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"Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this"

• chris_wot 12y ago
  Yeah, this was discussed about an hour ago, and it hit the flame filter pretty fast. I'd suggest that it won't last very long on the front page. Incidentally, I find it very sad that we can't discuss this on HN. What has happened to Lennart, and the behaviour of Linus Torvalds as a bully, is probably something decent to talk about. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859
  • freehunter 12y ago
    It's a real shame because it's really true and really needs to be addressed. We've had these conversations about gamers, about startups, about tech in general, but when it comes to Linux (and related open source projects) it's somehow impossible to talk about. The community just isn't friendly and isn't inclusive, and that bad behavior goes far enough as to shut down any talk of the bad behavior.
    • chris_wot 12y ago
      I don't know about anyone else, but when I read Linus write: "Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F✦CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?" https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495 then I don't think I'd ever contribute to the LKML. (p.s. the irony of posting such an offensive post by starring out the u in fuck... does he not see the irony?)
      • sergiosgc 12y ago
        Linus is great enough, and known enough, to be allowed some idiosyncrasies. If you follow LKML long enough you realize these hard language comments do not carry one tenth the negative message a primary read would convey. Note that this happens because you can read it with knowledge of the writer's personality. If it were an anonymous author, your impression would be perfectly correct. No, I know that the standard reply here is that no one is above being polite. I disagree. This is a Linus' flaw, of course, but one we can live with in the context of his hugely positive net contribution.
        • GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
          "Oh you can advocate murder for people you don't like as long as your technical chops are in order" --you
          • sergiosgc 12y ago
            "You can yell bloody murder as long as people know you aren't serious about it"-- really me
          • vidarh 12y ago
            How you managed to read that into the message above is totally beyond me.
            • freehunter 12y ago
              >This is a Linus' flaw, of course, but one we can live with in the context of his hugely positive net contribution. Said in response to a comment by Linus directly stating that someone should be retroactively aborted (murdered).
              • sergiosgc 12y ago
                Be reasonable. Do you seriously read that meaning into Linus' message? Couldn't it have an interpretation other than a literal one? I know a lot gets lost in written format, but ... come on!
      • tomp 12y ago
        On the other hand, I don't consider this bad. Sure, it's offensive, but he has quite a good reason to be upset - reading one byte at a time will be really slow. Could he say it in a better way? Obviously. Could you interpret his words in a less literal way? Obviously. I don't know Linus, but he seems a good, selfless guy, with the best intentions at heart. If he's not politically correct, who the fuck cares? Sometimes I get the feeling that even murderers are more respected, as long as they talk nice. In my opinion the insistence on political correctnes has much more chilling effect than some passionate, if insulting, words.
        • kibwen 12y ago
          I don't think "political correctness" has anything to do with suggesting that someone is so braindead that they ought to have starved to death. Rather, you appear to be using it as a strawman to discredit the notion that we should treat people like decent human beings. As for his "passion", I don't think that resorting to public humiliation is any way to lead a project. Rather, it sounds like an item out of that "How To Minimize Employee Retention" article that made the rounds last week. Linus certainly has many good qualities that have contributed to the success of Linux. He's diligent, he's technical, and he's great at solving problems. But it's important to acknowledge that Linux has thrived despite his abrasive outbursts, not because of them.
          • kyberias 12y ago
            > But it's important to acknowledge that Linux has thrived despite his abrasive outbursts, not because of them. No, you don't really know that! These outbursts may bother you and other people but it is also possible that they have been very, very beneficial to the community. Like it or not, they are a form of humor to many people and that may improve team cohesiveness. I for one think that the reaction to this particular retroactive-abortion-outburst as "not treating people as human beings" is taking things absolutely way too seriously.
        • mike_hearn 12y ago
          It's really not political correctness to just keep technical discussions calm and non-personal. Meanwhile, consider the chilling effect that kind of attitude has. I know quite a few skilled engineers who would just walk out if their boss talked to them like that, regardless of the merits of the underlying discussion. It's just wildly unprofessional and when Linus does that kind of thing, it sets the tone for all the other Linux-wannabe's who think "great engineers flame people!! i should flame people too!!".
      • pekk 12y ago
        Not to excuse this, but this involved a person with a Finnish name who specifically CC'd Linus complaining about a perceived regression when doing things a wrong way. Note that there is even a phrase about a Finnish phenomenon, "management by perkele," referring to a militaristic managing style which steamrolls dissent with a lot of profanity. Therefore, I doubt that a random person on LKML that wasn't CC'ing Linus to complain about the bad performance of doing things wrong would draw random fire from Linus about his ability to suck a tit. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs was a total asshole to many people, including family, and this has been approved in his hagiography as a condition for his incredible inventions which revolutionized all mankind. If that is true for Apple then presumably it is also true for Linux? Or maybe we should be more uniform in criticizing for people being assholes, rather than singling out Open Source with an implicit double standard.
        • jdub 12y ago
          There's no double standard here. It's a conversation specifically about jerkish behaviour in the open source world, and merely having this discussion does not ignore jerkish behaviour in other companies, communities, etc.
        • philh 12y ago
          Minor correction: the person who CC'd Linus was Alan Cox, directing Linus' attention to Jukka Ollila's message.
        • mwfunk 12y ago
          I have no idea who these people are that you think celebrate Steve Jobs' asshole behavior. Those are not people who actually know anything about him; those are randos on crappy tech forums if they exist at all. He was an unusual person with many good and bad qualities, not all of which were factors in his success. Usually when people cite Steve Jobs' (or Linus', or anyone's) asshole moments as being somehow constructive, it's because they wish they could act the same way towards the people around them but they can't get away with it due to their own lack of power. It's not an attractive quality for someone to have. It's one thing to be somebody's lousy manager, it's another thing entirely to be envious of lousy managers.
      • vidarh 12y ago
        > (p.s. the irony of posting such an offensive post by starring out the u in fuck... does he not see the irony?) Linus is fully capable of writing "fuck", as evidenced by e.g. [1]. If he stars it out, assume it is a stylistic choice for that particular message. > then I don't think I'd ever contribute to the LKML. If you can't handle a message like that, then perhaps it's just as well. Note the context (though I can appreciate it may not matter to you, and that you simply won't contribute regardless of it): A senior developer who have repeatedly made Linus exasperated by submitting code that Linus have had massive issues with, up to and including unacceptable levels of breakage, appears to have written code so idiotic that it should not even have occurred to him. 1 byte reads with sys-calls is a beginner mistake. Kay was/is not a beginner. He also had at that point had repeated complaints from Linus about the quality of his code, and showed no sign of listening. This conflict eventually culminated in Linus making it clear he'd had enough, and will no longer merge code from Kay until he cleans up his act [2] While I don't think I'd be as caustic as Linus, I can totally understand the level of exasperation that saga must have caused him given the series of issues in question. And at the point of this outburst, nothing appears to have worked: the stream of crap had kept on coming. [1] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 [2] https://plus.google.com/u/0/111049168280159033135/posts/Kd57G8s1cTD https://plus.google.com/u/0/111049168280159033135/posts/Kd57...
        • haberman 12y ago
          > While I don't think I'd be as caustic as Linus, I can totally understand the level of exasperation that saga must have caused him given the series of issues in question. And at the point of this outburst, nothing appears to have worked: the stream of crap had kept on coming. I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but are you saying that being exasperated is justification to be arbitrarily caustic? There are plenty of open-source project leaders who deal with incorrigible people and do not talk this way.
          • cookiecaper 12y ago
            It's a style choice, and I think both the choice to utilize it and the reception to it are heavily dependent on the participant's cultural background and upbringing. A lot of people see this kind of message, applied to someone who Really Should Know Better, as a form of tough love and half-tongue-in-cheek way to place extra emphasis on an important message. Some people can form that understanding as the basis of their relationship and continue on happily, able to both give and receive this kind of criticism. To others, it is completely foreign and incomprehensible and they don't see the tongue-in-cheek at all and just interpret it as blatant, outright hostility, which is generally not the actual subtext.
      • imakesnowflakes 12y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk8n-I53Ib8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xk8n-I53Ib8 (Pulp Fiction, Wolf's speech)
      • zimbatm 12y ago
        Why is is that each time offensive Linus quotes are used only a handful of them show up ? Over the thousands of emails that have been exchanged in the last fifteen years there surely must exist a bigger variety.
        • bronson 12y ago
          This is a fantastic question!
        • meapix 12y ago
          How could a person who has 24 hours a day be: 1. very nice. 2. receiver of whatever shit (including good shit) people send. 3. productive. 4. responsible to make a critical system work. 5. a filter of bad code. 6. ... Without offending anybody?
          • mcantor 12y ago
            "Offending" and "verbally abusing" are not the same thing.
          • RivieraKid 12y ago
            Any emotionally mature person shouldn't have a problem with what you've described.
      • vidoc 12y ago
        I'm wondering what kind of world you would like instead? Would you like those mailing lists to be an environment similar to what you have in the mass media, where political correctness and hypocrisy is rampant, and anytime someone crosses the boundary we use words like 'hate'?
        • meapix 12y ago
          No thanks
        • EmanueleAina 12y ago
          Why not find a middle ground, where one can say that a patch is incredibly broken and shows lack of attention without resorting to abusive language?
      • oscargrouch 12y ago
        Wait.. but what the guy did (whoever is) is really stupid; of the unbelievable type.. Now i imagine that Linus suffer a tremendous pressure to not let any bug pass, cause everybody in the world would eat his liver if there's a smallest security hole in the Kernel Millions of lines of C code, that run in every gadget we can think of, the guy is stressed out; and you have a "code terrorist" do deal with?! Also Linus has a strong personality, everybody knows that; so i dont see this as something bad as its being painted here; And we have to take the cultural background into account; i prefer the German/Nordic tought/transparent way than the hypocrisy/"you are great, but i will stab you when you turn your back" kind of culture (and im from a relaxed kind of culture) I Think this is more of a cultural clash
    • RVuRnvbM2e 12y ago
      This is why I'm glad that Debian now has a code of conduct. https://www.debian.org/code_of_conduct https://www.debian.org/code_of_conduct
  • stefantalpalaru 12y ago
    There's always Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2ifo6h/lennart_on_the_linux_community/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/2ifo6h/lennart_on_th...
  • forgottenpass 12y ago
    Incidentally, I find it very sad that we can't discuss this on HN. What has happened to Lennart, and the behaviour of Linus Torvalds as a bully, is probably something decent to talk about. It's not that we "can't" discuss it, you just have to be prepared for the discomfort of disagreement from both reasonable and unreasonable positions. Bad positions will be argued well, and good positions will be argued poorly. The empathy to understand issues from stances you disagree with is necessary to make arguments that sway people to your position. The ability to be as critical of your own positions as those you disagree with is how you ditch silly ideas and improve the defense of your good ideas. The reader has to put in more effort than looking at a salty conversation and coming out the other end saying "gee, that was frosty, therefore I don't have to think about the issue seriously and can conclude the position I had going in was right all along." It may not be ideal, but making the best of a bad situation is a practical approach often necessary to get anything useful done. Do you want to change minds or do you want to indulge in the comfort of showing everyone just how right you are?
    • ekimekim 12y ago
      I think the parent was referring to HN's ranking system's tendency to apply a penalty to posts with many comments, in an effort to keep flame wars off the front page (if I recall correctly - it's been a while since I saw a "how HN ranking works" post and I can't find a source url, sorry). This has the side effect of divisive issues not getting the same exposure as stuff everyone agrees on.
    • freehunter 12y ago
      No, really, historically it's been impossible to discuss. People flag the article off the front page or downvote anything negative about Linux or open source the same way they do anything positive about Microsoft.
  • xroche 12y ago
    You need to understand one thing: you are wrong. Linus Torvalds is not a bully. He's in charge of one of the biggest and most successful project out there. And this project is open-source, and anyone can contribute to it. Anyone. Even your cat. Imagine the Windows codebase being opened to anyone, with anyone being able to suggest fixes and send patches, or ask questions, or make suggestions. You do not want any idiot to commit insane things. You need to have some barriers. And these barriers are related to technical skills. You have to understand that the alternative to "Linus is mean" is "Linus let a fucking patch enter the kernel, and it broke millions of machines around the world, causing millions of dollars worth of damage". Every single line committed in the kernel must be carefully checked, and if you lack the skills, just go away, because it will (1) spoil the precious kernel maintainers time and more importantly (2) do damages to millions of users. So I am personally very glad Linus is "abrasive", because when someone screw up, he makes it perfectly clear, and this is totally appropriate considering how critical the linux kernel is nowadays. And yes, if you want to live in a politically correct, nice, cheerful project, this is not the project you need to work for. [Having said that, I do not think Linus has ever been dishonest (such as refusing a patch only because he did not like its author, unlike some C-library guy), which is precisely the reason why his abrasiveness is perfectly fine to me]
    • mike_hearn 12y ago
      You realise that there are large, commercial projects that are just as high stakes as the Linux kernel or arguably even higher stakes, and they manage to operate with reasonable team dynamics? There is no correlation between "runs an important project" and "must be an asshole" even though certainly everyone has off days from time to time (I've been known to flame people when reaching the end of my tether but usually regretted it later). I think this notion - which Linus pushes - that the alternative to yelling at people and generally being short tempered is always "political correctness" ... well it's quite harmful. Yes, it CAN get that way, if people interpret criticism of their work as personal criticism and try to shut it down by complaining about it. I've seen that happen before. Some people don't know how to handle someone implying, even if politely, that their work sucks and can't handle it. But that doesn't mean it has to be that way and well functioning teams manage to avoid it.
  • belorn 12y ago
    To get some insight behind linus behavior, I can strongly recommend his Q/A for latest debconf (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mg5_gxNXTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Mg5_gxNXTo). It was quite interesting in how much he seems to like to exaggerate things, like the retroactively aborted comment, or how he can make two following sentences with "it is a horrible license" and "it is a great license" regarding the same license. Linus do not seems to be a person one should quote, as context seem to be critical important for anything he says.
  • DanBC 12y ago
    > I find it very sad that we can't discuss this on HN. It is intensely but shallowly interesting. Previous attempts to discuss it devolve into bad tempered argument. No one learns anything from these discussions. No one has their mind changed.
  • disjointrevelry 12y ago
    Linus' behavior is one that is necessary in order to work with the dominant culture in OSS, particularly white males. The open forum insults to establish the pecking order, and to deter thin skinned people is one that is also abundant in other cultures where open forums are used for establishing the hierarchy. One such example are some East-Asian cultures, such as the Chinese. The question is, is this method of selection conducive and is the use of obsessive aggression costing open forum projects like OSS through selective acceptance? There may have never been an alternative to the extremely abusive nature of white-male dominated cultures in the first place in regards to projects in open forums.
    • muyuu 12y ago
      It has little to do with "white males" and more to do with Open Communities with no barrier of entry needing to be extremely dismissive when a standard is not met, to make up for said lack of barriers of entry. The vast majority of OSS projects that don't start from a strong core fail miserably and it's because of this. People extrapolate their real life professional behaviour to a virtual, open scene where assumptions of competence and commitment fall flat massively. If anything, OSS needs more people like Linus Torvalds and Theo de Raadt managing projects and not post modern clowns with "white male" guilt. It's not by chance that Linux is possibly the biggest success in OSS history with real community contribution, and most of the others have been carried out by their respective cores with very little external output. American PC behaviour is a disaster for OSS and that's why a lot of OSS is "awful" where it matters, which is in quality, in competitiveness and in leading the industry. Companies like Google and Mozilla lord it over OSS projects that are basically "glass house" corporative projects with extremely little external contribution (other than forking code from Linux, Apache, BSD, etc). If anything the OSS is not dismissive enough of shit and this is holding us back.
• rbanffy 12y ago
  > in particular ones where losing face is a major issue This touches an interesting point. Feedback must be accurate. If you are actually provably wrong, I am not doing you a favor by telling you you that you are "not right". Losing face is a fact of life. When I'm wrong, I want to know I am wrong, what I am wrong about and just how wrong am I. If possible, tell me what can I do to be right the next time. It must also be kind. You do not point someone is wrong to humiliate the person and you should take care not to (I try and I fail more often than I'd like to) fall into the trap of judging a person for his or her first efforts. Having said that, I am almost sure all the exaggerated discourse on the Linux kernel mailing list is not really part of the message, but should be understood as more like a sport, a game, where the one with the most elaborately crafted insult wins. When Linus says you should be retroactively aborted he most likely wants to say you are very wrong and your idea is really bad and that, maybe, you should be more thorough the next time you submit a patch. Their time is a finite resource. Is this the most efficient way to run the community? Probably not. We just don't know what is the most efficient way to do it and it can just be that Linus found a local maximum.
  • freehunter 12y ago
    >If you are actually provably wrong, I am not doing you a favor by telling you you that you are "not right". Saying "you're wrong" isn't the issue here. Saying "your mom should have aborted you and i hope you die" is the issue. I don't think people in cultures where losing face is a big issue much care if they're told they're wrong. They care is they're told they are so wrong they should kill themselves or be killed. Honor killings are unfortunately still a big deal in some parts of the world. What you say in defense of the mailing list insults is the same thing that has been said about casual racism or casual misogyny in other groups normally dominated by white men. It scares away other groups and cultures, and it's not acceptable anywhere.
    • sbhere 12y ago
      > Saying "you're wrong" isn't the issue here. Saying "your mom should have aborted you and i hope you die" is the issue. I don't think people in cultures where losing face is a big issue much care if they're told they're wrong. They care is they're told they are so wrong they should kill themselves or be killed. Honor killings are unfortunately still a big deal in some parts of the world. This. Absolutely. The issue is the personal attacks. I've considered delving more deeply into the linux world, but why would I want to willingly go into a place where my constitution is insulted by those who know little-to-nothing of my constitution, let alone my character. To the individual who commented on the fact that "time is a limited resource" ... so are intelligent people. That you would sacrifice a person (sacrifice them from your project, or committing to your work) by insulting them shows me to avoid your organization.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  • chris_wot 12y ago
    Because what has happened to Lennart is pretty horrible.
    • freehunter 12y ago
      I googled his name and as soon as I read what projects he works on I instantly knew his complaint was perfectly valid. Probably the most hated Linux projects ever devised, and for purely political reasons.
      • eloisant 12y ago
        I wouldn't say his projects were hated for political reasons. They were hated because they were a central piece of software (sound for PA the init for systemd) and they were released unfinished. It's certainly wrong to turn that to personal attacks against him, but I can understand why people disliked PulseAudio then Systemd - and even hated these projects because they caused breakage in numerous systems, hours to try to fix it, and ended up with justifications like "it's by design" or "you don't understand why but it's better this way".
        • Shish2k 12y ago
          > they were released unfinished Isn't that how open source is /supposed/ to work? TBH, as a Debian user, I'm quite happy with the "Lennart releases theoretically brilliant but practically buggy apps, Ubuntu / Arch users suffer for a few months, Debian integrates the system once it's stable" workflow :)
          • EmanueleAina 12y ago
            Nowadays the workflow is more or less back to the reverse direction: Debian first and Ubuntu later, with the added benefit that Debian maintainers are rather more dependable when choosing the version to be packaged. :)
• jblz 12y ago
  I'm not sure how this pertains to Open Source communities across the board..? Seems to be a pretty targeted indictment of the Linux dev community. There are plenty that don't stand for the type of bad acting described here.
  • acdha 12y ago
    The problem is that the Linux kernel is one of the longer running and most influential open source communities so too many people have picked up the idea that because Linus can say something mean, it's okay for them to do it, too — as long as they're technically correct, of course, but which flame-warrior doesn't believe that they're correcting an error?
• mike_ivanov 12y ago
  Anything is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this.
• oliwarner 12y ago
  It's easy to see that in some quarters this is certainly true. People are allowed —even encouraged— to smack people down if they're being ridiculous... But this isn't the rule. http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu/conduct http://www.ubuntu.com/about/about-ubuntu/conduct As an Ubuntu member, I'm expected to behave. In our derivative communities, we try to ensure that people adhere to these principles too. Ask Ubuntu (part of Stack Exchange, not Canonical), for example, also requires people to adhere to the Ubuntu CoC. Ubuntu Forums and IRC have similar behaviour guidelines. Does that mean it's always civil? Of course not... But it does mean that nobody's surprised when people are tossed out for being needlessly rude and the non-technical flame wars of the late 90s just don't happen.
  • jnbiche 12y ago
    I'm not an Ubuntu contributor, but I have to give credit to the Ubuntu community in that they do try to create a welcoming place for contributors. Of course, no one's perfect and I'm sure someone will dig up a counterexample, but this has been my experience over the course of many years of interactions with the community.
• forca 12y ago
  I agree somewhat with Lennart. The Libre/OSS community is full of egotistical asshats -- generally western and in their 30s and 40s. What's funny, though, is that not all camps in the community are that bad. The Linux camp has deteriorated in recent years -- I've noticed it myself on several occasions. The BSD camps don't suffer near as much from the nonsense that occurs on the Linux side. I think there are several reasons for this. One I have notice in person working on both sides is that the BSD crews tend to be more professional overall. They love UNIX and the goal has always been to create the best UNIX-like OS around. The BSD license is arguably better IMO as well. Quite a few Linux devs, both kernel and userland, are grossly immature and tend to be vocal closed-source opponents for the sake of being vocal. The world cannot be all closed source or all open source. There is room for everyone. Most of the issues with people I have had over the three decades I've been in IT have been with Linux-based devs and users. Without exception all BSD guys and girls have been the pinnacle of professionalism. I think this speaks volumes and is quite telling. This is not observation from one workplace -- this is over many, many years in different work spaces, different cultures, states, whatnot. All things considered, I have been seriously thinking of moving my core infrastructure over to FreeBSD/OpenBSD to avoid the coming (well, here already) continued balkanisation of Linux. The code quality of Linux has deteriorated of late as well. I've noticed it. My BSD test boxes running the same software suffer nary a hitch. Debian seems to be sane still, as does Slackware, but for how long. This ridiculous systemd battle is bonkers.
  • _delirium 12y ago
    Interesting viewpoint; I don't have the same perception, but communities are big, so you might be right. Do you mean purely the sysadmin community in workplaces, or also the developer community? For developer communities, the BSD world seems to have a pretty wide range of community friendliness, but I wouldn't describe it as uniformly pleasant and professional. Certainly the OpenBSD community is not that: there are many good things about de Raadt, but the tone he sets is more one of combative-and-right than pleasant-and-professional (and he's not the only one in the community with that tone). He's no less prone to flamage than Torvalds, anyway. The only really friendly BSD developer community I've encountered is the NetBSD one, which seems to make an active effort at cultivating a certain ethos. FreeBSD is maybe somewhere in between, though I think trending friendlier compared to some years ago. Some sub-communities are also quite pleasant, like the ZFS one (which lives a bit more in Illumos-land, but has a lot of BSD contributors as well).
• andmarios 12y ago
  This post would be interesting if there wasn't the “all others do it except us” accusation. Systemd zealots are exactly the same with any other open source community's zealots and systemd's diva devs are exactly the same with any other open source diva devs.
• tschellenbach 12y ago
  Seriously why would you work on open source if the community is that bad. It's not open source in general though. Some projects are great fun to work on. Just change which project you're working on.
• snarfy 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_perkele http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_by_perkele Linus's approach is a cultural thing.
  • freehunter 12y ago
    A lot of discriminatory or hateful actions can be written off as cultural. Racism is cultural in the Southern US. Doesn't mean it's acceptable.
    • snarfy 12y ago
      Absolutely. I'm not saying it's acceptable, only giving background. "I'm being blunt." "I'm just being honest". etc. These are not excuses for being an asshole. The same information can be shared without being an asshole about it. Being an asshole towards others publicly on the mailing list is just another form of bullying. If he wanted to be blunt or whatever, he could do it in private messages. There is no need to publicly shame people.
• spindritf 12y ago
  The whole post is just a weak assertion. Linus does run a really large project with many, sometimes random, contributors quite efficiently and it's not possible to tell whether it's because, despite, or regardless of his style with a sample of one. I'm also reasonably sure that Lennart Poettering's experience does not generalize. He is rather unique within the Linux community.
• nateabele 12y ago
  Re: "the Open Source community is full of assholes" s/Open Source community/human race/ Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre's_law
  • AznHisoka 12y ago
    true. there's nothing different from open source ppl that makes them more kind, or compassionate than the average human being.
• liveoneggs 12y ago
  Maybe these strong reactions from core linux engineers have meaning. Maybe strong reactions from large parts of the user base have meaning. Maybe one reaps what one sows.
  • mahouse 12y ago
    Exactly. If there are some guys that tell you that what you do is wrong, you may be right. If everybody tells you you are wrong, maybe, well, you are wrong.
  • pekk 12y ago
    People also reap things that somebody else sowed, or that nobody sowed. There is no physical law that anyone will be treated fairly.
• fidotron 12y ago
  He's just the new Drepper. Coming from almost anyone else this might be reasonable, but him? Just pointing out someone else is an asshole does not negate you being an asshole. Honestly, it's people like him and the systemd noise on all sides that have made me lose faith in Linux. By contrast Linus has git too, which is potentially as big a contribution as Linux was in the first place. History may even demonstrate git is the more important contribution, because as it stands Linux as a potential platform for end user deployment, except as part of Android or Chrome OS, is basically dead now.
  • RVuRnvbM2e 12y ago
    I'd be very interested if you could provide evidence of Lennart being an asshole. I've honestly never seen him be anything other than professional.
    • fidotron 12y ago
      His entire m.o. is passive aggressive asshole, whereas Linus is balls out asshole, but has the relatively unique quality of being right more often than not. I'd even argue this post is lennart using the genuinely disgusting antics of others as a way to deflect potential criticism of his work in future. This is why, like Drepper, many view him as a long term liability to the ecosystem as a whole.
      • the_why_of_y 12y ago
        That's odd... I thought passive-aggressive is when you're deliberately failing to do something you're supposed to do and capable of doing, but what he's usually accused of is actually doing too many things - please clarify this apparent contradiction.
    • vezzy-fnord 12y ago
      Here is one of his more infamous statements: http://lwn.net/Articles/430699/ http://lwn.net/Articles/430699/ "What I actually suggested in that interview was not so much that the BSDs should adopt the Linux APIs, but instead that people should just forget about the BSDs. Full stop." He's also been an annoyance in Steve Langasek (Upstart developer)'s Google+ feed, and his post regarding the inseparability of systemd-logind as a main argument for why Debian should adopt systemd, at the time of the heated debates, is another. Among plenty of other examples. His hijacking of Wolfgang Draxinger's CCC talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmPKDeo9Oow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmPKDeo9Oow Announcing udev becoming systemd-only while referring to potential detractors as "systemd-haters": http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-May/019657.html http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2014-May... That said, Lennart does not deserve the death threats and the extremer vitriol, but the jabs and sardonic humor are par for the course, given he is a divisive figure, and has made a lot of people mad for good reason. He's not as abrasive and destructive as Drepper is, certainly, but some people actually find indirect and passive-aggressive attitudes to be even more offensive.
• nanoscopic 12y ago
  I think this is an important point for people to accept, acknowledge, and keep in mind as a reason to strive harder to be open and accepting to people, especially those you don't agree with. I got a bunch of attacks from members of the open source community, due to developing my XML parser. ( Grant McLean and others ) I also got attacked by Poul-Henning Kamp, and then threatened that he would "shame" me for pointing out bugs in his software that he refuses to acknowledge. Additionally, the founder of Perl Mongers, Brian D Foy, argued with me about the naming of my application framework, and then refused to approve the naming of my module even after other people on the newsgroup discussed it with me and we came to a good resolution. ( which led to the vanishing of "registered" modules on cpan imo ) The open source community, at large, is not a happy helpful place, and I have gone through a lot of harassment just contributing my own free open source stuff to the world. Also, I can't say I have ever been thanked for contributing. Just kicked in the face. I am referencing names of individuals so that people can lookup these events and see the truth in what I'm saying; NOT to shame these people. They are all good developers, and I value their contributions ( don't necessarily like these people but what does that matter ). There should be respect in the community regardless of whether you like or dislike people's projects.
  • netrus 12y ago
    Don't you think adding your real-name would be a nice move when you choose to give names of people you disagree with?
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
      • andyl 12y ago
        Is this you? http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/why-he-hacked-university-of-maryland-contractor-turned-hacker-tells-all/ http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/why-he...
        • 12y ago
• c3d 12y ago
  +1. But then, is it necessary? Jobs and Gates were not exactly moderate, as far as we know.
  • danielweber 12y ago
    They weren't managing volunteer communities.
    • tomp 12y ago
      They weren't giving their software away for free either.
  • thanatropism 12y ago
    But they were subject to the full extent of employee harassment laws.
• qwerta 12y ago
  If it is so bad, do not use it! One could always pay $1000/hour and get his software from someone with correct attitude, sex, race and age. If you pay $0 do not complain!
• Xeoncross 12y ago
  Odd, I've never had a problem from the open source projects I've developed or contributed too. In fact, I've made more friends from it than enemies. I suppose the pressure of these projects is small compared to something important like a driver or operating system... but perhaps that says more about people than open source.
• rdtsc 12y ago
  > By many he [Linus] is a considered a role model, but he is quite a bad one. I give Linus a pass. Given the success of the project and the size of the team, I would rather have a foul mouthed Linus than perhaps no kernel and no Linux. It is not a positive characteristic. I wish he wasn't as abrasive but that is his personality. What I feel Poettering is doing here is a bit of a "well on technical merits Linus was right but I'll attack his abrasiveness instead". I suspect this is related to the 'debug' flag and Linus chewing out one of the systemd developers. I think Linus was justified in chewing him out. Maybe shouldn't have used expletives, but still justified. And I understand it was a pattern of behavior of leaving bugs in their wake and so on. > If Linux had success, then that certainly happened despite, not because of this behaviour. Hard to say. Maybe so. Maybe if he wouldn't be as critical and as abrasive we would have had a different OS or different community. Maybe better. Maybe worse. hard to say.
  • ivraatiems 12y ago
    > I give Linus a pass. Given the success of the project and the size of the team, I would rather have a foul mouthed Linus than perhaps no kernel and no Linux. This attitude is precisely the problem. Being a smart or successful human being does not alleviate your obligation to be a decent human being - neither does having strong opinions and good reasons for them. The argument you have made comes in another form, and I hope when I phrase it this way you'll see why I disagree strongly: "Do you know who I am?!"
    • adnzzzzZ 12y ago
      I think there's another facet to the argument he made that he didn't make. When you're in a position of power and you have to deal with the work of other people you want to waste as little time as possible on people making stupid mistakes that shouldn't be made in the first place. You want to bring the quality of your contributors up. One way of doing this is making people fear making mistakes. Society does this all the time: if you are a racist/homophobe/sexist people will ostracize you publicly in a number of ways. Essentially you get rid of racists/homophobes/sexists by making them fear voicing those opinions. I personally don't think this is a particularly good way of dealing with problems, but it's what society does and it's how it works: based on mostly punishment. To then go on to say that what Linus does is somehow bad or any different seems kinda weird.
• bad_user 12y ago
  This doesn't pertain to "Open Source" in general, the same argument can be said about companies and closed-source products, which can be just as well run by jerks. I have a couple of small projects published on GitHub and the people that interacted with me have been very professional and thankful for my work. I am also a part of big open-source communities which are very professional and asshole behavior is definitely an exception and is being punished in general. A comment like "How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?" is only tolerated if you're Linus Torvalds or somebody like him that has contributed a lot and that is tolerated in spite of his character. And yes, the world is full of jerks that want to copy Linus Torvalds, or Theo de Raadt, or Richard Stallman, or Steve Jobs, or David Heinemeier Hansson, or whatever else ruthless leader with strong opinions that happened in this industry, but without the track record to back up their strong thoughts. Open Source is only special because the discussions are often public for anybody to see. I do find Linus' behavior regrettable, as he's a very public person in this industry, his opinions do have legs and he is a role model for others. And I'm personally against PC talk, for example I think usage of the word "fuck" is totally legitimate because it implies passion, it implies that you care, but I think critiques should never be ad-hominem and people breaking this rule should get social punishment, including Linus.
  • PaulHoule 12y ago
    I think if you're involved in a closed-source company and you act like an ass too many times you'll get fired.
    • Niksko 12y ago
      The difference is that in a corporate setting, if you're fired that's the end of it. Fortunately or unfortunately, in an open source setting, if you act like an asshat you can still contribute and discuss and continue to be an asshat. And then other people ignore you. So you convince people that they're the asshat. And people believe you because you're still there. I'm not sure it's really a flaw. It's just the way it is. I feel as if it's simply one of the tradeoffs that you make with an open source project. People can hang around and be annoying and abusive and there isn't all that much you can do to totally get rid of them if they're determined. On the other hand, you can get brilliant programmers who come out of nowhere and have no qualifications that would never get past the interview stage in a large company.
• doe88 12y ago
  For all its flaws I must credit the various open source codes I've come to study along the years for all I know in CS. Long term, it's more important than degrees and schools. For instance I vividly remember how hard for me it was to learn and code in Objective-C for iOS back in 2009, at this time there was only few related open source projects available to study and learn how good UI were implemented and such, it was mostly a closed source world. Also for instance one thing I consider great about Rust, not only Rust is open source but better its compiler and standard libraries are developed in Rust and thus you just have to read them to learn from probably the most skilled Rust developpers so far. I can't fathom how painful it must be for current Swift developers to develop in a young (so far) closed project where you can't see nothing and bang your head against every walls to find your way.
  • Dewie 12y ago
    > Also for instance one thing I consider great about Rust, not only Rust is open source but better its compiler and standard libraries are developed in Rust and thus you just have to read them to learn from probably the most skilled Rust developpers so far. Last I saw, reading the compiler wasn't recommended (by someone) since the code is apparently old and not idiomatic.
    • steveklabnik 12y ago
      Historically, that's been kind of true, but it depends on the part, really, and is getting better all the time.
    • dbaupp 12y ago
      The standard library (for the most part) is reasonable; the compiler itself is not quite as nice, but it's improving.
• musesum 12y ago
  A psychologist friend mentioned that invoking 2nd person (you) often escalates conflict. I wonder what it would take to write a thread parser that bounces comments with "you" as the focal point? Sentiment analysis probably has some utility if bad commits are clustered around a particular contributor. Would it be more product to represent sentiment as a graph? What would it look like?
• pekk 12y ago
  I don't think it is fair to generalize this to all of Open Source. The Linux kernel and the Systemd controversy in particular do not represent all of Open Source. That said, I do think Lennart has very valid and important points about the Linux kernel and the Linux community and specifically the Systemd controversy. It's too bad. But switching to Mac OS doesn't fix this, if we wanted to talk about that then there is a whole set of separate issues there.
• Mikeb85 12y ago
  Open source is not awful. It's perhaps the most important thing to happen to computing, ever. Multi-billion dollar companies have formed largely around open source. It enables millions of people to do business. Learning how to code is easier than ever. Saying open source is awful because you've encountered assholes is like saying free market economies are awful because some vendor overcharged you one time, or saying cars are awful because some guy cut you off yesterday, or saying free speech is awful because some guy insulted you in public the other day... Open source is merely the idea that sharing code is good. Well, a little more than that, but that's the basic gist. I've personally had nothing but great encounters with FOSS. The few times I've found a bug I sent a bug report, the maintainer was super friendly (maybe because I wasn't a whiny douche-bag complaining about something that I got for free), and fixed it in an absurdly short amount of time (less than a day). Even if it wasn't fixed for a month I'd have been more than happy. Anyhow, the open source community is much like the world at large. Many very nice, friendly people, and a few assholes. Same thing if you step outside. It's best to think of FOSS not as some community that replaces your interactions, but rather as a sharing philosophy in the same way free markets are an economic philosophy.
  • nathanb 12y ago
    Surely you can understand the intent of his message and of the phrase which you partially quote. "Some elements of the open source community are awful to contributors" "Open source is an awful place to be if you don't have a thick skin" "The behavior I have observed as a prolific contributor to open source is awful" All of these statements, I believe, accurately summarize his experience. All of these statements can be summarized "Open source is awful in many ways" for purposes of titling an article. He's not trying to say that the concept of open source is awful. You don't have to jump in and defend that cause.
    • Zikes 12y ago
      It might be more accurate to say "the state of the open source community is awful", but for some folks that are deeply involved in that community that might simply be synonymous with open source itself. In either case, I think the author made it fairly clear that he was referring to the community and not the concept.
• jwr 12y ago
  As a data point and a side note: I've been participating in open source discussions for more than 15 years now. This issue seems to come up more and more, and it seems that many communities are deteriorating. Lennart is right about Linus setting a bad example. But not all is gloomy. As a positive example, the Clojure community has always impressed me with its maturity. People are incredibly nice and helpful, discussions are constructive. Bad tone is immediately struck down. And it is true that a lot depends on the leader — Rich Hickey sets the example here and people follow.
  • teleclimber 12y ago
    Exactly. Project leaders have the power to set the tone of discussions within their communities. If abusive people are moderated, they don't propagate, and the community gets more welcoming. However this does not address the inter-project nastiness that the OP refers to.
• naner 12y ago
  For whatever reason, programmers and hackers as a group are disproportionately socially inept compared to the general population. This manifests itself in nasty behavior towards women (underrepresented in our field and generally being more balanced personality-wise then men) and towards each other. In the real world and in the workplace this can be filtered out and mitigated to some degree. Online, in a domain where technical merit is king, however, things tend to remain more dysfunctional than in real life. Some open source groups make an effort to curate their communities and shun this behavior (for example the SVN devs wrote about intentionally doing this on mailing lists IIRC). I imagine some groups are not quite so organized, however, especially very large groups. I think Lennart's experience favors this anecdotal theory: The more technical communities (Gentoo is given an example - and you have to be more comfortable getting your hands dirty to run Gentoo than to run a distro like Ubuntu or Fedora) empirically appear to be more dysfunctional. I actually avoid going to technical conferences anymore since this dysfunction and awkwardness is always intense and tiring/difficult to deal with. I'm not exempt to the social difficulties, but I have been guided and exposed to a large number of social situations by friends/family growing up since I have always been in mixed environment not dominated by people like myself. This doesn't only affect us, by the way. When I was young I worked several blue-collar jobs (construction) and it was a very dysfunctional boys-club type social environment as well, but in a different way. I love what I do, but there's a lot of weirdos here. I try not to be one. :) EDIT: Removed ignorant aspergers comment.
  • lallysingh 12y ago
    Do you ever wonder if the act of programming causes movement on the scale? Especially if done for a long time, especially if started when young?
  • cdr 12y ago
    > fall somewhere on the aspergers scale That's really insulting to people that actually have autism. Don't do that. (And you mean autism scale, asperger's was eliminated as a separate diagnosis.)
    • naner 12y ago
• nilved 12y ago
  I read this article and was very confused about how somebody could create an open source project that lead to actual death threads. Then I googled Lennart Poettering and it all made sense. PulseAudio and systemd make for a particularly wretched resume: Poettering is probably responsible for more frustration to Linux users than anybody else right now. Not that I'm not going to condone online harassment or blame the victim, but I am a little happy that this harassment is based on technical merits instead of appearance or sexual orientation as is normally the case.
  • lallysingh 12y ago
    Note that nobody else has built competing projects, and he didn't force any distribution to use them. Yet the software seems quite popular. Sometimes someone has to step up to do the dirty work and write software that can only give mediocre results. I think he's getting flack as the scapegoat for the general consumerization of Linux (ala ubuntu, gnome, etc). Really, if people don't like these systems, or if they weren't worth the trouble, why not do something about it? They sound like itches that could be scratched. That was the spirit of a previous, less popular open source movement. Now it's full of useless bitching assholes who will spend 10x the time complaining over time actually fixing. Note: I'm not saying that you personally are in that category. But this guy should be able to respond with "fix it, fork it, or fuck off."
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    • brockers 12y ago
      >> Note that nobody else has built competing projects, and he didn't force any distribution to use them. This is simply not true. Both systems were effectively pushed down everybody's throats because RedHat (through Fedora) made it that way. There were lots of competing options that we NEVER going to get consideration because they were "not invented here." That is the thing that frustrates people most about him. That he may be a good developer, but what he does has less to do with engineering merit and more to do with politics.
• DogeDogeDoge 12y ago
  never cared who is behind a nick on the other side of the cable, if he is white,black,yellow,green or pink. But i like the banter and sometimes people are cursing at others not because of gender, race or any other factor but because of emotions. If PC will get over everything soon it will be not acceptable to say anything. Is this the internet we all fought for ? In internet it doesn't matter who you are.
  • DogeDogeDoge 12y ago
    in interwebs you can be even atari owner...Yes even them are welcome and it doesn't matter guy is atari owner. So why mix in chat about kernel patch code that he is an atari owner ? he can't change it, and it doesn't matter. But should he get less flame because he owns atari ? no.
• kelvin0 12y ago
  Maybe video should replace written text in some of these exchanges. I think that someone having to record themselves would make them think twice and maybe rephrase some heinous language. Written word also has the disadvantage of not conveying non-verbal body language and can also be misinterpreted. Not sure this solution would be widely accepted though, unfortunately.
• msielski 12y ago
  Conflating the Open Source community at large with the Linux community, the Linux development community, and the Linux kernel development community does not help him make his case.
  • forgottenpass 12y ago
    Laying boycots, campaigns to fund a hitman via bitcoin and irc harassment at the feet of Linus doesn't help either. I won't argue that Linus' attitude has no influence in general, but the categorical differences between this and Linus' hyperbole make it a red herring for the conversation.
• jaegerpicker 12y ago
  I certainly agree that there some Open source projects that are extremely toxic, like the Linux Kernal, but I wish people wouldn't say all open source is that way. The author has been through a lot of crazy shit for very silly reasons, note I'm not blaming him in any way - no one should go through that over volunteering free work. But I've contributed to Django, Flask, Python, Meotor, and Node.js in different ways and though it's varied in how pleasant the experience has been for the most part these communities were really awesome, when dealing with the core teams. I think those are good examples of better open source communities and I think they will tend to pick up more developers that aren't willing to put up with all of the crap involved in the Linux project.
• bhouston 12y ago
  I'll probably get burned for saying this but I think this is related to GamerGate/SocialJusticeWarriors. I think that other controversy is being portrayed as anti-feminist (and there is a lot of undertones of that) but I think that it is more indicative of a general problem -- it is basically unrestrained incivility against those whom one has disagreements, or who has done perceived wrongs. For some reason it has become really easy to escalate things quickly from what are disagreements or perceived wrongs to really intense hatred and online forms of retaliation that is so extreme that it overshadows the original disagreements/wrongs. It is almost like one needs a new form of Godwin's law for group arguments, the first one to go full "4chan" (or whatever) on a subject is declared the loser of the argument, whether or not they had a valid argument to begin with. This type of crazy retaliation is really harmful to those that are targeted, but it also serves to detract from legitimate arguments. It is just weird. But this is the internet and I suspect it isn't really that easy to curb going full "4chan" on subjects because it can be "fun" for those involved because there are few personal consequences -- as per that sociology concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deindividuation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deindividuation.
  • imanaccount247 12y ago
    >It is almost like one needs a new form of Godwin's law for group arguments, the first one to go full "4chan" (or whatever) on a subject is declared the loser of the argument, whether or not they had a valid argument to begin with. Except the anonymity involved means people on the other side send abuse to themselves and their side in order to shift discussion off of the topic and onto how their opponents are evil abusive monsters. And then of course people who just love stirring up shit send abuse to both sides purely because they enjoy it.
    • bhouston 12y ago
      I think the anonymity is the core problem-- anonymous crowds are easy to undermine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_provocateur) and they are always the least self-controlled. But the larger, amorphous and distributed the anonymous group, the more easy it is to undermine them via real Agent provocateurs and also people who are in it just for the kicks of causing havoc.
• jingo 12y ago
  The author of this g+ post is the author of "systemd", a controversial new program being installed by default into some of the most popular distributions of the GNU/Linux operating system. It seems that some Linux users are unhappy with systemd. While I do not agree with any user being disrespectful to the author by targeting him personally, the fact that users are seriously upset about systemd as a program gives me hope for the future of the popular Linux distributions. When the author says "Open Source is awful" maybe he is revealing his true colors. Perhaps he is better suited to closed source development which is insulated from public review by users and other developers at-large. But that is for him to decide. There was a post on HN a little while back by the developer of a popular glibc alernative for Linux who told us he has been using a flat, linear /etc/rc file for over a decade and his boot times are substantially shorter than with systemd. But more importantly, his approach is simple by comparison. How many users will be able to debug systemd by examining the internals? It is this type of "hands-on" user that gives me hope for the future of the distributions that are experimenting with systemd. I hope these users will speak up if they have not done so already.
• jchonphoenix 12y ago
  Communities with corporate stewards are a lot more civil for obvious reasons
• digital-rubber 12y ago
  Systemd and PulseAudio are getting pushed down everybody's throat, unasked for. They are both horrible to work with and suck quite a bit, both introduced way prematurely and buggy. Why did he not roll his own distro fully based on systemd to convince people it is so cool? instead of rolling out his own distro, people responsible for distro package/rolling were convinced it should be added to the default; as it was so much cooler then Sys V Init. Nobody would have wanted to hire a hit-man for him making choices for his own distro. But no the choice was made to infect nearly all distributions with systemd. And worst, it is not even optional, which is BAD. The package maintainers, the nerds that like to have meetings on what should happen with a certain distribution got convinced, or simply wanted to be the person to implement something new, without giving it some proper thought. It's a task, work where their name is showing. Which makes them think they are cool, special or any other term you think applies! That's what is wrong with people, we are all a bunch of hypocrite bastards, from the most recent baby that got born crying for a mothers tit from mother Theresa that wanted her place in heaven by choosing the life of suffering. It's in our nature. Sys V Init was simple and transparent, and it worked fine for anybody i knew working with linux, nobody had the need for a systemd like .. lets call it a product as i don't want to use another insulting term, as the author apparently might get his feelings hurt. (one does not write such a blog post as he did, if you DO NOT care). If his blog post was mine, and i would have re-read it before posting it, i would strongly wonder if i have not done something wrong, striking so many people the wrong way; SO MUCH SO, people want to hire a hit-man. If you need address so much bitching about your 'stuff' and still feel like stuffing it down everybody's throats, you miss some critical wiring in the brain. There were a lot of different paths that could have been chosen, but the path that effects nearly all linux users was chosen… WHY? Yes i would like it very much if systemd, pulse audio and lennart pottering would disappear from the linux community. That is my personal opinion, shared and or opposed by many, deal with it.
  • ekimekim 12y ago
    I fail to see how the tools Pottering works on have any relevance to the discussion. Are you claiming that personal attacks are justified if you don't like a person's software?
• npsimons 12y ago
  This coming from the man who, when people point out flaws in his design of systemd, says basically "too bad, I'm doing it anyway, and if you don't like it, you can take a hike."
  • stephen_g 12y ago
    Do you seriously not see the difference between Lennart saying something like "if you don't like it, you're wrong and should use another distro" [that doesn't use Systemd] and Linus saying things like "you should have been retroactively aborted" and "you're so stupid I can't believe you didn't die as a child'? Or the difference between him telling someone not to use his software and people setting up crowd funding to hire a hitman?
    • npsimons 12y ago
      Death threats are never justified. But I was paraphrasing Poettering's responses to perfectly valid criticism. He did basically say "fuck off", just sugar coated it, which doesn't make it any better. It's just really incongruous to hear someone who is so polarizing (on purpose!) claim that other people should not be so polarizing. And funny how he never seemed to notice these assholes until his friend, Kay Sievers, got called out on LKML for refusing to fix a bug he introduced. It fits though; Poettering is so short sighted that he can't even see the value in portability, nor does he think anything besides desktop Linux matters (when Linux runs, oh, everywhere).
      • the_why_of_y 12y ago
        Are you aware that Poettering's PulseAudio project runs on Windows? Are you aware that the only Linux init system that ever ran on a non-Linux kernel (sysvinit) did so only because the FreeBSD and Hurd kernels implemented the Linux-specific /proc filesystem?
  • shabda 12y ago
    That sound like an entirely reasonable thing to say. If you don't like it, you can choose to boycott his system. It would become unreasonable if he opened his emails with "YOU are full of bullshit. "
• ZeroGravitas 12y ago
  This reminded me of the "This is Phil Fish: A case study in internet celebrity" video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w Phil Fish is an indie game developer, internet-famous for the game Fez. And "everybody" hates him. Though as the video explains, it's more complicated than that. The video is notably also as being referenced by Notch (creator of Minecraft) as part of the reason why he decided to go into semi-retirement after the sale of Mojang.
  • imanaccount247 12y ago
    That video is Phil's friend defending him by ignoring reality and saying "you are wrong because I say so". Phil started getting hate because he exploited people, ripped them off, abused them and acted like he was some sort of genius for making a game he didn't even make, which won an award that was won because his investor owns the contest and judged the entries. The hate grew to massive portions mainly because of his response to that initial hate. You can't insult everyone and expect them to thank you for it.
    • pantalaimon 12y ago
      Can you provide any examples for that?
      • imanaccount247 12y ago
        http://www.lazygamer.net/pc-gaming/is-phil-fish-about-to-be-arrested-for-racketeering/ http://www.lazygamer.net/pc-gaming/is-phil-fish-about-to-be-...
  • forgottenpass 12y ago
    That video is generally OK, but some of the explanations it offers aren't the only interpretation, or are a stretch that seems a bit too convenient. Occasionally the stretches seemed like just telling a particular segment of the games industry and games press exactly what they wanted to hear. I watched it a few months ago, and may re-watch it tonight when I have more time to make a clear argument about specific ideas presented there. But probably won't for the same reason I never bothered posting a criticism of that video online when it was new. The twitter crowd that likes Fish and games press cliques that are friendly with him wouldn't respond well to the agitation.
• yummyfajitas 12y ago
  So I'm a blogger with posts that occasionally go semi-viral [1], and I've been subject to unpleasant comments on a few occasions. Here are a couple of posts which have gotten me quite a bit of hate: http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic_job.html http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basic... http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/equal_weights.html http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2014/equal_weights.html In both cases they are posts about mathematics which use other topics (economics, dating) as concrete examples and the examples draw hatred. However, unlike many of the people subject to unpleasant behavior such as this, I'm going to suggest that the best thing to do is ignore it and move on with your life. I don't favor much in the way of systematic solutions. Assorted "codes of conduct" being proposed are blunt instruments and are easily used by people in power to bully others or to shut down discussion of "incorrect" opinions. Furthermore, technology is fairly unique in it's communication. In many fields, communication is there to create a sense of community and in-group status - creating a tribe. In our field, most communication is simply about facts. It's quite easy to ignore "you're wrong because X,Y,Z and a big jerk" - just evaluate argument X,Y,Z and update your beliefs accordingly. Back when I lived in NY, a coach told me (rough paraphrase): "Tu debil. Necesita para construir tu corpu." ("You're weak. You need to build your body.") In the recent past, the tech world's culture was a lot like that of a mexican boxing club. The correct response is "si, mi SQL debil, eu pratico." ("Yes, my SQL is weak, I'll practice.") Somewhere along the line, we gave this up and became a culture where feelings matter more than results. I think the solution here is for the tech world to regrow the thick skin it once had. [1] A post about functional programming is limited in it's eventual virality.
  • minikites 12y ago
    This is different for men and women. http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-arent-welcome-internet-72170/ http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/women-ar... "Accounts with feminine usernames incurred an average of 100 sexually explicit or threatening messages a day. Masculine names received 3.7." http://time.com/3305466/male-female-harassment-online/ http://time.com/3305466/male-female-harassment-online/ The study pointed out that the harassment targeted at men is not because they are men, as is clearly more frequently the case with women. It’s defining because a lot of harassment is an effort to put women, because they are women, back in their “place.”
• powertower 12y ago
  More info that points to what caused all the hate - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennart_Poettering
• avinassh 12y ago
  discussion about petition on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3385276 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3385276
• cpach 12y ago
  This is a duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859
• nathanb 12y ago
  He calls Linus out for being a toxic element in the open source (or at least Linux) ecosystem. This is quite probably true. Trying to look at it from the other side, though, I wonder if Linus got to be the way he is because it's how he copes with the toxic effluvia he has to deal with on a regular basis. Surely Torvalds has to deal with even more of this than Poettering does. If these things were directed at me on a regular basis, I can't claim with confidence that my moral fortitude would be up to the task of remaining easy to work with either.
  • tanglesome 12y ago
    You know for being a toxic element, Linus's has done a hell of a job with Linux. Is there anything else that's even come close to it in terms of technical or business success? I don't think so.
    • nathanb 12y ago
      Yes, while I think he is culturally and emotionally toxic, he is also brilliant, and has led Linux to great success. I respect his achievements and his technical abilities. Do you think this excuses his behavior?
• vidoc 12y ago
  Hehe, around the line about the community being mainly about white males in their 30's and 40's, I for some reason felt that the Hitler card was coming :P
• vidoc 12y ago
  Hehe, around the line about the community being mainly about white males in their 30's and 40's, I for some reason felt that the Hitler card was coming :P
• peterwwillis 12y ago
  Poettering's M.O. is basically to force people to adopt changes that piss off a lot of people, and then whine when he doesn't get his way or he gets push back by standards boards who aren't interested in his personal agenda. Keep flouncing, Lennart. I'm sure this is the best way to get people to be nice to you or adopt your changes.
  • wffurr 12y ago
    I liked your original pre-edit comment, since it portrayed your attitude even better: "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahaahhahahahahahaha Was about to argue the merit of this post, then noticed the author. Almost got me, Poettering ;-) Just another social/political manipulation to get his way at the expense of others. I would feel bad for the guy if he wasn't such a whiny prick the rest of the time." I especially like how you admit that if this letter was anonymous, you would actually consider the argument, but since it's a particular person you dislike, you're OK with people advocating violence and attempting to hire hitmen. Stay classy.
    • Dylan16807 12y ago
      I think it's reasonable to not argue the merits of a post from someone[generic] known to be manipulative.
    • peterwwillis 12y ago
      Yeah, I figured explaining my opinion was more valid than the verbal diahhrea I initially concocted. But since I never took a position on whether his treatment was fair, I think your attempt to paint me as an advocate of violence is a lot less classy. To be clear, it's not that I dislike him personally, it's that he's an open source troll and this is just more trolling. I'm sure he's a lovely person when he isn't shitting on Linux.
      • EmanueleAina 12y ago
        Lennart is producing lots of software that many people find useful to solve real problems. If you don't have these problems you're free to not use them. If your distro maintainer choose to integrate with software produced by Lennart it's because it either solves real problems for them or are simply too dumb to be trusted. In the first case it would be appropriate to trust the decision of qualified people, but if you fall in the latter care you're still free to change distro given the assumed incompetence of your maintainers. I still don't see how this makes Lennart a troll.
• filmgirlcw 12y ago
  I'm glad Lennart wrote this, though obviously I'm sorry he had to do it. I'd like to think this would open up a bigger dialog about the truly decrepit level of discourse that is common on all too many OSS projects (not all, of course, but many of them, and oftentimes, the older, the more nasty), but I'm not that idealistic. I don't think anyone, least of all Lennart, would say that his projects (particularly PulseAudio and systemd) aren't up for criticism or discussion, but what has happened to him has gone beyond criticism and into just nasty territory. But here's my question: With so much of OSS being funded by large corporations (often through these corps sponsoring employees to work on stuff full time), when do we finally drop the "it's all volunteers so this shit is acceptable" mantra. It's not all volunteers. It's people volunteering their time and collectively sharing the source/combining efforts, but make no mistake, OSS is a huge enterprise and is primarily funded by the Fortune 500. I cannot imagine that the discourse that happens in some of these mailing lists and forums would be allowed to exist without consequence if they were happening on an official company listserv. I cannot imagine that Red Hat or IBM or whoever would let this go on on their official channels without HR getting involved. So why is it acceptable and passed off on the "outer" channels? Open source is no longer a new quirky movement. It's the status quo. Time for the whole movement to grow up and be accountable to treating people like human beings.
  • jtbigwoo 12y ago
    >> So why is it acceptable and passed off on the "outer" channels? >> Open source is no longer a new quirky movement. It's the status quo. I wonder if this isn't part of the problem. Many of the massive open-source blow-ups have been between people who are being paid to do it. It's not like a guy from Red Hat, for example, can just pick a different project to contribute to. His jobs depends on working in these abusive environments. The only way to stop contributing would be to get a different job.
• lukeschlather 12y ago
  Previous discussion with a less flame-bait title: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414859
• matt_heimer 12y ago
  I've had some arguments with people but in large part it is pleasant to work with most people in the open source world. I was just at JavaOne and "everybody meets at conferences for beers" really does happen. For smaller projects most developers are extremely happy when someone takes any interest in their project.
• hippich 12y ago
  Never had to participate in linux kernel development, so can't really comment on it (although I hear Linus can be rude). But open source != linux kernel. There are so many small, large, medium project, that if you really want to - you can find where to contribute. It works the best when you actually need to fix something you use and you have developer expertise to fix it. But even when you can describe in details bug or feature - this is often is very welcomed by project maintainers.
• psychometry 12y ago
  Desktop/non-mobile link: https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/posts/J2TZrTvu7vd https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post... It's apparently impossible to go back to the desktop version from the mobile page. The "View Desktop" link in the footer takes you to the G+ homepage. Well done, Google.
• martiuk 12y ago
  I sometime think whether some people, especially people like Lennart did not experience bullying at school and would prefer the internet be policed to prevent any "attacks" made towards them. Sometimes you just need to take it on the chin and carry on. Maybe it's because I'm from the UK and you just expect the the world to shit on you whenever possible, I'm not really affected by outright attacks and offensiveness, but I probably wouldn't let anyone get to me, like Lennart shows.
• pknight 12y ago
  It's a shame that ones personal experiences result in generalizations that are then attached to Open Source. People can and will be assholes in any kind of project or group. That has not got a lot to do with Open Source. It would be fairer to say: "I had many bad experiences with the Open Source communities I was involved with".
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• fareesh 12y ago
  Can someone here clue me in about why mailing lists still appear to be the de-facto platform for communication for a lot of open source projects - particularly those that are centered around kernel development and other low level "stuff"?
  • kstrauser 12y ago
    Because the alternative is web forum software, none of which is as good at thread management ("alert me to replies to this thread", "hide this thread", "beep when Jane Smith posts") as a good email client. Also, email is ubiquitous: you can follow and participate in conversations from a phone as easily as a desktop. Finally, you only have to learn one email client, and can then use those skills on every mailing list you join. That's in contrast with "project Foo uses SomeBoard v1.3 and has this new feature, but project Bar uses SomeBoard v1.1 and doesn't have it yet. Project Baz uses OtherBoard 0.6 which has this one cool thing but lacks have the features of SomeBoard." Remember, this is the same group of people that gets passionately whipped up about text editors. Can you imagine them not having strong opinions about forum interfaces? Defaulting to good old email and letting everyone use their interface of choice is probably the only practical way to get everyone to participate.
• pikachu_is_cool 12y ago
  Fourteen year old kids were telling me that they were going to skullfuck my grandmother with a rake over Xbox Live, a decade ago, just because I killed them once or twice in Halo 2. Internet insults have always been ridiculously over the top, it's nothing new. Nobody is actually going to rape or kill her over this, you're a massive idiot if you think for even a split second that they would.
  • oldmanjay 12y ago
    It does seem like there's an awful lot of energy being expended on stopping 14 year old boys from being assholes. I suspect it's about as likely to work as efforts to stop teenagers from having sex. At least quixotic quests are entertaining from the sidelines.
    • mcantor 12y ago
      This post was about grown men, not fourteen-year-olds. Grown men... as in, people who should know better.
      • oldmanjay 12y ago
        Oh of course. But I was responding to a particular comment, so context is important.
• aidenn0 12y ago
  Lennart specifically called out Gentoo; as a Gentoo user, I do want to speak up in defense of the Gentoo community. I will concede the point that Lennart has, by far, probably received more vitriol per-capita from the Gentoo community than any others. I'm not going to defend any of the personal attacks launched on him. However, Lennart writes very opinionated software, and the opinions it takes are more at clash with the Gentoo way than the Fedora way or the Ubuntu way. Furthermore it seems to me that Gentoo users are more conservative than any distro other than Slack. What this adds up to is that a far larger fraction of the Gentoo community have issues with Lennart's software. There will be some fraction X of people who have issues with his software that will make inappropriate attacks on Lennart himself. Given that a much larger fraction of the Gentoo community has issues with his software than in other communities, the fact he gets a disproportionate amount of vitriol from Gentoo users doesn't necessarily mean that X is larger in Gentoo.
  • crististm 12y ago
    Indeed. About ten years ago, there was a saying on Gentoo site saying that it is a bug if you can't customize your gentoo system the way you want it. Personal attacks are not OK, but he should keep his opinion on what _my_ machine should do for himself. For what it is worth, his systemd is a bug.
    • Someone1234 12y ago
      > but he should keep his opinion on what _my_ machine should do for himself Releasing free software and what you accuse him of are entirely different things. Frankly I'd like to understand how you even equate someone releasing software which you aren't even forced to use, to essentially ramming his opinions of how YOUR machine should run down your throat. The anti-systemd people really aren't coming across at all well in this thread. At lot of what you guys are accusing him of literally makes no sense on the most basic level. This being a prime example. Don't like systemd? Don't install systemd. Don't like that a distro is bundling systemd? Don't use the distro that is bundling systemd. The creator of systemd cannot be held responsible for you voluntarily installing the software, leaving it on your system, and then becoming upset about how it works. If you installed systemd and hate it, remove it. It aint' rocket science.
• tzakrajs 12y ago
  Welcome to the Internet? Hack with people irl and this happens way less often.
• DonHopkins 12y ago
  The thing that is awful about "Open Source" is that it was a term coined by Eric S Raymond in order to attack Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation, and to make a name and money for himself as a so-called "hacker", without actually having to write any useful code, or even read anybody else's code and report bugs with his very own "millions of I's". If you want to see how the Open Source fish rots from the head down, you have to look no further than Eric Raymond's own blog: "In the U.S., blacks are 12% of the population but commit 50% of violent crimes; can anyone honestly think this is unconnected to the fact that they average 15 points of IQ lower than the general population? That stupid people are more violent is a fact independent of skin color." http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=129 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=129 Or in his own words: "And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I’ve got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome." http://web.archive.org/web/20090628025127/http://www.nedanet.org/ http://web.archive.org/web/20090628025127/http://www.nedanet... "When I hear the words "social responsibility", I want to reach for my gun." When receiving an award from an organization called Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond "Ego is for little people" "[bla bla bla...] I’ve blown up the software industry once, reinvented the hacker culture twice, and am without doubt one of the dozen most famous geeks alive. Investment bankers pay me $300 an hour to yak at them because I have a track record as a shrewd business analyst. I don’t even have a BS, yet there’s been an entire academic cottage industry devoted to writing exegeses of my work. I could do nothing but speaking tours for the rest of my life and still be overbooked. [...bla bla bla]" (...and on and on ad nausium -- he really needs to work on his BS!) http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1404 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1404 The hacker culture can do just fine without ESR's "reinventions", thank you. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7728146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7727953 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7727953
  • Curmudgel 12y ago
    Don't forget HIV denial: "I believe, but cannot prove, that global “AIDS” is a whole cluster of unrelated diseases all of which have been swept under a single rug for essentially political reasons, and that the identification of HIV as the sole pathogen is likely to go down as one of the most colossal blunders in the history of medicine." http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=184 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=184
• theflubba 12y ago
  POETTERING EFFECT - It appears that lately some Linux developers are concentrating on changing things (that work fine) with no particular reason, breaking existing functionality in the process and running away before the job is really finished (sometimes called the Poettering effect), while in fact it would be better to make a nicely polished finished system that can be used from installation without having to tune it up.
• imanaccount247 12y ago
  This trend towards using victim status from trolls as a shield to ignore real criticism is really unfortunate. Linus's criticism of redhat and redhat employees is perfectly reasonable and valid. Trying to distract attention from it and pretend he is just some evil bully nobody should listen to is incredibly childish and counter productive.
• baldfat 12y ago
  So I will go what appears Off-Topic but I think this is a pattern. KDE 4.0 is release and KDE specifically says that they don't want Distros making packages for the .0 release. Distros do make packages because the community was excited to see it. Then a storm hits over what a 4.0 vs 3.99 release means. PulseAudio comes out. Is stated that it is not a solid release yet and Distros please don't install. It gets installed and the whole community freaks out on PulseAudio. KDE 4 and PulseAudio are SOLID and probably best of show in their categories now. BUT the community always will spread out hate (and even lies) to both projects because it wasn't solid on day one. SystemD is considered bad because it is made by the same person that head up PulseAudio. That is enough for the community to never let go of the acceleration peddle on hate. SystemD got out of the trap that caught C# and Mono on Linux. There is a reason why SystemD is on most systems. It is the best solution for the vast majority of people. I personally find it so much better then what was there before in practice and MUCH easier to understand.
• freshflowers 12y ago
  The problem with many self-organized groups of engineers is that they equate meritocracy with technical contributions. This is a very, very limited way of approaching the complex dynamics of people working together. It shows up in many ways. Most open source communities are not good places for people who can contribute design, documentation and god forbid, people management skills. A pervasive illusion amongst software engineers is that we can do without "soft" skills, and nowhere does this manifests itself more in places where no boss or company forcefully adds those soft skills into the mix. Some open source communities are lucky enough to have people that have both the technical chops to get respect based on technically focused meritocratic values and have other "management" skills. Most don't. So once conflict arises (as it inevitably will, because they are human beings) and simple meritocracy no longer suffices (because both sides are smart and contribute), the community either breaks up or devolves into a permanent Lord of the Flies atmosphere. It has nothing to do with Open Source in general. It's the lack of value placed on soft skills in tech driven meritocracies. (You can see the same thing in tech start-ups founded by technies, but there it usually gets quickly corrected after the first PR disaster.)
• dr_zoidberg 12y ago
  This article reminded me of what Valerie Aurora[1] posted & discussed. She called for feminism values, and Lennart is calling for less hate. I get the feeling they are both talking of the same underlying problem. On a personal note, when GIMP 2.6 first came out, I filled a bug report pointing to the devs that under Windows XP sans SP2, the program would crash on load. Instead of getting a real answer, I got some angry comments about not updating my OS and a ban from the bug tracking system. Some time later, they added Windows XP SP2 as a requirement. I still use GIMP, but whenever I find a bug, I just wait patiently until the next version to see if they have fixed it. [1] HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8414180 Edit: found the bug report, it was SP2, not SP1 as I first thought. Also fixed some typos.
  • deleted 12y ago
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• antirez 12y ago
  I must be very lucky... because after many many years of writing open source, being involved with at least three communities (IT security with hping, Tcl language with Tcl/Jim-Interpreter, Databases with Redis) I still have to receive serious attacks. Actually the only attacks I can remember are about my vision on how diversity should be handled (I was accused of sexism for saying that people are all alike), and a few company-driven attacks 99% generated from the SF area and for people working for competing companies, and with a big overlap of people accusing me of sexism (go figure...). Basically none of this was ever a great deal, and the remaining 99.999% of the OSS community was always awesome. Basically I'm just a single data point but as somebody involved for a long time in OSS, I can't confirm what I read. Well, also consider this: I refuse most pull requests, and I'm not the kind of guy that is kind at every cost. I also am part of a minority, being very southern-european, from Sicily, often associated with the worst cliché of the Italian culture, Mafia, ... I also have a vision on software development which is very far from what is considered "good practice". One could expect me to receive more attacks than average.
  • teleclimber 12y ago
    Thanks for sharing. It's good to know that even when a project is large and popular like Redis, it's still possible to have mostly positive experiences.
  • solipsism 12y ago
    Could you hint or point us toward some of the ways your vision on software development is far from what is considered good practice? I like to absorb counter-normal opinions.
    • antirez 12y ago
      Just a few examples: reinvent the wheel (Redis uses its own event loop, strings library, and in general has very little external deps). Always backporting new features when they have little interactions with the rest on the code base, to patch-level releases of the stable version. Using data structures or algorithms which are not common. For example Redis implements LRU by random sampling. Taking extreme tradeoffs: Redis is also a store but the dataset is in RAM, Redis Cluster does not try to achieve theoretical optimum of CP or AP in order to win latency, lack of metadata, simplicity, and so forth.
• jalfresi 12y ago
  The Linux kernal dev community is a community of rough tough programmer bastards. If you can't handle the knocks there, maybe that's not the community for you? I'm sure there are other less abrasive communities you can join? It certainly says a lot about someone who believes that they are entitled to join a community and to demand to have their voice heard and to have the community adapt to their wants and desires. I believe that sort of influence is earned within a community. I mean, I wouldn't join /r/kkk and expect everyone to "chill out on the use of the N word guys". Maybe, just maybe, I'm not as important to that community as I believe myself to be? Urgh, I can't believe I'm typing this, but the phrase "be the change you want to see" applies for community membership. Be the beacon of conduct you want the community to share. Inspire the community to aim for those ideals through example. Or write a snarky blog post about it because you're finding it difficult to get mind share on an obviously flawed project.
  • jalfresi 12y ago
    Why the down vote? I never apologized for the violence leveled at him, just that you are not entitled to be a member of any community, and that you cannot expect the culture of a community to change simply because you want it to. Communities require membership contribution to change. You want to change the culture, you have to get involved. IF the communities culture is too poisonous for you, then maybe that's not the community for you.
• arca_vorago 12y ago
  I just want to point out that there needs to be a more clear distinction between "open source" and FOSS "Free open source software". They are two very different things, and I have found that while there are fundamental issues rearing their ugly head in the development model (many eye's theory is on it's last leg, which is why I push the reduced code theory, which is just my made up theory), much of the vitriol happens in the "open source" community and less so in the FOSS community. The title is a bad on because it lacks this distinction.
• tessierashpool 12y ago
  Re this part, about Linus Torvalds being aggressive and insulting to his contributors: But no, it's not an efficient way to run a community. If Linux had success, then that certainly happened despite, not because of this behaviour. You have to have been utterly brilliant to invent git. I don't know enough about operating system internals to say if the same is true for Linux, but I know enough about git to say it's true for git. So Linus was brilliant enough to invent git, and is widely known to be a complete asshole to his contributors. He rarely brags about being a genius - in fact I believe I've seen him on video making modest statements about being overrated and not really that smart - but he often argues that being an asshole to his contributors is a wise and effective form of management. To me, he seems like an epoch-definingly great hacker who nonetheless has absolutely no clue what his own strengths and weaknesses are.
  • sbierwagen 12y ago
    I'm not sure git is an example of capital-G Genius, since Linus had been using BitKeeper, a commercial distributed revision control system, for about five years by the time he wrote git. Git is good, but it's not new.
    • the_why_of_y 12y ago
      More importantly, Linus took a good look at Monotone, with which git has a lot more in common than with BitKeeper... and the same is true of Matt Mackall/Mercurial of course. The incremental improvements in git/Mercurial were of course significant in getting wide adoption.
• rafa2000 12y ago
  Non Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be aware of this. You have said nothing.
• issa 12y ago
  I think people might be overthinking the problem here. Whenever someone is really good at one thing (say, programming), it is easy for them to get away with being really bad at others (say, manners). It's the same reason college athletes get away with breaking so many rules. And both situations are very hard to solve due to the competing and conflicting interests involved. On a personal level, we should all try our best to stop people (ourselves included) from being programmer bullies. And I've seen many people work very hard to do so!
• r4pha 12y ago
  Huge egos and insults are things that have always bothered me in the OSS community. Just some days ago the Crockford vs. fat thread on github resurfaced and shocked a lot of people on HN [0]. It certainly has stopped from releasing stuff in the past. Lately, though, I've been having an awesome experience with a few of my really simple open source projects. I've been receiving a few emails with requests in the most polite way possible, some of them even thanking me for my small contribution. Recently I've even got a pull request from a guy who out of the blue designed an icon for my android app. These things are priceless to me, and certainly motivate me much more than the bad parts demotivate me. [0] https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/3057#issuecomment-5135512 https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/issues/3057#issuecomment-5...
• Touche 12y ago
  Some people are attributing this phenomenon to the internet, but I don't think that's accurate. I studied Russian history in college and the writings of various members of the communist intelligentsia had the same vitriol. Particularly the writings between Lenin and Karl Kautsky. My professors called it "maximalism", a term that hasn't caught on in general use. It's meaning is the belief that anyone that disagrees with you even in small ways, disagrees with you fully. I think this attitude is what occurs in OS communities, where people who generally agree find themselves in angry exchanges.
• Alupis 12y ago
  > I don't usually talk about this too much, and hence I figure that people are really not aware of this, but yes, the Open Source community is full of assholes, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets. I get hate mail for hacking on Open Source. People have started multiple "petitions" on petition web sites, asking me to stop working (google for it). Recently, people started collecting Bitcoins to hire a hitman for me (this really happened!). Just the other day, some idiot posted a "song" on youtube, a creepy work, filled with expletives about me and suggestions of violence. People post websites about boycotting my projects, containing pretty personal attacks. On IRC, people /msg me sometimes, with nasty messages, and references to artwork in 4chan style. And there's more. A lot more. My jaw dropped. Feelings about systemd aside (I actually quite like it), this is uncalled for, and outrageously bad. Grow up! Hiring a hitman? Are you for real? Anytime someone makes a large project that gets traction, people are going to disagree; that does not make it acceptable to launch personal attacks, and call for violence against the developer. As a community, we need to call out the people doing this and show it's not acceptable; irregardless of any politics that may be involved.
• deleted 12y ago
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• nkurz 12y ago
  Linus posted a very relevant document yesterday entitled "Linux kernel management style". I wonder if Lennart's piece is in response (or perhaps vice versa). I'd recommend reading each in mind of the other. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8417154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8417154 https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/plain/Documentation/ManagementStyle https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux....
• meapix 12y ago
  I actually see that language as creative and funny, don't say because I'm not the target audience. I forgot the comedian who said that he likes to cross the line then come back to bring some people with him. I appreciate the work that is being done in open source community, the language part I don't really care much as long as it's to make a point. If you don't like that community, why don't you just fork the kernel and call it whatever you like. Nobody prevents you from doing that then you become the jail keeper and show what you can do to the world.
• lukaslalinsky 12y ago
  I think this very much depends on your own attitude. Sure, there are assholes who will say things about how useless is your project and how they hate you for it, but this is not the norm in open source. And it's definitely not the norm when it comes to developers, not users. I have worked with various people in open source, including some that are known to be "not good at dealing with people", but I never had a serious problem with them. In fact, just a few weeks ago I had a wonderful experience contributing a patch to cairo. You meet a new person and you are working together with the goal of the best quality code. I was not doing much open source development for some time and it was amazing how great it felt again.
• owenversteeg 12y ago
  Ehh, you just have to look past the arguments and inane people. I run a small-to-medium open source project (the Min CSS framework, http://mincss.com http://mincss.com) and I get plenty of inane comments, criticism, and personal attacks. However, I also get plenty of nice comments that make it all worthwile. For a project as large as systemd, I imagine that this is many orders of magnitude more extreme. As with any group of people, the assholes are the loudest, and if you're writing software for a huge group of people a bunch of them are going to be really loud assholes.
• notastartup 12y ago
  The Linux community is dominated by western, white, straight, males in their 30s and 40s these days. Could it be that this is a purely cultural thing? If the fish rots from the head, then isn't something about the culture to be blame? Outside of race but purely from a group of straight males who are probably sexually repressed, beta male, grew up in a individualistic society free to express oneself naturally give rise to such Spartan environment? Imagine if the linux community consisted mostly of Korean or Japanese males, both countries with strong Neo-confucian values of social hierarchy and mutual respect, avoiding harsh words. But maybe such culture are not apt at producing new ideas but retaining old ones.
• DarkIye 12y ago
  The Open Source community is young, like the rest of the field of software engineering, and we're still childish and uncivil towards one another, derived from a root of individualism, fed by the promise of a vast and plentiful uncharted territory. Eventually we will install a system that will protect ourselves from one another. I hope it's a good one. On a more specific note, PulseAudio sucks and I could care less what Lennart thinks.