8 ms·

Linus Torvalds Rants

127 points by turrini 9y ago

AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
The thing about Linus's rants is that he's almost always completely right. As far as I am concerned, his attitude is part of the reason the Linux kernel doesn't completely suck, in stark contrast the pretty much everything that sits on top of it (at least in the Desktop space).
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
  I think the main criticism of Linus's rants is not that he is incorrect, but rather his tone (primarily his use of explitives and ad-hominens). I think he could communicate more efficiently with a civil yet blunt criticism by simply removing the explicitives and ad-hominems.
  - alexashka 9y ago
    Maybe, or maybe he'd be a ball of suppressed rage, get some stress-related disease and die. I understand that the current trend is to suppress all your emotions, and then quietly read self-help books and seek therapy, but it's not at all obvious to me that venting does more bad than good. To me, I get a kick out of reading Linus' rants, I find them highly amusing. I can understand that the few people they're directed towards, would feel mildly abused, to which I say welp, it's a small price to pay. There needs to be an acceptance that dealing with other people is oftentimes frustrating, and that there need to be avenues to release that. Business people have booze, drugs, strippers and hookers. Linus is a good boy, he has offensive language and all caps. I consider him a saint, compared to the alternatives someone a little more gregarious would've taken.
    - Retra 9y ago
      I don't think you have any legitimate reason to believe his vulgarities are somehow protecting his health or sanity. But I also don't see any reason to believe they're harming anyone else's.
- stjohnswarts 9y ago
  I've used linux desktop for years and it has always been stabble for me I haven't tried apple. My desktop stays up for weeks.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
    My Windows desktop stays up for months at a time. This isn't a good metric for whether or not a system is good in 2018.
faragon 9y ago
Linus is a jerk, but a honest and quite reasonable one. He is the anti-Dunning-Kruger [1] personification, in my opinion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
- kyberias 9y ago
  Don't call people "jerks".
  - phs318u 9y ago
    I honestly can't tell if you're being ironic, given the subject matter.
    - kyberias 9y ago
      Well, I honestly think that categorizing people into these "jerk" and "asshole" categories based on some sampling of email communication is completely unfair. Linus Torvalds as a _person_ is a JERK because he's ranting about his life-work in an email list? I don't think Linus is a jerk just for being passionate about his work. His job is to be extremely critical of the code he reviews. Yes, he gets angry and uses swear words quite liberally but it's his style.
      - creatornator 9y ago
        Have you ever been the subject of someone calling your work sh*t? The thing about using such inflammatory language as Linus does is that from the outside, you could say "he's criticizing your work, not you", but if it is directed at you, it's inevitable that you take it personally. It's not passion that makes him make others feel insignificant--it's who he is. It should be possible to be "extremely critical of the code he reviews" without the kind of vitriol that he's comfortable spewing.
- seunosewa 9y ago
  "Jerk" means "a contemptible naive, fatous, foolish, or inconsequential person". Are you sure that this is what you mean?
kyberias 9y ago
There is nowadays some constructing criticism to Linus's outbursts on the mailing lists: On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 05:44:04PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > [snip] Don't shit on (new) contributors like this. Noralf has done good work (go look), Kconfig is an impossible combinatorial maze, and I'd be rather annoyed if you managed to drive away Noralf (and other contributors) with your mail. I know that you need to rage every once in a while, but at least only send those mails to Dave (and me) in private. On dri-devel here, this isn't accepted.
- ReidZB 9y ago
  Worth noting: the above was written by Daniel Vetter, not Linus. https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/2/24/176 https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/2/24/176
  - amputect 9y ago
    To add further context, here's Linus' (imo rude and totally unproductive) rant from https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/2/23/611 https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/2/23/611, which Daniel Vetter is replying to: The tinydrm code seems like absolute pure shit that has never seen a compiler. I'm upset, because I expect better quality control. In fact, I expect some qualitty control, and this piece-of-shit driver has clearly seen none at all. And those patches were apparently committed yesterday. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK? I get tons and tons of lines of warnings: drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/mipi-dbi.c: In function ‘mipi_dbi_typec1_command’: drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/mipi-dbi.c:65:20: warning: field width specifier ‘’ expects argument of type ‘int’, but argument 5 has type ‘size_t {aka long unsigned int}’ [-Wformat=] DRM_DEBUG_DRIVER("cmd=%02x, par=%ph\n", cmd, len, data); \ with nasty chains of nested defines, but then I also get actual compile failures drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/core/tinydrm-helpers.c:198:26: error: redefinition of ‘tinydrm_of_find_backlight’ struct backlight_device tinydrm_of_find_backlight(struct device dev) ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In file included from drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/core/tinydrm-helpers.c:11:0: ./include/drm/tinydrm/tinydrm-helpers.h:53:1: note: previous definition of ‘tinydrm_of_find_backlight’ was here tinydrm_of_find_backlight(struct device dev) ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ (with similar stuff for tinydrm_disable_backlight()). It looks like it might compile if CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE was enabled rather than being a module. Doing this: -#ifdef CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE +#if IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE) in tinydrm-helpers.h gets rid of the complete build failure, and only leaves the tens of lines of warnings. How the hell did this get to the point where crap like this is even sent to me? Nobody tested anything*? AND WHY THE HELL WAS THIS UTTER SHITE SENT TO ME IF IT WAS COMMITTED YESTERDAY?
qrbLPHiKpiux 9y ago
My god, the fragile personalities - subtract the harshness and extract his wisdom.
mmjaa 9y ago
Personally, I enjoy Linus' rants on a regular basis. They are the perfect antidote to total idiocy that happens in the Linux software world at times. I've very rarely ever found his point of view to be incorrect, and the abrasion that occurs is a great way to rub the shine off a lot of bullshit. I know people find it uncomfortable or rude, but I think its a necessary feature of a great leader when dealing with an unruly mass of, generally speaking, mostly arrogant, mostly privileged individuals.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Sadly while he may be running the kernel development quite well, he defends some serious idiocies when it comes to his dive log software Subsurface. Such as defending the bundling of modified libs, thus making it hard (if not impossible) to package for various distros. And rather than noticing this as being very similar to what he has ranted about others doing in the past in userspace, he joins in attacking said distros... Edit (because apparently i am "posting too fast"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_(software) See the last few parts, and citenotes 9 and 10.
  - mmjaa 9y ago
    Interesting. Got a link to an example of where this is happening? Because its a form of irrationality I'm not accustomed to with Linus, and I'd like to see for myself if he might have reasons for behaving this way beyond just stubborn pig-headedness. I know he can be stubborn, but in the case of management of Kernel development, he has very fine reasons... the scope of the kernel is far greater than the scope for some user space software, and so this is indeed an intriguing opportunity to gain some insight into his thought processes.
  - CJefferson 9y ago
    He is consistent in my opinion. His problem is that most libraries don't try to avoid breaking programs, unlike the kernel. I've started distributing an exact version of boost and gmp with my programs and refusing to accept bug reports generated from using other versions. Life is too short (when unpaid) for the pain caused by exactly the problems Linus is describing.
dustinmoorenet 9y ago
He may be a harsh critic, but looking at this [1] you can see why other developers work with him. He praises and acknowledges good work from others. He definitely contributes to the overall discussion, and in the end, I even understand the problem discussed. [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/29/449 https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/29/449
- cup-of-tea 9y ago
  And praise from Linus is far more highly valued than praise from your standard overly-optimistic business-type yes-man. The thing is Linus speaks volumes to people like Linus. And it just so happens that people like Linus are really good at writing the kind of software that goes in an operating system. Most of the criticism either comes from outside or from the type of people who feel they need to protect others from things that they themselves are able to handle. The latter is basically where ideas about censorship come from (I'm going to read this first to decide whether it's suitable for you to read).
  - cm2187 9y ago
    It's actually the motto of one of the main french newspapers. Sans la liberté de blâmer, il n'est pas d'éloge flatteur, i.e. something like "Where there is no freedom of blaming, there can be no genuine praise".
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      The French really do not get enough praise these days. Perhaps because so much of the world do not learn how to read French...
      - walterstucco 9y ago
        As an Italian who can read French, I don't think that's true.
      - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
        The English translation of the french phrase seems fine to me. So there isn't a need to be able to learn to read French in order to express that thought, since it can be done in English. Or is the English translation missing something important?
gorbachev 9y ago
That subreddit needs a Rant Rating Bot.
redleggedfrog 9y ago
That attitude, which is sometimes grating, is also what keeps linux from being the garbage that is most other software. It helps when your gatekeeper is a scary.
- ken 9y ago
  Is there any evidence of this being true in general? Linux is the only software I can think of where a quality product is accompanied by a "grating attitude". All of the other software I've liked in recent years (like Redis or SQLite or Postgres) has maintainers who seem rather easy-going.
  - stinkytaco 9y ago
    There are good software maintainers and bad. And good communities and bad. OpenBSD has pretty grating maintainers. FreeNAS has a pretty toxic community. I could go on, but it's certainly not just linux.
  - lobster_johnson 9y ago
    Those examples don't have the same influx of contributions, and they don't have a host of corporate contributors (Red Hat, Intel, IBM, Google, Nvidia, etc.) who are all vying to push their own solutions into the code. Much of the rage people see from Linus is about these contributions not being good enough because they put the companies' needs before the kernel. The most important quality in a project manager is often the ability to say "no". You will see Linus rant about what he considers bad code practices, and will castigate people rather brutally for this [1], but he always provides a cogent, often informative explanation. A more mild-mannered lead would not make a scene, and I don't see the point of his expletive-laden gruffness -- it would have been just as effective without the acidity. I guess if you want the Linus who defends code quality from big contributors, you will also have to accept the Linus who verbally destroys individuals. [1] http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/bool.html http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/bool.html
    - ken 9y ago
      Are there other projects with numerous corporate contributors, then, which were threatened or destroyed by poor patches? My perception is that Postgres has a large number of corporate contributors, but they don't seem to be hurting for it. This justification (i.e., that Linux has to be this way, because it's in a unique position) sounds strange to me. If we're claiming that the relevant sample size is N=1, isn't that equivalent to saying that it's impossible to study whether this management style is necessary or not? In fact, this argument seems almost backwards to me. Linux can be run this way because it is successful. Nvidia isn't trying to mess up NetBSD's architecture, precisely because NetBSD is not as popular with users.
grandinj 9y ago
The nice thing about Linus is that he "plays the ball not the man" to use a sporting analogy. He criticises peoples actions, but not the people themselves. I.e. "this is a stupid thing to do", not "you are stupid".
- munin 9y ago
  > Those security people are fcking morons. [1] > There's something odd about drm people. [2] > aarch64 is just another druggie name that the ARM people came up with after drinking too much of the spiked water in cambridge. [3] > YOU are full of bullshit. [4] > I've come to the conclusion that any programmer that would prefer the project to be in C++ over C is likely a programmer that I really would prefer to piss off [4] > Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP! It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a maintainer? And you still haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance? [5] 1: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1711.2/01701.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1711.2/01701.html 2: https://www.spinics.net/lists/dri-devel/msg157415.html https://www.spinics.net/lists/dri-devel/msg157415.html 3: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/15/133 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/15/133 4: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus 5: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75
yitchelle 9y ago
If Linus adopts a saner approach, without all this mindless ranting, to managing the Linux kernel, I seriously believe that would the results be much better. If he was running a company in a similar manner, would it work?
- nindalf 9y ago
  At least in this thread, the view that his ranting is pointless is in the minority. Most projects don't have the the same constraints and pressures that Linux faces - including IBM, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm all wanting to commit code that benefits their company, but not necessarily the Linux kernel. Linus taking a firm stance on quality helps, I think.
yedava 9y ago
Linus seems to inspire a lot of poor and motivated reasoning - since Linux is successful, it must be because of his toxic personality. If a toxic personality is a requirement (or a major contributing factor) for a successful engineering product, in a world of exquisitely crafted engineering products we should expect to see toxic personalities everywhere. That we don't should have prevented a cult of personality from developing in a community that prizes logical reasoning. Maybe the lesson here is that no group of humans is immune to some set of biases.
- taeric 9y ago
  I'd take it another way. The fact that he has some toxic qualities is likely orthogonal. Or, an indicator correlated with another quality. This one is kind of fun. Probably Linus' greatest quality is his fearlessness. He did something publicly for the world, that the majority of experts were saying was a bad idea. Specifically, he made a monolithic kernel. To that end. Yes, he can rant a bit. The question is if his rants reduce the conversations? It is as possible he shuts down thread that would have been more harmful. Indeed, most people he rants against are pushing from positions of power. And he rarely goes personal. (Ever?)
- nindalf 9y ago
  In general, most intelligent people are aware of the dangers of sampling bias and try to avoid it. But what do you do when your sample size is really small? We extrapolate from what we have seen work, but only a handful of open source projects have had the longevity and success that Linux has had. We see the same thing with decisions on what kind of movies to make. A handful of high budget movies are made every year, and when its time to decide which movies to fund studios extrapolate from past successes and failures. This includes wrong ideas like "no movies centred around female superheroes because Catwoman, Elektra etc" or "international audiences only connect with white leads, not with black ones". It goes the other way too, Black Panther's success suddenly means that international audiences love black actors. Me personally, I don't think either of the conclusions wrt black actors is correct - there's insufficient data to support either hypothesis. But people make do with the data they have, which is the same thing with Linux. "Linux is wildly successful - what do they do differently? Hmm, must be Linus' management style"
tptacek 9y ago
Chris Lattner led a systems project just as complicated (presumably more so!) than Linus. You don't see whole pages dedicated to "Chris Lattner" rants.
- pcwalton 9y ago
  Great point. I'm stealing that insight. :) If you haven't met Chris in person, by the way, you really should if you get the chance. He's as affable in person as he is online.
yes_or_gnome 9y ago
Most be a slow day at HN. I've subscribed to this subreddit and the posts there are mostly people discovering lkml.org for the first time and seeing the "Hottest" emails of which some are over 5 years old. (`Re: [Regression w/ patch] Media commit causes user space to misbahave (was: Re: Linux 3.8-rc1)`, `Re: [GIT] Networking`, etc.) In this thread, there's been plenty of more recent examples of Linus's snark, but this particular subreddit is more or less dead. And, I suspect it's dead for a good reason. That is, Linus doesn't really really all that much. Side from the infamous 'Mauro, Shut The F* Up!' email, there's not that many good "rants". There's plenty of snarky, bad behavior sure. I get that a lot of people don't like it, but none of them bother to understand that these people work together daily and in the most open environment possible. Nobody considers the fact that, in the most infamous example, Mauro has been a contributor since 2006. (I don't know either, not anyone that's a major Linux contributor.) That's right, I wrote 'has' not 'had' because he still contributes to this day. That's not too excuse a behavior, but as a knock against the characterization of a "toxic environment". Maybe for some, but obviously not for others. I for one, am glad that most of my cringiest, offensive comments were in person and that I was able to walk then back. And, of the stupifying comments that I made in an email, I'm incredibly thankful that they were private.

127 points by turrini 9y ago

The thing about Linus's rants is that he's almost always completely right. As far as I am concerned, his attitude is part of the reason the Linux kernel doesn't completely suck, in stark contrast the pretty much everything that sits on top of it (at least in the Desktop space).

em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
I think the main criticism of Linus's rants is not that he is incorrect, but rather his tone (primarily his use of explitives and ad-hominens). I think he could communicate more efficiently with a civil yet blunt criticism by simply removing the explicitives and ad-hominems.
- alexashka 9y ago
  Maybe, or maybe he'd be a ball of suppressed rage, get some stress-related disease and die. I understand that the current trend is to suppress all your emotions, and then quietly read self-help books and seek therapy, but it's not at all obvious to me that venting does more bad than good. To me, I get a kick out of reading Linus' rants, I find them highly amusing. I can understand that the few people they're directed towards, would feel mildly abused, to which I say welp, it's a small price to pay. There needs to be an acceptance that dealing with other people is oftentimes frustrating, and that there need to be avenues to release that. Business people have booze, drugs, strippers and hookers. Linus is a good boy, he has offensive language and all caps. I consider him a saint, compared to the alternatives someone a little more gregarious would've taken.
  - Retra 9y ago
    I don't think you have any legitimate reason to believe his vulgarities are somehow protecting his health or sanity. But I also don't see any reason to believe they're harming anyone else's.
stjohnswarts 9y ago
I've used linux desktop for years and it has always been stabble for me I haven't tried apple. My desktop stays up for weeks.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
  My Windows desktop stays up for months at a time. This isn't a good metric for whether or not a system is good in 2018.

faragon 9y ago

Linus is a jerk, but a honest and quite reasonable one. He is the anti-Dunning-Kruger [1] personification, in my opinion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

kyberias 9y ago
Don't call people "jerks".
- phs318u 9y ago
  I honestly can't tell if you're being ironic, given the subject matter.
  - kyberias 9y ago
    Well, I honestly think that categorizing people into these "jerk" and "asshole" categories based on some sampling of email communication is completely unfair. Linus Torvalds as a _person_ is a JERK because he's ranting about his life-work in an email list? I don't think Linus is a jerk just for being passionate about his work. His job is to be extremely critical of the code he reviews. Yes, he gets angry and uses swear words quite liberally but it's his style.
    - creatornator 9y ago
      Have you ever been the subject of someone calling your work sh*t? The thing about using such inflammatory language as Linus does is that from the outside, you could say "he's criticizing your work, not you", but if it is directed at you, it's inevitable that you take it personally. It's not passion that makes him make others feel insignificant--it's who he is. It should be possible to be "extremely critical of the code he reviews" without the kind of vitriol that he's comfortable spewing.
seunosewa 9y ago
"Jerk" means "a contemptible naive, fatous, foolish, or inconsequential person". Are you sure that this is what you mean?

kyberias 9y ago

There is nowadays some constructing criticism to Linus's outbursts on the mailing lists: On Thu, Feb 23, 2017 at 05:44:04PM -0800, Linus Torvalds wrote: > [snip] Don't shit on (new) contributors like this. Noralf has done good work (go look), Kconfig is an impossible combinatorial maze, and I'd be rather annoyed if you managed to drive away Noralf (and other contributors) with your mail. I know that you need to rage every once in a while, but at least only send those mails to Dave (and me) in private. On dri-devel here, this isn't accepted.

ReidZB 9y ago
Worth noting: the above was written by Daniel Vetter, not Linus. https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/2/24/176 https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/2/24/176
- amputect 9y ago
  To add further context, here's Linus' (imo rude and totally unproductive) rant from https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/2/23/611 https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/2/23/611, which Daniel Vetter is replying to: The tinydrm code seems like absolute pure shit that has never seen a compiler. I'm upset, because I expect better quality control. In fact, I expect some qualitty control, and this piece-of-shit driver has clearly seen none at all. And those patches were apparently committed yesterday. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK? I get tons and tons of lines of warnings: drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/mipi-dbi.c: In function ‘mipi_dbi_typec1_command’: drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/mipi-dbi.c:65:20: warning: field width specifier ‘’ expects argument of type ‘int’, but argument 5 has type ‘size_t {aka long unsigned int}’ [-Wformat=] DRM_DEBUG_DRIVER("cmd=%02x, par=%ph\n", cmd, len, data); \ with nasty chains of nested defines, but then I also get actual compile failures drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/core/tinydrm-helpers.c:198:26: error: redefinition of ‘tinydrm_of_find_backlight’ struct backlight_device tinydrm_of_find_backlight(struct device dev) ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In file included from drivers/gpu/drm/tinydrm/core/tinydrm-helpers.c:11:0: ./include/drm/tinydrm/tinydrm-helpers.h:53:1: note: previous definition of ‘tinydrm_of_find_backlight’ was here tinydrm_of_find_backlight(struct device dev) ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ (with similar stuff for tinydrm_disable_backlight()). It looks like it might compile if CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE was enabled rather than being a module. Doing this: -#ifdef CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE +#if IS_ENABLED(CONFIG_BACKLIGHT_CLASS_DEVICE) in tinydrm-helpers.h gets rid of the complete build failure, and only leaves the tens of lines of warnings. How the hell did this get to the point where crap like this is even sent to me? Nobody tested anything*? AND WHY THE HELL WAS THIS UTTER SHITE SENT TO ME IF IT WAS COMMITTED YESTERDAY?

qrbLPHiKpiux 9y ago

My god, the fragile personalities - subtract the harshness and extract his wisdom.

mmjaa 9y ago

Personally, I enjoy Linus' rants on a regular basis. They are the perfect antidote to total idiocy that happens in the Linux software world at times. I've very rarely ever found his point of view to be incorrect, and the abrasion that occurs is a great way to rub the shine off a lot of bullshit. I know people find it uncomfortable or rude, but I think its a necessary feature of a great leader when dealing with an unruly mass of, generally speaking, mostly arrogant, mostly privileged individuals.

digi_owl 9y ago
Sadly while he may be running the kernel development quite well, he defends some serious idiocies when it comes to his dive log software Subsurface. Such as defending the bundling of modified libs, thus making it hard (if not impossible) to package for various distros. And rather than noticing this as being very similar to what he has ranted about others doing in the past in userspace, he joins in attacking said distros... Edit (because apparently i am "posting too fast"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_(software) See the last few parts, and citenotes 9 and 10.
- mmjaa 9y ago
  Interesting. Got a link to an example of where this is happening? Because its a form of irrationality I'm not accustomed to with Linus, and I'd like to see for myself if he might have reasons for behaving this way beyond just stubborn pig-headedness. I know he can be stubborn, but in the case of management of Kernel development, he has very fine reasons... the scope of the kernel is far greater than the scope for some user space software, and so this is indeed an intriguing opportunity to gain some insight into his thought processes.
- CJefferson 9y ago
  He is consistent in my opinion. His problem is that most libraries don't try to avoid breaking programs, unlike the kernel. I've started distributing an exact version of boost and gmp with my programs and refusing to accept bug reports generated from using other versions. Life is too short (when unpaid) for the pain caused by exactly the problems Linus is describing.

dustinmoorenet 9y ago

He may be a harsh critic, but looking at this [1] you can see why other developers work with him. He praises and acknowledges good work from others. He definitely contributes to the overall discussion, and in the end, I even understand the problem discussed. [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/29/449 https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/12/29/449

cup-of-tea 9y ago
And praise from Linus is far more highly valued than praise from your standard overly-optimistic business-type yes-man. The thing is Linus speaks volumes to people like Linus. And it just so happens that people like Linus are really good at writing the kind of software that goes in an operating system. Most of the criticism either comes from outside or from the type of people who feel they need to protect others from things that they themselves are able to handle. The latter is basically where ideas about censorship come from (I'm going to read this first to decide whether it's suitable for you to read).
- cm2187 9y ago
  It's actually the motto of one of the main french newspapers. Sans la liberté de blâmer, il n'est pas d'éloge flatteur, i.e. something like "Where there is no freedom of blaming, there can be no genuine praise".
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    The French really do not get enough praise these days. Perhaps because so much of the world do not learn how to read French...
    - walterstucco 9y ago
      As an Italian who can read French, I don't think that's true.
    - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
      The English translation of the french phrase seems fine to me. So there isn't a need to be able to learn to read French in order to express that thought, since it can be done in English. Or is the English translation missing something important?

gorbachev 9y ago

That subreddit needs a Rant Rating Bot.

redleggedfrog 9y ago

That attitude, which is sometimes grating, is also what keeps linux from being the garbage that is most other software. It helps when your gatekeeper is a scary.

ken 9y ago
Is there any evidence of this being true in general? Linux is the only software I can think of where a quality product is accompanied by a "grating attitude". All of the other software I've liked in recent years (like Redis or SQLite or Postgres) has maintainers who seem rather easy-going.
- stinkytaco 9y ago
  There are good software maintainers and bad. And good communities and bad. OpenBSD has pretty grating maintainers. FreeNAS has a pretty toxic community. I could go on, but it's certainly not just linux.
- lobster_johnson 9y ago
  Those examples don't have the same influx of contributions, and they don't have a host of corporate contributors (Red Hat, Intel, IBM, Google, Nvidia, etc.) who are all vying to push their own solutions into the code. Much of the rage people see from Linus is about these contributions not being good enough because they put the companies' needs before the kernel. The most important quality in a project manager is often the ability to say "no". You will see Linus rant about what he considers bad code practices, and will castigate people rather brutally for this [1], but he always provides a cogent, often informative explanation. A more mild-mannered lead would not make a scene, and I don't see the point of his expletive-laden gruffness -- it would have been just as effective without the acidity. I guess if you want the Linus who defends code quality from big contributors, you will also have to accept the Linus who verbally destroys individuals. [1] http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/bool.html http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/bool.html
  - ken 9y ago
    Are there other projects with numerous corporate contributors, then, which were threatened or destroyed by poor patches? My perception is that Postgres has a large number of corporate contributors, but they don't seem to be hurting for it. This justification (i.e., that Linux has to be this way, because it's in a unique position) sounds strange to me. If we're claiming that the relevant sample size is N=1, isn't that equivalent to saying that it's impossible to study whether this management style is necessary or not? In fact, this argument seems almost backwards to me. Linux can be run this way because it is successful. Nvidia isn't trying to mess up NetBSD's architecture, precisely because NetBSD is not as popular with users.

grandinj 9y ago

The nice thing about Linus is that he "plays the ball not the man" to use a sporting analogy. He criticises peoples actions, but not the people themselves. I.e. "this is a stupid thing to do", not "you are stupid".

munin 9y ago
> Those security people are fcking morons. [1] > There's something odd about drm people. [2] > aarch64 is just another druggie name that the ARM people came up with after drinking too much of the spiked water in cambridge. [3] > YOU are full of bullshit. [4] > I've come to the conclusion that any programmer that would prefer the project to be in C++ over C is likely a programmer that I really would prefer to piss off [4] > Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP! It's a bug alright - in the kernel. How long have you been a maintainer? And you still haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance? [5] 1: http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1711.2/01701.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1711.2/01701.html 2: https://www.spinics.net/lists/dri-devel/msg157415.html https://www.spinics.net/lists/dri-devel/msg157415.html 3: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/15/133 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/15/133 4: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/c++/linus 5: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75

yitchelle 9y ago

If Linus adopts a saner approach, without all this mindless ranting, to managing the Linux kernel, I seriously believe that would the results be much better. If he was running a company in a similar manner, would it work?

nindalf 9y ago
At least in this thread, the view that his ranting is pointless is in the minority. Most projects don't have the the same constraints and pressures that Linux faces - including IBM, Intel, Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm all wanting to commit code that benefits their company, but not necessarily the Linux kernel. Linus taking a firm stance on quality helps, I think.

yedava 9y ago

Linus seems to inspire a lot of poor and motivated reasoning - since Linux is successful, it must be because of his toxic personality. If a toxic personality is a requirement (or a major contributing factor) for a successful engineering product, in a world of exquisitely crafted engineering products we should expect to see toxic personalities everywhere. That we don't should have prevented a cult of personality from developing in a community that prizes logical reasoning. Maybe the lesson here is that no group of humans is immune to some set of biases.

taeric 9y ago
I'd take it another way. The fact that he has some toxic qualities is likely orthogonal. Or, an indicator correlated with another quality. This one is kind of fun. Probably Linus' greatest quality is his fearlessness. He did something publicly for the world, that the majority of experts were saying was a bad idea. Specifically, he made a monolithic kernel. To that end. Yes, he can rant a bit. The question is if his rants reduce the conversations? It is as possible he shuts down thread that would have been more harmful. Indeed, most people he rants against are pushing from positions of power. And he rarely goes personal. (Ever?)
nindalf 9y ago
In general, most intelligent people are aware of the dangers of sampling bias and try to avoid it. But what do you do when your sample size is really small? We extrapolate from what we have seen work, but only a handful of open source projects have had the longevity and success that Linux has had. We see the same thing with decisions on what kind of movies to make. A handful of high budget movies are made every year, and when its time to decide which movies to fund studios extrapolate from past successes and failures. This includes wrong ideas like "no movies centred around female superheroes because Catwoman, Elektra etc" or "international audiences only connect with white leads, not with black ones". It goes the other way too, Black Panther's success suddenly means that international audiences love black actors. Me personally, I don't think either of the conclusions wrt black actors is correct - there's insufficient data to support either hypothesis. But people make do with the data they have, which is the same thing with Linux. "Linux is wildly successful - what do they do differently? Hmm, must be Linus' management style"

tptacek 9y ago

Chris Lattner led a systems project just as complicated (presumably more so!) than Linus. You don't see whole pages dedicated to "Chris Lattner" rants.

pcwalton 9y ago
Great point. I'm stealing that insight. :) If you haven't met Chris in person, by the way, you really should if you get the chance. He's as affable in person as he is online.

yes_or_gnome 9y ago

Most be a slow day at HN. I've subscribed to this subreddit and the posts there are mostly people discovering lkml.org for the first time and seeing the "Hottest" emails of which some are over 5 years old. (`Re: [Regression w/ patch] Media commit causes user space to misbahave (was: Re: Linux 3.8-rc1)`, `Re: [GIT] Networking`, etc.) In this thread, there's been plenty of more recent examples of Linus's snark, but this particular subreddit is more or less dead. And, I suspect it's dead for a good reason. That is, Linus doesn't really really all that much. Side from the infamous 'Mauro, Shut The F* Up!' email, there's not that many good "rants". There's plenty of snarky, bad behavior sure. I get that a lot of people don't like it, but none of them bother to understand that these people work together daily and in the most open environment possible. Nobody considers the fact that, in the most infamous example, Mauro has been a contributor since 2006. (I don't know either, not anyone that's a major Linux contributor.) That's right, I wrote 'has' not 'had' because he still contributes to this day. That's not too excuse a behavior, but as a knock against the characterization of a "toxic environment". Maybe for some, but obviously not for others. I for one, am glad that most of my cringiest, offensive comments were in person and that I was able to walk then back. And, of the stupifying comments that I made in an email, I'm incredibly thankful that they were private.