Slashdot Mirror
Linus Torvalds Reflects On How He's Been Hostile To Linux Community Members Over the Years, Issues Apology, and Announces He Will Be Taking Some Time Off (kernel.org)
On Sunday, Linus Torvalds spoke about the confusion he had regarding Maintainer's Summit, but more importantly, how this incident gave him a chance to realize "that I really had been ignoring some fairly deep-seated feelings in the community." In an email to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, Torvalds apologized for hurting people with his behavior over the years, and possibly driving some people "away from kernel development entirely." On that end, said Torvalds, "I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately." He wrote: [...] It's one thing when you can ignore these issues. Usually it's just something I didn't want to deal with. This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person and that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of all me. The fact that I then misread people and don't realize (for years) how badly I've judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good. This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry.
The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely.I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately.
Put another way: When asked at conferences, I occasionally talk about how the pain-points in kernel development have generally not been about the _technical_ issues, but about the inflection points where development flow and behavior changed. These pain points have been about managing the flow of patches, and often been associated with big tooling changes - moving from making releases with "patches and tar-balls" (and the _very_ painful discussions about how "Linus doesn't scale" back 15+ years ago) to using BitKeeper, and then to having to write git in order to get past the point of that no longer working for us. We haven't had that kind of pain-point in about a decade. But this week felt like that kind of pain point to me. To tie this all back to the actual 4.19-rc4 release (no, really, this_is_ related!) I actually think that 4.19 is looking fairly good, things have gotten to the "calm" period of the release cycle, and I've talked to Greg to ask him if he'd mind finishing up 4.19 for me, so that I can take a break, and try to at least fix my own behavior.
This is not some kind of "I'm burnt out, I need to just go away" break. I'm not feeling like I don't want to continue maintaining Linux. Quite the reverse. I very much *do* want to continue to do this project that I've been working on for almost three decades. This is more like the time I got out of kernel development for a while because I needed to write a little tool called "git". I need to take a break to get help on how to behave differently and fix some issues in my tooling and workflow.
And yes, some of it might be "just" tooling. Maybe I can get an email filter in place so at when I send email with curse-words, they just won't go out. Because hey, I'm a big believer in tools, and at least _some_ problems going forward might be improved with simple automation. [...]
The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely.I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately.
Put another way: When asked at conferences, I occasionally talk about how the pain-points in kernel development have generally not been about the _technical_ issues, but about the inflection points where development flow and behavior changed. These pain points have been about managing the flow of patches, and often been associated with big tooling changes - moving from making releases with "patches and tar-balls" (and the _very_ painful discussions about how "Linus doesn't scale" back 15+ years ago) to using BitKeeper, and then to having to write git in order to get past the point of that no longer working for us. We haven't had that kind of pain-point in about a decade. But this week felt like that kind of pain point to me. To tie this all back to the actual 4.19-rc4 release (no, really, this_is_ related!) I actually think that 4.19 is looking fairly good, things have gotten to the "calm" period of the release cycle, and I've talked to Greg to ask him if he'd mind finishing up 4.19 for me, so that I can take a break, and try to at least fix my own behavior.
This is not some kind of "I'm burnt out, I need to just go away" break. I'm not feeling like I don't want to continue maintaining Linux. Quite the reverse. I very much *do* want to continue to do this project that I've been working on for almost three decades. This is more like the time I got out of kernel development for a while because I needed to write a little tool called "git". I need to take a break to get help on how to behave differently and fix some issues in my tooling and workflow.
And yes, some of it might be "just" tooling. Maybe I can get an email filter in place so at when I send email with curse-words, they just won't go out. Because hey, I'm a big believer in tools, and at least _some_ problems going forward might be improved with simple automation. [...]
these people are a direct threat to your status, your hobby, and your livelihood, because if these people get their way, your technical excellence becomes secondary to their wokeness
An LLVM contributor left the project in part because he would have been required to sign documents to attend an LLVM conference. It is very much the case that the CoC crowd would rather exclude any amount of talent then tolerate a dissenter. You're either 1000% on board with the "high-verbal-IQ non-technical politics-playing San-Francisco-residing cliques of social justice advocates" or you're out.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Look closer:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/v4.19-rc4/Documentation/process/code-of-conduct.rst
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/8a104f8b5867
The real news here isn't that Linus decided to get some therapy.
The real news is that Linux, the project, adopted the "Contributor's Covenant" code of conduct and thereby acknowledged SJW ideological supremacy. The CC is an SJW vehicle promulgated by Coraline Ada and a related group of activist malcontents. While the CC appears on the surface to be a call of civility, it's actually the tip of a very long and exsanguatory anti-meritocracy spear,
When I first read this, I knew nothing of Coraline Ada and so I figured the AC was full of shit. I decided I would do a little searching to prove the AC wrong. One of the first things I came across was her website, PostMeritocracy.org, which contains The Post-Meritocracy Manifesto
I apologize for having doubted you, AC.
Real nerds hate Sheldon Cooper.
"It seems like his attitude was pretty successful."
That just about says it all. If people were so upset with him there was nothing stopping them from forking the kernel and going their own way so they didn't have to deal with Torvalds saying mean things about them and hurting their tender sensibilities. And the man deserves a vacation. His contributions to modern day operating systems is Nobel Prize worthy. If he had not created Linux I wonder what OS's would run on today's non-Apple phones. What OS would dominate today's data center space? And just think of all the forks and different distributions running on desktops today. After accomplishing all of this he is entitled to channel the spirit of Archie Bunker any time he wants.
You sound like a Fox News viewer.
It's obvious that he must be punished. And here in the lands of Linux, there is only one punishment for hurting people's feelings; after that punishment is meted out, you may deal with him as you like.
You sound like a Fox News viewer.
Fox news huh? How about right from another horses mouth. Don't worry, they ARE going after you on your other social media accounts.It's not like we don't have examples. Holy fuck! Look at that, we've got just another case for wrong think. Oh, and this one too. Just to show that the Mike Pence rule applies too.
Om, nomnomnom...
Yes! How terrible that a project adopt a code of conduct where people are asked to be courteous and treat others with respect!
So is that the part where they attack people for holding opinions, political opinions and views that don't conform to the CoC's gatekeepers? Plenty of evidence over the last 2 years of SJW's going after a persons job, family, and so on for say supporting Trump, being a conservative, speaking out against antifa, disliking Trudeau, being against Merkel, speaking out against illegals, having no desire to suppress speech or restrict protected freedoms for example.
Oops, we've apparently decided it's not a theory and a fact! Linus has been captured by the SJWs!! Someone rally an army of obnoxious politically incorrect men to save him!!!
So we don't have previous examples in history where people who hold particular points of view aren't pushed out of their own companies? Wait...we do. And we don't have examples of SJW's going after people to financially ruin a person? Well whatja know we do. And we sure don't have any examples of SJW's claiming a person is sexist/misogynist/racist/homophobic/etc to get them removed from a job. Oh...wait...we do. And we sure don't have past examples of SJW's then hounding a person in a new job to get them fired. Oh well...fuck, we do. And we sure don't have any proof that SJW's claim meritocracy is a tool of the patriarchy. Oh well...son of a bitch, we do too. And we sure don't have any evidence of progressive sites then latching on to these cases, and trying to shame the person for holding views they don't agree with. Man I'm sure drawing blanks here, so many sites haven't done this. And we sure don't have any examples of SJW's making shit up to get people fired, or taking things out of context to get people fired, or quote mining to get people fired.
And there's absolutely no shortage of feminists, race baiters, and sjw's shaking down companies if they don't bow to their demands. Or suddenly coming up with "diversity problems" and it suddenly being all over the news. Oh...wait...
And we sure don't have cases where sjw's and feminists falsely accuse a person of sexual assault or rape to try and ruin them for their own gain. And we sure don't have a long list of sjw's, feminists, and progressives latching on to #metoo to ruin a persons life either, even when the evidence shows otherwise with claims of "well he might have done it anyway." And we sure don't have examples from #metoo of women lying, then sjw's, progressives, and feminist circling the wagons and saying "you should believe all women anyway! She did it for the right reasons."
Oh...boy! It's a giant three ring circus of non-meritocratic and shitty people abusing what some people thought was a good idea, and ruining everything all the way down.
Om, nomnomnom...
Nope, because the first thing that's going to happen now is they'll start sifting through contributors social media accounts to find things that they can sanction them with against the CoC. .
Don't be absurd. Most of the contributions are through companies, and for the benefit of companies. The level of SJW outrage is pretty minimal as there are almost no SJWs of the boogey-man definition people seem to have (as it is mostly a reds-under-the-bed fantasy), let alone involved in the Linux kernel.
Don't be absurd. Most of the contributions are through companies, and for the benefit of companies. The level of SJW outrage is pretty minimal as there are almost no SJWs of the boogey-man definition people seem to have (as it is mostly a reds-under-the-bed fantasy), let alone involved in the Linux kernel.
In my experience "companies" can lead to some pretty nasty outcomes with some or all parties acting like children especially in standards work.
Organizations can have unaligned agendas. Sometimes management will get involved and "lean" on technical people or attempt "ballot stuffing" resulting in unpleasant situations all around.
This naturally is rarely an issue when companies contribute code specific to their hardware or address bugs. There is rarely contention in these activities.
Where issues creep up is with design of certain abstractions / interfaces that could play to the strengths or weaknesses of certain vendors either providing more work for some or technical advantage due to architectural considerations. Often someone is already shipping product with it working one way and they will do or say anything to not have to be the one to change.
I've personally witnessed SJW bullshit fly as people (all employed and acting on behalf of corporations) attempt to try and score points by playing victim asserting the other guy hurt their feelings. The experiences are partially why I firmly believe the only policy should be one that maximizes tolerance. The less sharp objects for children to throw at each other the better.
Sadly, it'll probably be Lennart Poettering.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Linus's teeth are fine, don't worry.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Can you list some of these things we should know about Bill Gates please?
I know he was a deservedly convicted monopolist who openly wanted to crush open source.
Do you remember the Halloween documents?
-- MartinG To mail me: echo kewyjlcxyzvjfxbqwh | tr bcefhjklqvwxyz