4 ms·

Linus manages combined efforts of hundreds of people for years, probably leading the most successful open source project ever. Without salaries, without command

Linus manages combined efforts of hundreds of people for years, probably leading the most successful open source project ever. Without salaries, without command and rule authority, without perks, without shared office space, even without HR. He probably knows something about what it takes to manage people

podperson 13y ago
Or maybe he's just so talented that he can carry a huge interpersonal handicap. Actually, this email is pretty polite and to-the-point. I don't know exactly what it is that he said that was offensive in private, but he's actually being pretty reasonable here. The thing is, some people spend a lot of effort when writing to check that they don't accidentally leave "sharp edges" in their writing (and then they still fail to find them all) while others write the way they would talk and assume that their tone of voice is "obvious" when of course it isn't. I expect if you knew Linus personally (I do not) his most outrageous written comments would seem just fine. There's a ton of research on how written communications (especially with relative anonymity, etc.) can lead to cascading flamewars and so forth without anyone setting out to troll or be outrageous. Linus lives in that world, so he probably offends a lot of people accidentally just as a matter of percentages. > most successful open source project ever Surely that would be BSD which, without Linux, would probably be Linux (and was Linux before Linux), and with Linux is still most of Linux and a good deal of Mac OS X and iOS, and without which Linux would be irrelevant.
- fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
  >I don't know exactly what it is that he said that was offensive in private, but he's actually being pretty reasonable here. I think what's being discussed is Linus' reaction to someone's patch on the lkml a few days ago. https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/13/132 https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/13/132 Here is a preview: >What the F*CK, guys? >This piece-of-shit commit is marked for stable, but you clearly never >even test-compiled it, did you?
  - jhspaybar 13y ago
    Wow, I cannot tell you how many times I've wanted to say something similar in a code review but instead go with "hey, this looks a little funny, any ideas what you could do to clean it up?" Part of me does think its rude, the other part is jealous he can say it and I can't :)
    - lnanek2 13y ago
      Haha, yeah. Honestly, being nice in code reviews, half the time the person just argues for half a dozen comments or never addresses the issue, even if it's completely obvious like two methods doing the same thing but with different names. Oh, well, if we have to be nice and not get things done or suffer some idiot code getting in, we have to be nice.
    - justin66 13y ago
      If you're wired anything like a normal human being, you'd observe the effect saying it actually had and you'd stop behaving that way. So think of your current situation as having skipped ahead without the additional damage of a hands-on learning process.
    - DanBC 13y ago
      "Hey, this looks a little funny, any ideas what you could do to clean it up?" is ambiguous and doesn't help you. "Hey! This is broken. It doesn't do X, Y, or Z. Please make sure to check code thoroughly (refer to $DOCUMENT) before committing." is direct, tells people what's wrong, and isn't hostile. People will be offended by it, but those people can be made to understand that they are being given useful direct advice.
      - rocky1138 13y ago
        The feeling of being offended by such a message diminishes the more it happens, the more you fix and prevent the behaviour, and when you see your role models make similar mistakes, which has a tendency to humanize them.
      - marknow 13y ago
- wozniacki 13y ago
  There's a ton of research on how written communications (especially with relative anonymity, etc.) can lead to cascading flamewars and so forth without anyone setting out to troll or be outrageous. Genuinely interested in this research. Care to cite?
  - podperson 13y ago
    I'm not an academic so I can't reel off citations from memory (my wife can but I don't have her handy). Here's a quick example thanks to google: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/02/70179 http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/02/70179 But this is a drop in the bucket.
- makomk 13y ago
  Actually, I reckon he's being fairly unreasonable, he's just couching it in superficially-reasonable terms. He's arguing that "playing the victim card" is a way of enforcing your expectations upon others, but accusing someone of "playing the victim card" is itself an incredibly nasty way of imposing your own expectations on others. It's essentially saying that not only should Sarah Sharp be willing to put up with all the hostility, but that the only reason she's complaining about it is to make a political point. It's a way of snidely arguing that she can't possibly actually care about the issue. That's far more dismissive of other people's reactions than anything Linus Torvalds is complaining about, and yet he's trying to claim that he has the inclusive moral high ground and Sarah Sharp is the one who's ignoring the fact that different people react differently.
  - mwfunk 13y ago
    Totally agreed, accusing someone of "playing the victim card" is a super lame oratorical trick, frequently used by people who don't realize that that's what they're doing. It's up there with saying, "now, I know it may not be politically correct to say this...", which is pretty much 100% of the time followed by some completely idiotic statement. The trick is that it sets up an environment where objecting to the idiotic statement is preemptively made to sound like some sort of hypersensitive political correctness.

podperson 13y ago

Or maybe he's just so talented that he can carry a huge interpersonal handicap. Actually, this email is pretty polite and to-the-point. I don't know exactly what it is that he said that was offensive in private, but he's actually being pretty reasonable here. The thing is, some people spend a lot of effort when writing to check that they don't accidentally leave "sharp edges" in their writing (and then they still fail to find them all) while others write the way they would talk and assume that their tone of voice is "obvious" when of course it isn't. I expect if you knew Linus personally (I do not) his most outrageous written comments would seem just fine. There's a ton of research on how written communications (especially with relative anonymity, etc.) can lead to cascading flamewars and so forth without anyone setting out to troll or be outrageous. Linus lives in that world, so he probably offends a lot of people accidentally just as a matter of percentages. > most successful open source project ever Surely that would be BSD which, without Linux, would probably be Linux (and was Linux before Linux), and with Linux is still most of Linux and a good deal of Mac OS X and iOS, and without which Linux would be irrelevant.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
>I don't know exactly what it is that he said that was offensive in private, but he's actually being pretty reasonable here. I think what's being discussed is Linus' reaction to someone's patch on the lkml a few days ago. https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/13/132 https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/13/132 Here is a preview: >What the F*CK, guys? >This piece-of-shit commit is marked for stable, but you clearly never >even test-compiled it, did you?
- jhspaybar 13y ago
  Wow, I cannot tell you how many times I've wanted to say something similar in a code review but instead go with "hey, this looks a little funny, any ideas what you could do to clean it up?" Part of me does think its rude, the other part is jealous he can say it and I can't :)
  - lnanek2 13y ago
    Haha, yeah. Honestly, being nice in code reviews, half the time the person just argues for half a dozen comments or never addresses the issue, even if it's completely obvious like two methods doing the same thing but with different names. Oh, well, if we have to be nice and not get things done or suffer some idiot code getting in, we have to be nice.
  - justin66 13y ago
    If you're wired anything like a normal human being, you'd observe the effect saying it actually had and you'd stop behaving that way. So think of your current situation as having skipped ahead without the additional damage of a hands-on learning process.
  - DanBC 13y ago
    "Hey, this looks a little funny, any ideas what you could do to clean it up?" is ambiguous and doesn't help you. "Hey! This is broken. It doesn't do X, Y, or Z. Please make sure to check code thoroughly (refer to $DOCUMENT) before committing." is direct, tells people what's wrong, and isn't hostile. People will be offended by it, but those people can be made to understand that they are being given useful direct advice.
    - rocky1138 13y ago
      The feeling of being offended by such a message diminishes the more it happens, the more you fix and prevent the behaviour, and when you see your role models make similar mistakes, which has a tendency to humanize them.
    - marknow 13y ago
wozniacki 13y ago
There's a ton of research on how written communications (especially with relative anonymity, etc.) can lead to cascading flamewars and so forth without anyone setting out to troll or be outrageous. Genuinely interested in this research. Care to cite?
- podperson 13y ago
  I'm not an academic so I can't reel off citations from memory (my wife can but I don't have her handy). Here's a quick example thanks to google: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/02/70179 http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/02/70179 But this is a drop in the bucket.
makomk 13y ago
Actually, I reckon he's being fairly unreasonable, he's just couching it in superficially-reasonable terms. He's arguing that "playing the victim card" is a way of enforcing your expectations upon others, but accusing someone of "playing the victim card" is itself an incredibly nasty way of imposing your own expectations on others. It's essentially saying that not only should Sarah Sharp be willing to put up with all the hostility, but that the only reason she's complaining about it is to make a political point. It's a way of snidely arguing that she can't possibly actually care about the issue. That's far more dismissive of other people's reactions than anything Linus Torvalds is complaining about, and yet he's trying to claim that he has the inclusive moral high ground and Sarah Sharp is the one who's ignoring the fact that different people react differently.
- mwfunk 13y ago
  Totally agreed, accusing someone of "playing the victim card" is a super lame oratorical trick, frequently used by people who don't realize that that's what they're doing. It's up there with saying, "now, I know it may not be politically correct to say this...", which is pretty much 100% of the time followed by some completely idiotic statement. The trick is that it sets up an environment where objecting to the idiotic statement is preemptively made to sound like some sort of hypersensitive political correctness.