Slashdot Mirror
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. "
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.
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?
Ironically, Poettering's rant only served to highlight the issues and interpersonal problems he was rather than Linus or anyone else.
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?
If you are referring to Linus' 'Guys, this is not a d*#@-sucking contest. If you want to parse PE binaries, go right ahead. If Red Hat wants to deep-throat Microsoft, that's *your* issue.' from http://linux-beta.slashdot.org..., then it is a fully technical criticize of Red Hat policy choices. I don't see anything personal in that. If you have any other quote, please provide information on their context.
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
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".
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.
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.
How could Poettering be "calling out" Torvalds when systemd is a user land init process?
Way to go with the selective quote there, Ace. Here, let me be so kind as to include the footnote you left out of your quote:
[*] In other words, it's an Oracleism.
Let's also provide some context, shall we?
Here's the entire message:
Date Sat, 11 May 2002 11:04:45 -0700 (PDT)
From Linus Torvalds
Subject Re: O_DIRECT performance impact on 2.4.18 (was: Re: [PATCH] 2.5.14 IDE 56)
On Fri, 10 May 2002, Gerrit Huizenga wrote:
> In message , > : Li
> nus Torvalds writes:
> >
> > For O_DIRECT to be a win, you need to make it asynchronous.
>
> O_DIRECT is especially useful for applications which maintain their
> own cache, e.g. a database. And adding Async to it is an even bigger
> bonus (another Oracleism we did in PTX).
The thing that has always disturbed me about O_DIRECT is that the whole
interface is just stupid, and was probably designed by a deranged monkey
on some serious mind-controlling substances [*].
It's simply not very pretty, and it doesn't perform very well either
because of the bad interfaces (where synchronocity of read/write is part
of it, but the inherent page-table-walking is another issue).
I bet you could get _better_ performance more cleanly by splitting up the
actual IO generation and the "user-space mapping" thing sanely. For
example, if you want to do an O_DIRECT read into a buffer, there is no
reason why it shouldn't be done in two phases:
(1) readahead: allocate pages, and start the IO asynchronously
(2) mmap the file with a MAP_UNCACHED flag, which causes read-faults to
"steal" the page from the page cache and make it private to the
mapping on page faults.
If you split it up like that, you can do much more interesting things than
O_DIRECT can do (ie the above is inherently asynchronous - we'll wait only
for IO to complete when the page is actually faulted in).
For O_DIRECT writes, you split it the other way around:
(1) mmwrite() takes the pages in the memory area, and moves them into the
page cache, removing the page from the page table (and only copies
if existing pages already exist)
(2) fdatasync_area(fd, offset, len)
Again, the above is likely to be a lot more efficient _and_ can do things
that O_DIRECT only dreams on.
With my suggested _sane_ interface, I can do a noncached file copy that
should be "perfect" even in the face of memory pressure by simply doing
addr = mmap( .. MAP_UNCACHED .. src .. )
mwrite(dst, addr, len);
which does true zero-copy (and, since mwrite removes it from the page
table anyway, you can actually avoid even the TLB overhead trivially: if
mwrite notices that the page isn't mapped, it will just take it directly
from the page cache).
Sadly, database people don't seem to have any understanding of good taste,
and various OS people end up usually just saying "Yes, Mr Oracle, I'll
open up any orifice I have for your pleasure".
Linus
[*] In other words, it's an Oracleism.
Linus is good naturedly criticizing the interface as too database centric (Oraclesim). He's not calling out anyone, or maligning them.
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.
Get some older relatives to tell you some stories of when they were growing up without sanitising them and you'll learn how wrong you are. You've likely missed the boat for 1914, but I managed to talk to some relatives about it a few decades ago. What you read about days gone past has been cleaned up and is not an accurate indication of how people spoke, and we are furthur hampered by talkies corresponding with the rise of a moral crusade aimed at Hollywood which gives very distorted view of the 1930s etc from film and recordings.
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
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.
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,
Who the FLYING FUCK are you to determine that? What gives you the right to judge the way someone else goes about their interactions? To decide that they are in need of you help?
This sort of bullshit moral superior armslength personal judgement makes me So Fucking Angry. You don't know him. You are not his therapist. You have no right to tell someone you do not know how they are in need of your help.