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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."
was not so nice, either. As the newly occupied lands matured, so did language and behavior. This frontier is no different.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
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. I am not about to find faults with his management style. People have been free to fork it and run with it. Nobody has done that. Perhaps a little bit of screaming every now and then is needed for this job.
He gave us Linux and he gave us git. Maybe we should stop nitpicking and say thank you for once.
"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."
Excuses, excuses. One can easily be heard and still be professional if he wants to. Linux alone is so cool and influential that the leader of the project will certainly get noticed even without peppering everything with insults and cursing.
...but isn't the reason Linus tends to be blunt due to an experience early in Linux's existence?
Someone came in with a big, grand idea and asked if this is something Linux needed.
Linus replied with something meant to be taken as a polite NAK.
Guy didn't get the subtle hint, and proceeded to go off and spend x months developing feature.
Came back with patches and had the whole thing rejected.
Guy left saying he was so depressed he may commit suicide.
Since then, Linus has been up-front and directly.
Can't remember who, what, where or when
Anyone?
"... he gave us git."
Git uses poor naming, is poorly documented, and is, in my opinion, an example of the worst of the lack of social sophistication in programmers.
Functionally Git is advanced, but the Git interface is a mess created by someone who thinks, "You should just know what I mean. I don't have to be careful about communicating."
Effectively, Git is abusive. It drags every user through a steep learning curve. Git is an example of Linus Torvalds at his worst, in my opinion: Great ideas, sometimes a poor communicator.
A program is not finished until the user interface and documentation make using the program as easy as possible. If Torvalds fixed the difficulties that make Git hard to learn, as he did that he would have a chance to become more aware of his problems with communication. Facing that ugliness would take courage, but resolving the problems would make his entire life easier.
Yes, Torvalds deserves a lot of praise. If we care about him, and we should, we must help him become more socially capable. For example, he could recognize when his anger is caused by not getting enough caring in childhood, and not think that events in the present caused his anger, when events in the present only made him aware of his anger.
I'm writing a book about how people use their brains. I'm not saying I have a perfect understanding, but I have spent decades studying the issues. If you don't like my explanations, it is not sufficient to drop the subject or just complain; it is necessary to make your own theories about the problems.
Really? Where do you think a lot of fools went? It especially applies to gold rush situations all over the planet that century and not just the "wild west".
I've been using Linux for a VERY long time (like AMD K5 PR100 long), and have done kernel development at a few jobs over the years, and have a few minor edits in the repository. I've always appreciated Linus' forthrightness. He's had some strong differences with equally competent developers over the years, but in both the LKML and private correspondence, those comments and disagreements have been upfront and honest. When one of my edits was sent back for rework, the comments were not only honest, but constructive, and exposure to Linus' and his senior collaborators' comments have made me a better developer.
I know it sounds a bit "fanboy", but Linus isn't the only project "owner" out there I really respect, he's just the subject of this thread.