A Case Study in Not Being a Jerk in Open Source

I'm still looking for the participation trophy that should come with the post's proposed edit.

Heres to you, Stuart Smalley! You're good enough, smart enough and.... doggone it, people like you!

There's something weird going on with Linus vs the polite people, where Linus is far too rude, but his critics are asking him to adopt a conversational style with a dangerous amount of hedging and uncertainty that would be catastrophically bad for the kernel.

Consider These changes look OK, but the rationale is dangerously wrong. It doesn't require Linus to pretend he's "not sure" about a rationale that he obviously thinks is both wrong and dangerous, but it's less personally insulting, shorter, and more on topic.

I don't like Linus's approach because it takes the conversation away from "how did this break, let's investigate carefully" and steers it towards blaming an individual for making a mistake.

As Mauro points out in the replies, the patch here was trying to fix an issue where one driver (uvcvideo) was returning error codes that didn't match what the majority of drivers were doing -- something that was also a bug and was also breaking userspace. The -ENOENT that Linus screams about is an internal driver error that accidentally was returned to userspace in one place.

No core maintainer was refusing to fix userspace (read the thread!), they just wanted to understand the breakage in question since the patch was intended to fix something else!

Software is hard and tricky. The correct response to managing this complexity shouldn't be calling someone an idiot for trying.

A lot of the widely-celebrated "Linus burns" have important, nuanced discussion behind them that is thrown out the window when it's reduced to swears and anger.

> I don't want people in other OSS projects emulating him.

This strikes me as a self-regulating problem...

Linus gets to Linus for a lot of the same reasons Jobs got to Jobs. Try to port those attitudes to other areas, less successful areas, and you're gonna hit human factors. Namely: people aren't gonna tolerate jerks without cause.

Linus is not a role model, he's running a highly important and specific project. He's not dealing with weekend coders, he's wrangling senior types IBM, RedHat, MS, and Google. If those corporate titans don't like how he writes on his mailing list they're welcome to fork off into the sunset ;)

> What you call a jerk is what i see as a interesting person.

There's no accounting for taste, so you're welcome to find verbal abuse interesting. But the overwhelming majority of people do not like being treated with disrespect.

> People have cultures and personalities, many which are not understood by other cultures and personalities.

This isn't a cultural issue. Linus is from Finland. In Finnish culture, it's rude to imply your coworker an idiot. It's rude in most cultures to do so.

Linus is a fluent English speaker. He knows what "idiocy" means, and he knows that it's disrespectful to Andy. That's why he's saying it.

> Carefully measured polite language is absolutely exhausting for many of us.

Nobody is suggesting we use carefully measured language. That is exhausting.

What I'm suggesting is, just don't be a jerk. Watch how easy it is:

"Andy, what is the background for trying to push this idiocy?"

vs

"Andy, what is the background for trying to push this?"

The second statement isn't cluttered by polite language. And it actually takes less effort to say than the first. Yet it's far less Jerky.

> I prefer us to exist side by side instead of banning one in favour of the other.

In general, people should learn to work with people who are different from them. I work with people who have a different religion from me, speak with a different accent, or have different interests from me. And we put aside our differences to work together. It works well.

But there is one kind of person you can't work with, no matter how many differences you put aside, and that's a bully.