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Torvalds: I Made Community-Building Mistakes With Linux
electronic convict writes In a Q&A at LinuxCon Europe, Linux creator Linus Torvalds — no stranger to strong language and blunt opinions — acknowledged a "metric sh*#load" of interpersonal mistakes that unnecessarily antagonized others within the Linux community. In response to Intel's Dirk Hohndel, who asked him which decision he regretted most over the past 23 years, Torvalds replied: "From a technical standpoint, no single decision has ever been that important... The problems tend to be around alienating users or developers and I'm pretty good at that. I use strong language. But again there's not a single instance I'd like to fix. There's a metric sh*#load of those." It's probably not a coincidence that Torvalds said this just a few weeks after critics like Lennart Poettering started drawing attention to the abusive nature of some commentary within the open-source community. Poettering explicitly called out Torvalds for some of his most intemperate remarks and described open source as "quite a sick place to be in." Still, Torvalds doesn't sound like he's about to start making an apology tour. "One of the reasons we have this culture of strong language, that admittedly many people find off-putting, is that when it comes to technical people with strong opinions and with a strong drive to do something technically superior, you end up having these opinions show up as sometimes pretty strong language," he said. "On the Internet, nobody can hear you being subtle."
That's going in my quotes file.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Linus does not claim victimhood and speaks with humility. Can you think of how this sets him apart from another noted developer?
Also doesn't charge ahead with full-bore stupid against half the user and developer base's advice.
I think there's a difference between using strong language on a person who demonstrably done something you don't agree with, versus death threats, continuous abuse, stalking or directing said vitriol against large groups people only related by race, gender, etc.
The wild west had a lot of advantages over "civilization", you did not have to suffer fools.
Ironically, Poettering's rant only served to highlight the issues and interpersonal problems he was rather than Linus or anyone else.
The problem is that too many people can't understand the difference between "strong language" and "personal attacks" so the much of the community has this culture of speaking in an abusive and condescending manner under the justification that "that's how Linus speaks to people".
Even on the occasion that he does slip in a few personal attacks every now and then he is the dictator of the most widely used open source project around so it is tolerable, when this trickles down to other contributors and they take that approach simply because they think that is acceptable in open source it does make a hostile, segregated and uninviting "community".
Would Apple be where it is if Jobs wasn't an asshole?
Do you think Linux would still be a success if Linus wasn't there to keep dumbasses from accumulating more political clout than technical competence and steering it toward ruin?
I bet we'd all be using Hurd now, we'd have a colony on Mars, and there'd be peace in the Middle East. Nothing promotes innovation faster than living in a hugbox that respects all opinions!
I hope it's not just me, I don't really have a problem with the strong language or pointed critique. Linus only really employs it for smart people who should know better, and will actually engage in conversation, and he's typically constructive. And funny.
The asshats are the people like Pottering, GNOME, and certain figures editing the HTML spec who don't give a damn about users, authors, and/or developers. The people who can't possibly imagine any use-case outside themselves or their company.
They're the maintainers in Open Source who close your bug reports without any questions because they can't imagine how your use case could possibly be relevant to them. Come on guys, at least ask a question if you don't understand the bug report/feature request.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Most popular, yes. Largest? Not by a long shot. As some folks are all-too-happy to remind folks, Linux is "just the kernel".
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We all know the word is shitload. We all know Linus is swearing, and he didn't bleep himself. This is an adult website, not a child website. So can we please have an honest depiction of what's actually said rather than some silly characters replacing the full spelling of the word like this is a cartoon? FCC rules don't apply to slashdot, that's radio and TV.
I'll never understand this weird deception people have that if you miss-spell fuck as f*ck, shit as sh-T, cocksucker as c*cksu**er, piss as p*ss, motherfucker as motherf*cker, cunt as c*nt, and tits as t*ts, you're someone "not swearing". Uhh.. yeah. (My regards to the late George Carlin)
AccountKiller
And yet we use it, because it's that effective If you can make a better git than git, I'm sure we'll all eventually move to it. But right now your armchair-quarterbacking.
You strike me as the kind of person that also considers all men latent rapists.
So what I think you're saying is that Linus should have iterated on git privately, indefinitely, until it meets your standard of done-ness?
I dunno, he hasn't gotten divorced yet, he's living a stable life, enjoys what he does, and is making a very positive contribution to society. Exactly what about him do you think is so in need of fixing that we should attend to that rather than, for example, find more time reading to our own kids?
Please warn us when you know its ISBN.
No it's not. In no way have you demonstrated that we have a moral or practical obligation to consider your statements. In fact, the only reason I'm writing about them at all is because I felt you needed an intervention, not Linux.
At the end of the day, he created and manages the largest open source project ever. More than 20 years on, it is still going strong.
But Linus won't be around forever ---
and immature and abusive behavior that persists well beyond the adolescence of a man or a project, a system or a method, toubles me. I do not want to see such behavior institutionalized in FOSS and carried on into the next generation.
As a software developer, frankly I'd rather deal with Linus or someone like him than most of the management I've had to deal with at my jobs. At least with Linus you know exactly where he stands and exactly where you stand with him, and why. When he calls something "stupid", he's usually very clear about his reasons for thinking it's stupid. I can deal with that. I can argue my position with him because I know what his position and his reasoning is. And he won't take my arguing with him personally, or even particularly badly as long as I can trot out facts and hard numbers to back up my positions and counter his. Better that than management that won't tell you what they want, won't say what they mean and try to deny their own decisions in the face of copies of their own e-mails and memos.
Megalomania. Poettering wants Poetterix, and since he cannot be the lead kernel person, he tries to make some kind of "wrapper" around the kernel with systemd. That person is possibly the worst that could have happened to Linux.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I strongly disagree. There have been plenty of situations where I have had to escalate a polite refusal to something more easily understood and I'm sure you've had plenty of those as well. People are very good at ignoring polite refusals.
I prefer people who swear and yell at me to people who sit there doing nothing while bad things are happening. Or people who sit there and hate you silently and scheme behind your back. Or people who do the wrong thing just to avoid conflict and it ends up tanking the project. Or people who always quietly do what they are told instead of saying "this is wrong, this idea is stupid, we need to do things differently".
There are much worse things than swearing and being offensive, especially if soneone deserves it.
Getting results is what's critical. Being nice is a nice to have, but ultimately less important. In other words I'll take competent assholes who get things done over impotent nice guys. And competent assholes tend to stop acting like assholes when you earn their respect.
On the other hand, I would be reluctant to work with an asshole who's being an asshole without a good reason just because he likes hurting people. That is wrong. But this is now what we are talking about here- I never heard Linus being like that.
--Coder
It's not a binary swear/never swear option. When I swear I try to reserve it for times when it really adds something to what I am saying. Usually it's for emphasis or comedy. Swearing all the time is just kinda lazy and makes it less effective.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
This is becoming a more general problem with society. As people spend more time online, they get their social acceptance needs from other people online. Unfortunately, some people see the internet as a place where they don't need to filter themselves, and can cause harm to others. I'm not saying Linus means to hurt others, just that we all should remember there's a live person on the other end of the email.
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Web servers and cell phones, yes. The rest, not so much.
Realistically almost no one runs Linux on their desktop. Even Unix sysadmins lean heavily to Windows (or Mac). Windows with cygwin makes a more effective Unix workstation for most all uses than does Linux.
The embedded realm (including TVs) is dominated by BSD, for license reasons if nothing else. That's if they want/need a heavy weight OS; Most embedded systems either have no OS or a small real time OS.
The only game system that runs Linux is Steam Box.
And last but certainly not least, if Linux fell off the face of the Earth today, very little would change tomorrow. The BSDs are a drop in replacement for 99.9% of Linux use cases. And frankly, would do the job better: Linux is popular despite merit, not because of it.
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