected to filter the comments (a majordomo), the king is going to say whatever the king wants to say.
This is the problem with "political correctness":
The act of trying to avoid being offensive, is, in and of itself, offensive to some people.
To whit, Linus Torvalds finds it offensive. QED.
This means that political correctness is fundementally faulted at its very conception, and can never be satisfied.
In the instances of verbal slurs, the creation of "inoffensive surrogates", as often tendered by political correctness advocates, simply shift the problem and do NOTHING to fix it. Take for instance, calling somebody stupid, vs calling them "mentally challenged". They mean the same thing, and are equally offensive.
Same with monikers for race; for instance, people with very dark skin of african origin:
Negro->colored->black->"african american"
The fact of the matter, is that using *any* term to draw attention to the skin color of a person, to distinguish a racially profiled stereotype, is equally offensive.
To whit,
"The prefferential treatment of african americans in the college entrance exams has led to a sharp decline in student achievement scores."
The sentence is just as offensive if you use "colored", "black", or any other colorful descriptor.
The same is true of descriptors for men who like to bang other men.
"Effeminate"->'poofter'->queer->gay->"homosexual male"
It isn't the words you say, it is the way you say them, that causes offense, but the PC crowd never gets this, and instead just comandeers word after word, after word, in its relentless and futile attempt to eradicate the intent behind those words. The result is that previously benign clinical terms like "homosexual" start to get lurid connotations, when previously they were absolved from those implications, because of words like "faggot". Deleting "faggot" from the dictionary does not make everyone stop harboring negative views about homosexual males. All it does is make a previousy useful word no longer useful, as all the malign implication of the slur gets transferred.
I would much rather have people shout about "faggots", and expose just what kind of people they are by its use, than have perfectly useful terms like "homosexual" corrupted, because of a fundamentally faulted worldview gone wild.
So, I side with Torvalds with this issue. Is his use of profanity reasonable? Probably not. Is his argument about why he needs to be allowed to use profanity when he feels necessary, perfectly rational and well founded? Absolutely.
Profanity is intended to convey beligerance. Deleting profanity does not make people have to resort to civility, it makes them coopt civilized language for profane use. Profanity serves a valid role in human communication. Stop trying to delete it. You can't.
Let's see what horrible thing Linus said to set this off:
On Fri, 12 Jul 2013 08:22:27 -0700, Linus wrote:
Greg, the reason you get a lot of stable patches seems to be that you make it easy to act as a door-mat. Clearly at least some people say "I know this patch isn't important enough to send to Linus, but I know Greg will silently accept it after the fact, so I'll just wait and mark it for stable".
You may need to learn to shout at people.
Sarah Sharp is not a new person on LKML. She's the USB3 host controller maintainer. She's been there for a while, and she totally overreacted. Linus' original message was a tongue-in-cheek one talking about Greg Kroah-Hartman (who is a fairly large guy while Linus is not):
"Have you guys *seen* Greg? The guy is a freakish giant. He *should* scare you. He might squish you without ever even noticing."
Sarah's reaction was, "Seriously, guys? Is this what we need in order to get improve -stable? Linus Torvalds is advocating for physical intimidation and violence..."
Anyone who takes Linus' comments as a serious suggestion needs their head examined. It was *clearly* meant as a joke.
Do you follow LKML (all 15K messages/month)? If you only pay attention to the messages that get covered on Slashdot then you're going to have a pretty warped view of how he communicates.
The majority of the time Linus is direct but not abusive. On the rare occasions that he uses what could be called abusive language there is usually a recurring problem and more subtle means of communication have not been effective.
Absolutely. When people criticize Michael Jackson for allegedly molesting children, I tell them the exactly same thing. It's a fact of life. It's impossible to make music that great without touching a few kids. Likewise it's impossible to write some code without impersonating a high school.
Yours is not a fair statement. She’s been contributing to the Linux kernel for (as far as I can tell after a quick Google) 5 years or more. She’s not ‘attempting to join [the] community’; she’s already part of the community.
And she’s attempting to change it from within. Nothing, ipso facto, wrong with that.
30 Linux Kernel Developers in 30 Weeks: Sarah Sharp <<-- describes her involvement with kernel in 2007.