6 ms·

This is why ousting Linus puts the long-term health of the kernel at risk. It’s very difficult and expensive, at a personal and professional level, to tell coll

by wyager 5y ago

This is why ousting Linus puts the long-term health of the kernel at risk. It’s very difficult and expensive, at a personal and professional level, to tell colleagues to “fuck off” if they are submitting low quality garbage for reasons related to their salary. Linux was Linus’s baby, he had nearly absolute control, and he didn’t care too much about politeness - this was a magic recipe for him to be able to stave off garbage patch requests from motivated corporate peons. Now, if the people approving patches are just normal employees who can get fired if a kernel sponsor complains enough, it’s going to be much harder for them to successfully deflect all the bullshit without ever caving in.

otikik 5y ago
I think the email was completely effective in denouncing a behavior. Telling people to "fuck off" isn't required (nor desired, in my opinion). Linux health happened *despite* Linus' manners, not because of them.
- lmilcin 5y ago
  It is naive to claim you can tell which part of Linus is and which isn't contributing to the success. For one, I think it might be possible Linus's no-nonsense attitude is for the better of the organization as people who can't work with it are leaving causing Linux developers, on average, to be more no-nonsense and also able to coexist better with other no-nonsense people. But, it is my conjecture only. We would never know how Linux would fare if Linus was another guy.
  - fao_ 5y ago
    > It is naive to claim you can tell which part of Linus is and which isn't contributing to the success. Wasn't the other person doing exactly the same, just on the "pro-asshole" side of the argument?
    - yebyen 5y ago
      It is probably easier and more defensible to look at a thing that is, and say "why is it this way" than to see something that isn't and ask, "why isn't it the way I want it to be?" These are logically not the same structure of argument. I'm not making any character judgements about people involved in this discussion, or on the LKML either for that matter.
  - scoopertrooper 5y ago
    It's possible to have a no-nonsense attitude without being offensive.
- embeddTrway690 5y ago
  > Linux health happened despite Linus' manners, not because of them. I don't care. Telling incompetent people to fuck off is cool AF.
  - crysin 5y ago
    Your ego is showing. At some point you'll be the incompetent one in the room. Remember, when you're told to fuck off, it's cool as fuck.
    - wyager 5y ago
      While I don’t necessarily agree with the GP, there’s a huge difference between humble incompetence and arrogant incompetence. Everyone starts out incompetent, but that’s fine as long as they don’t repeatedly shove it on other people. Incompetence, without the self-awareness or humility to avoid wasting other people’s time? Maybe getting a verbal slap on the wrist is exactly what’s needed…
  - lmilcin 5y ago
    It may feel cool and that's probably all those bosses that keep threatening to fire their employees think, too. It works for Linus because of special circumstances that are not easily replicated. First, Linus is the creator of the project. He is also competent AF (borrowed your jargon here). Second, people understand Linus is doing this solely out of care for the project. If you look at history of his outbursts you will notice a pattern. Third, Linus tends to be right. Fourth, Linus has and had since almost very beginning celebrity status and people tend to approve of eccentric behavior of celebrities more.
    - hprotagonist 5y ago
      Fifth, Finns are blunt seemingly as a matter of national identity, and so in that sense Linus isn't even very remarkable.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    Maybe that's a sign that you are an incompetent team member and communicator.
- _wldu 5y ago
  You can tell people to "go away" politely (yet firmly). It is an art, but it can be done without vulgarity.
- grawprog 5y ago
  >Telling people to "fuck off" isn't required (nor desired, in my opinion). I'd agree with this for 99% of the time. There's a small 1% of the time though...where sometimes people really need to be told to fuck off.
- slownews45 5y ago
  You can watch a few conference talks where folks really go to town on Linus for his bad behavior. On GPLv3 lots of calls for Linus to stop supporting GPLv2 "How do we get you to stop..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU And the list goes on and on. That said, his decisions seem to have worked out amazingly well. At some point I can imagine getting tired at having to repeatedly defend your views.
  - zxzax 5y ago
    >his decisions seem to have worked out amazingly well. As someone who regularly deals with bugs and inconsistencies in Linux, I wouldn't say so. For me personally, I just want to be able to fix the issues, and would rather not spend the time bickering with someone who has some kind of personal vendetta about something that I don't know about. I try hard not to dump my baggage on other open source maintainers, I hope others can do the same.
- ertian 5y ago
  As others have pointed out, that's speculation. I have trouble understanding why it bothers people so much that Linus is rude sometimes. You don't have to interact with him if you don't want. You can even contribute to the kernel without interacting with him. Whatever he's been doing has been working for going on 3 decades now, I don't see a burning need to change it because it bothers some outsiders. There's this weird sense of entitlement. People want to elbow their way into this long-running and successful project and start telling everybody how they ought to behave. They think they have the right to contribute on their own terms without bothering to understand the project culture, and think it's everybody else's responsibility to make things easy for them and behave in a way they approve of. If you really think the LKML is too toxic and hostile, to the detriment of the project, then feel free to fork it and start up a parallel project without the problems you see. Surely your friendly corporate-style culture will attract more contributors and soon you'll have the more successful kernel, right? Personally, I like having somebody in charge of the core of the OS who's so concerned with correctness and hygiene that he gets upset when they're violated.
  - zxzax 5y ago
    The main problem for me is the old "fish rots from the head down" effect -- when the rude and entitled behavior comes directly from the top, it's no surprise when everyone else starts acting like that and gets at each other's throats. It should be obvious by now where this weird sense of entitlement and refusal to understand other people's culture is coming from. >feel free to fork it and start up a parallel project without the problems you see Most Linux distros are basically already doing this. They all have their own patchsets. It's well beyond correctness and hygiene at this point, if you actually look at the changes that are being disputed, it already falls a lot more in the "cultural differences" category.
    - Y_Y 5y ago
      I think the kernel developers got on pretty well for all those years and managed to put a pretty good product together, despite the big rotten head. And Linux distro maintain patchsets, but they're against mainline, that's a very salient difference here. They still start from whatever upstream publishes, they're not so upset by swearwords that they took a snapshot at Linux 2.4 and only add their own code on top of that.
zxzax 5y ago
If anyone gets ousted from the process, they probably deserve it, for wasting more maintainer time. Nobody is immune from that, not you, not me, not the maintainers, not the BDFL. Expecting the BDFL to be able to have full control and to review every patch is also nonsense that causes the exact same type of issues: https://lwn.net/Articles/393694/ https://lwn.net/Articles/393694/
geofft 5y ago
Good theory, but it's factually wrong. "Maintainers" in this context doesn't refer to Linus personally, it refers to individual maintainers of parts of the kernel. You can check the kernel MAINTAINERS file, and note that such a file has been there for years. There has been a longstanding problem of people submitting low-quality patches to maintainers - not to Linus personally - and that problem predated Linus stepping back for one release. Linus was not ousted and continues to have nearly absolute control; he has, for decades, chosen to exercise that control by delegating ownership of parts of the code to other people. Those people receive and review patches and incorporate them into their repos, which Linus pulls in bulk. (This is the origin of the term "pull request," which predates GitHub's use of it.) He quickly reviews those patches to make sure there's nothing weird, but he generally trusts that his "lieutenants" are making good decisions. That means that the time being wasted here is the time of individual maintainers, who are reviewing the patch, making a full judgment on it, and pulling it into their tree. Linus sees all such cleanups once per cycle and looks at them fairly quickly. Almost all of those maintainers have been "normal employees" of various companies for many, many years. Again, take a look at the MAINTAINERS file.
wolverine876 5y ago
> he didn’t care too much about politeness - this was a magic recipe for him to be able to stave off garbage patch requests from motivated corporate peons. Linus disagrees with you, so strongly that he invested a great amount of his time, reputation, and political capital in changing his behavior and that of his organization. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18000698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18000698 I think I'll trust Linus on that. Linux seems pretty successful.
- shard 5y ago
  Their younger versions might not have agreed with it, but some people do mellow out in their old age. In this case, to me it's clear that he is doing a large turnaround, which validates Wyager's statement that he did not care too much before.
  - wolverine876 5y ago
    I'm not sure what that means, or what basis there is for any of it ? The basis for my comment was Torvalds' own statements and actions, and he's a pretty good source for Torvalds and for effective management and communication in the Linux community. Do you know him personally? Are you a maintainer?
    - shard 5y ago
      It means that Linus used to be fairly brusk when he was younger (basis: e.g. flipping people off and telling people to "fuck off"), and recently he has apologized for his behavior (basis: the link you shared). To me this is him mellowing out in his old age. His younger self might not have agreed with this mellowing out, seeing it as unnecessary (basis: his responses previous to the apology to other people who called him out on his behavior). The fact that he apologized means that even he realized that he did not care too much before, but now he does, and therefore he wanted to make up for what he has done.
      - wolverine876 5y ago

by wyager 5y ago

otikik 5y ago

I think the email was completely effective in denouncing a behavior. Telling people to "fuck off" isn't required (nor desired, in my opinion). Linux health happened *despite* Linus' manners, not because of them.

lmilcin 5y ago
It is naive to claim you can tell which part of Linus is and which isn't contributing to the success. For one, I think it might be possible Linus's no-nonsense attitude is for the better of the organization as people who can't work with it are leaving causing Linux developers, on average, to be more no-nonsense and also able to coexist better with other no-nonsense people. But, it is my conjecture only. We would never know how Linux would fare if Linus was another guy.
- fao_ 5y ago
  > It is naive to claim you can tell which part of Linus is and which isn't contributing to the success. Wasn't the other person doing exactly the same, just on the "pro-asshole" side of the argument?
  - yebyen 5y ago
    It is probably easier and more defensible to look at a thing that is, and say "why is it this way" than to see something that isn't and ask, "why isn't it the way I want it to be?" These are logically not the same structure of argument. I'm not making any character judgements about people involved in this discussion, or on the LKML either for that matter.
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  It's possible to have a no-nonsense attitude without being offensive.
embeddTrway690 5y ago
> Linux health happened despite Linus' manners, not because of them. I don't care. Telling incompetent people to fuck off is cool AF.
- crysin 5y ago
  Your ego is showing. At some point you'll be the incompetent one in the room. Remember, when you're told to fuck off, it's cool as fuck.
  - wyager 5y ago
    While I don’t necessarily agree with the GP, there’s a huge difference between humble incompetence and arrogant incompetence. Everyone starts out incompetent, but that’s fine as long as they don’t repeatedly shove it on other people. Incompetence, without the self-awareness or humility to avoid wasting other people’s time? Maybe getting a verbal slap on the wrist is exactly what’s needed…
- lmilcin 5y ago
  It may feel cool and that's probably all those bosses that keep threatening to fire their employees think, too. It works for Linus because of special circumstances that are not easily replicated. First, Linus is the creator of the project. He is also competent AF (borrowed your jargon here). Second, people understand Linus is doing this solely out of care for the project. If you look at history of his outbursts you will notice a pattern. Third, Linus tends to be right. Fourth, Linus has and had since almost very beginning celebrity status and people tend to approve of eccentric behavior of celebrities more.
  - hprotagonist 5y ago
    Fifth, Finns are blunt seemingly as a matter of national identity, and so in that sense Linus isn't even very remarkable.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Maybe that's a sign that you are an incompetent team member and communicator.
_wldu 5y ago
You can tell people to "go away" politely (yet firmly). It is an art, but it can be done without vulgarity.
grawprog 5y ago
>Telling people to "fuck off" isn't required (nor desired, in my opinion). I'd agree with this for 99% of the time. There's a small 1% of the time though...where sometimes people really need to be told to fuck off.
slownews45 5y ago
You can watch a few conference talks where folks really go to town on Linus for his bad behavior. On GPLv3 lots of calls for Linus to stop supporting GPLv2 "How do we get you to stop..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU And the list goes on and on. That said, his decisions seem to have worked out amazingly well. At some point I can imagine getting tired at having to repeatedly defend your views.
- zxzax 5y ago
  >his decisions seem to have worked out amazingly well. As someone who regularly deals with bugs and inconsistencies in Linux, I wouldn't say so. For me personally, I just want to be able to fix the issues, and would rather not spend the time bickering with someone who has some kind of personal vendetta about something that I don't know about. I try hard not to dump my baggage on other open source maintainers, I hope others can do the same.
ertian 5y ago
As others have pointed out, that's speculation. I have trouble understanding why it bothers people so much that Linus is rude sometimes. You don't have to interact with him if you don't want. You can even contribute to the kernel without interacting with him. Whatever he's been doing has been working for going on 3 decades now, I don't see a burning need to change it because it bothers some outsiders. There's this weird sense of entitlement. People want to elbow their way into this long-running and successful project and start telling everybody how they ought to behave. They think they have the right to contribute on their own terms without bothering to understand the project culture, and think it's everybody else's responsibility to make things easy for them and behave in a way they approve of. If you really think the LKML is too toxic and hostile, to the detriment of the project, then feel free to fork it and start up a parallel project without the problems you see. Surely your friendly corporate-style culture will attract more contributors and soon you'll have the more successful kernel, right? Personally, I like having somebody in charge of the core of the OS who's so concerned with correctness and hygiene that he gets upset when they're violated.
- zxzax 5y ago
  The main problem for me is the old "fish rots from the head down" effect -- when the rude and entitled behavior comes directly from the top, it's no surprise when everyone else starts acting like that and gets at each other's throats. It should be obvious by now where this weird sense of entitlement and refusal to understand other people's culture is coming from. >feel free to fork it and start up a parallel project without the problems you see Most Linux distros are basically already doing this. They all have their own patchsets. It's well beyond correctness and hygiene at this point, if you actually look at the changes that are being disputed, it already falls a lot more in the "cultural differences" category.
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    I think the kernel developers got on pretty well for all those years and managed to put a pretty good product together, despite the big rotten head. And Linux distro maintain patchsets, but they're against mainline, that's a very salient difference here. They still start from whatever upstream publishes, they're not so upset by swearwords that they took a snapshot at Linux 2.4 and only add their own code on top of that.

zxzax 5y ago

If anyone gets ousted from the process, they probably deserve it, for wasting more maintainer time. Nobody is immune from that, not you, not me, not the maintainers, not the BDFL. Expecting the BDFL to be able to have full control and to review every patch is also nonsense that causes the exact same type of issues: https://lwn.net/Articles/393694/ https://lwn.net/Articles/393694/

geofft 5y ago

Good theory, but it's factually wrong. "Maintainers" in this context doesn't refer to Linus personally, it refers to individual maintainers of parts of the kernel. You can check the kernel MAINTAINERS file, and note that such a file has been there for years. There has been a longstanding problem of people submitting low-quality patches to maintainers - not to Linus personally - and that problem predated Linus stepping back for one release. Linus was not ousted and continues to have nearly absolute control; he has, for decades, chosen to exercise that control by delegating ownership of parts of the code to other people. Those people receive and review patches and incorporate them into their repos, which Linus pulls in bulk. (This is the origin of the term "pull request," which predates GitHub's use of it.) He quickly reviews those patches to make sure there's nothing weird, but he generally trusts that his "lieutenants" are making good decisions. That means that the time being wasted here is the time of individual maintainers, who are reviewing the patch, making a full judgment on it, and pulling it into their tree. Linus sees all such cleanups once per cycle and looks at them fairly quickly. Almost all of those maintainers have been "normal employees" of various companies for many, many years. Again, take a look at the MAINTAINERS file.

wolverine876 5y ago

> he didn’t care too much about politeness - this was a magic recipe for him to be able to stave off garbage patch requests from motivated corporate peons. Linus disagrees with you, so strongly that he invested a great amount of his time, reputation, and political capital in changing his behavior and that of his organization. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18000698 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18000698 I think I'll trust Linus on that. Linux seems pretty successful.

shard 5y ago
Their younger versions might not have agreed with it, but some people do mellow out in their old age. In this case, to me it's clear that he is doing a large turnaround, which validates Wyager's statement that he did not care too much before.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  I'm not sure what that means, or what basis there is for any of it ? The basis for my comment was Torvalds' own statements and actions, and he's a pretty good source for Torvalds and for effective management and communication in the Linux community. Do you know him personally? Are you a maintainer?
  - shard 5y ago
    It means that Linus used to be fairly brusk when he was younger (basis: e.g. flipping people off and telling people to "fuck off"), and recently he has apologized for his behavior (basis: the link you shared). To me this is him mellowing out in his old age. His younger self might not have agreed with this mellowing out, seeing it as unnecessary (basis: his responses previous to the apology to other people who called him out on his behavior). The fact that he apologized means that even he realized that he did not care too much before, but now he does, and therefore he wanted to make up for what he has done.
    - wolverine876 5y ago