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Linus Torvalds is Back in Charge of Linux (zdnet.com)
At Open Source Summit Europe in Edinburgh, Scotland, Linus Torvalds is meeting with Linux's top 40 or so developers at the Maintainers' Summit. This is his first step back in taking over Linux's reins. From a report: A little over a month ago, Torvalds stepped back from running the Linux development community. In a note to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), Torvalds said, "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." That time is over. Torvalds is back.
Whether he'll be a kinder and gentler Torvalds remains to be seen. In the Linux 4.19 announcement, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux's temporary leader and maintainer of the stable branch, wrote: "Linus, I'm handing the kernel tree back to you. You can have the joy of dealing with the merge window :)"
Whether he'll be a kinder and gentler Torvalds remains to be seen. In the Linux 4.19 announcement, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux's temporary leader and maintainer of the stable branch, wrote: "Linus, I'm handing the kernel tree back to you. You can have the joy of dealing with the merge window :)"
Whether he'll be a kinder and gentler Torvalds remains to be seen.
Which is part of the problem with these public confession/appeasement things.
Someone can always claim you didn't get "woke" enough.
No small part of it is because the left has adopted a view that "marginalized people" are effectively entitled to be disruptive, toxic, etc. Because discrimination(tm). If you want proof that most human beings are miserably stupid, it's the fact that so many left wing activists cannot reconcile two principles they've advocated and realize how the lock together like Lego pieces:
1. Every innocent civilian killed by anti-terrorism operations breeds new terrorists as people bitterly resent being collateral damage.
2. "Marginalized people" cannot be guilty of oppressing "non-marginalized people" no matter how they behave.
A rational person with an IQ higher than the thermostat might have an "oh fuq...." moment here. Every "non-marginalized person" who is disemployed, hounded out of public life, etc. creates collateral damage in their family, friends and people sympathetic saying "shit man, that could be me too" just like many a Muslim has done when the USAF bombs a village.
Also if it is not up to standard, make it constructive.
Some of the cases he called out ended up that way because constructive criticism was met with denial and deflections. In one case I remember the maintainer broke a user land API by introducing a new error code, we got to see Linus laying it in on the maintainer long **after** the maintainer dismissed Linus statements about unacceptable compatibility issues. Wether professional or not BS remains BS and in that case Linus had to tell the maintainer to quit with his BS.
Doesn't require a life changing event, all it takes is insight that frequently comes with maturity. This happens literally every day and happens to everybody. It's how children become adults.
We all know many programmers exist in a state of arrested development. Not all are doomed to remain that way.
Someone stuck a gun to his head? Look, the world is changing whether you like it or not. Linus Torvalds chose to roll with it.
Most people have a problem with "diversity initiatives" that look like they came out of the 1953 playbook of "fuck insert race here." This is after decades of "judge by the content of character, not by their skin" with the west moving for a more meritocratic system. And then the leftwing progressives, universities, and government policies that fell all over themselves by giving handouts, freebies, preferential hiring, slots in universities, government jobs to people who wouldn't have cut it otherwise.
There's a reason why Harvard and several other US universities are being sued for active discrimination against whites and asians.
Seriously, when faced with 'take empathy training' or 'lead the community off to the biggest flame war of all time', which did you think he was going to choose?
Easy answer, because outrage mobs have already made the choice for him. If he didn't bow, they'd start slandering him and trying to ruin him financially among others who refused to bow down. So the choice between bowing to the mob that does nothing, and the group that contributes? He made a choice hoping it would blow over.
Empathy is an interesting thing, problem is the people riding the outrage mob don't care. They don't want empathy, they want their victimization validated. Victimization as a currency is valuable, you can get pretty far on it if you're a shitty human who's done shitty things to people. Because there's an entire mob of people inside that progressive stack who will defend your actions, and go out of their way to ruin the detractors. Matt Taylor, Tim Hunt, Donglegate, take your pick among the hundreds of other cases.
Om, nomnomnom...
The main problem with Social Justice Warrior mob-style attack is that they function like a pack of hyenas. They will not attack until they sense weakness, but single hyenas will make forays to poke the target for weakness. But they will not make a full out attack until they see a weakness. But once they begin attacking, it's a bloodbath and does not stop until it's a full and unconditional surrender or utter defeat of the target.
This is why it's critically important that when Social Justice Mob attacks you, you never show any weakness and never flinch in the face of the brutal onslaught. Any sign of weakness, like an apology is a mark on you that you're the weak target and everyone in the pack goes after you instead of just a few scout hyenas poking you.
Linus caved with his apology and stepping back. He's now either their slave or a pariah in the eyes of anyone who is either a part of Social Justice Mob or is afraid of them and therefore will not take his side in fear of becoming a target himself.
He's done. That's the sad reality of the polarized world of today.
You live in a very fucked-up non-reality bro
Most of these people have never actually been in any management position, and most of them, quite frankly, are all talk on anonymous forums, but when push comes to shove, if they're hauled to the mat by their HR department for being insufferable prats, they'll roll over.
I have a great deal of admiration for Linus. He's pulled off one of the most extraordinary technology achievements in history. He gave the still pretty young open source community a functioning *nix kernel unimpeded (no matter what SCO thought) by the crazy licensing issues which had prevented Unix's adoption beyond servers and high end workstations.
But he's a fucking asshole. There are ways to deal with people who are doing substandard work that doesn't involve vast streams of personal insults. There are even ways of basically telling someone who has clearly subpar skills to take a walk that don't involve public dressings down. That kind of behavior effects all the developers, even the ones who are doing a damned good job. And the realpolitik of the situation is pretty simple; much of Linux is being developed by developers in corporate environments, and those corporations pretty much all of have codes of conduct, and they have every right to expect that the maintainer and overall strategist for the project that they are contributing resources to abide by a similar set of rules. If Linus wanted to prevent forking of Linux, in effect he being fired, and someone else whose vision, quite frankly, might not be at all in the open source community's best interests, taking over the fork with the greater resources, he had to alter his behavior and demonstrate that he meant it.
So all the chest thumpers here can basically get stuffed. They're delusional beta male types who like to imagine themselves in some alternative universe being alpha males. They've got a massive inferiority complex that they betray every time they talk about SJWs. They're mean spirited fantasists who in all likelihood will never be in any kind of management position because, well, they're emotionally-fraught cunts.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
But he's a fucking asshole. There are ways to deal with people who are doing substandard work that doesn't involve vast streams of personal insults.
Did you put these two sentences next to each other to invoke irony or hypocrisy (or both)? I can't tell.