701–710 of 1001 posts
Maybe this will finally end the myth that "you can be rude and insulting as long as you're right" that people seem to attribute to Linus's outbursts
I have to wonder if Linux would even be remembered other than as a footnote at this time without his forceful personality being in the mix. Many things fail when they get pecked to death by ducks. His forceful personality carried the day on many occasions.
A slowgoing development for him, still I sympathize and wish him the best while wondering ironically if personal issues aside what works best. It brings to mind fundamental organizational and management. Is it better to have a "rude" organization? Calling bullshit early and often instead of polite everything is fine stacks of lies since it would be impolite to point out having O(N!) code just can't work for anything…
Criticize the behavior, not the person. Linus often included personal attacks against people who were making errors. You can get a message across without telling people that they are worthless scum.
I would never work for this asshole. I have not granted any one the privilege of being disrespectful to me. No, no one has my permission to be unprofessional and/or disrespectful towards me, no matter the cost. Everything else is fair game. To be clear, I have had a fair amount of criticism on my work by all kinds of people (and most of them I deeply respect and consider my mentors).
Agreeableness in general is negatively correlated with career success. Have you noticed that Fortune 500 CEOs tend to be extremely disagreeable, to the point of psychopathy in some cases. At the risk of sticking my neck out, it's also one of the many reasons for the gender pay gap, woman are more agreeable than men. And you have to be somewhat disagreeable to stand up for yourself and demand a raise (or quit and seek…
What if, and this might blow your mind, we tweak things so that agreeableness is rewarded more? Society is constructed too adversarially for my tastes. More collaboration would be better.
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..and if productivity was better from disrespecting people, then that would be the way to go? Well...That seems to be the actual case. Our current system seems to not to respect people, or the planet (or other animals besides humans.) It seems to respect money, 'productivity', 'efficiency' and 'growth'.
This is a non sequitur unless you have a hidden assumption along the lines of "We currently have the best of all possible systems."
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> It eliminates any military, security or even anything useful. Haha, I love the implicit signaling you're doing. I mean not only is it just not true but your qualifications for "useful" and "not useful" are really stupid.
Are guidance systems on missiles OK or not?
I think likely yes, because if the zeitgeist among engineers was strong enough to make it nearly impossible to find one willing to build a missile guidance system, it would also be strong enough to make it impossible to find someone willing to build the actual missile.
To directly answer your question: no, I believe no weapon of war is OK. The reasons are all of the typical pacifist ones but I don't think it's necessary to reiterate verbatim here unless you feel otherwise.
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Same. Linus always called a spade a spade, and I always respected that. In a culture where the Overton window has shrunk considerably and people habitually hide their thoughts, I think this kind of attitude is more important, not less. People give up ability to say certain things in the name of inclusion, and then lose ability to think those things in the first place. I'll take an asshole over a pushover any day, and…
Reality is more important than one's feelings which is why he has been effective in making linux what it is today. Throwing that out the window and caving to the postmodernist "feels" will not bode well for the project as a whole... and in the end the activists will try to find another reason to push him out of the project he founded even if he completely capitulates to them.
There's a fine line between striding for truth and being a dickhead. Linux consistently leaches across to the latter while occasionally being the former. Fortunately he's realised this now and not later and chosen to work on himself to better his community.
Unlike you. And your 'feels'.
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The contributor covenant is fairly in-objectionable. Yes, the list of 'privileges' is a bit of a checklist for left-wing soapboxes, but it's not necessarily a bad thing to explicitly list traits commonly targeted by bullies and harassers. The problem many people have with it, as you imply, is that it's the thin end of a doorstop, at the thick end of which is the Post-Meritocracy Manifesto: https://postmeritocracy.org…
Just one example from that manifesto: “We have an ethical responsibility to refuse to work on software that will negatively impact the well-being of other people.” This a terrible slippery slope. It eliminates any military, security or even anything useful. A thief’s well-being is meant to be negatively impacted by a security measure. A guidance system in a missile is intended to negatively impact the well-being of t…
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If I'm reading your summation correctly, someone made edited the CoC in an attempt to indict Schito ad-hoc, and that bad faith attempt was foiled because the community was able to see the timing of the change. Doesn't your version of events strongly imply that having the CoC on file is what made it even possible to see how transparent this attack was? Maybe you believe that the CoC is what made this attack possible,…
Apologies, I thought lynching was your choice of words and I was using your words, I did think it was rather extreme. I agree it's overdramatic and a poor choice, I had missed that you were calling it out. Regarding the CoC, I had spared you the details. Opal didn't have a CoC when this happened, they were pressured into Ada's by the outrage mob from twitter - told it would help prevent problems like this. Upon succe…
That said, I think your framing of the Opal/Schito situation unfairly short-changes the pro-Schito side. Granted, while I do remember following the issue at the time, I now only vaguely recall its details. That its resolution isn't more memorable to me could admittedly mean that I think/thought Schito got what he deserved. But I don't (nor would other CoC supporters, I would think) claim that Schito was unharmed -- that's beside the point for now, since this isn't the time for a debate on what's offensive/exclusionary to the trans community. But if we just accept the premise that Schito should not have faced criticism (i.e. "harm") for tweeting (i.e. saying something across in a world-wide public channel) things that a community finds extremely offensive -- then there's no argument to be had.
I personally think that -- at least on the face of it -- what Schito said was more troubling than what people complained about regarding Torvalds and Rod Vagg.
But that issue IMO is orthogonal to the value of CoCs -- there is no CoC that would have stopped Schito from getting angry replies from the trans community. And as I read through that massive pull thread you referenced, I see that many of the prominent maintainers were in a state of reasonable debate and disagreement. Several pointed out that, as offensive as Schito's tweets might have been, there was hardly a "mob" in the pull request discussion; Coraline Ada is far outnumbered by people calling her unreasonable and accusing her of a "witch hunt".
Ada's pull request was closed and its discussion shut down. As you pointed out, there was no CoC before Schito got ripped on, so it is wrong, in a literal and figurative sense. Moreover, the opal project has since created and adopted a Code of Conduct. It is far less than what Ada pushed for. But I'm not trying to defend Ada's CoC, but to point out how it is beneficial to Schito and other maintainers of large, multi-collaborator projects to create and discuss a CoC, as Schito has apparently done, because it protects him.
The opal community was already lukewarm to Ada's complaints against Schito's 2015 complaints. Now anyone who wants to complain to opal's github community will be tolerated if they hate what Schito does on his personal Twitter account:
https://github.com/opal/opal/pull/961/commits/28738a25147ec9...
To me, this effort is beneficial to both sides; it protects community members from being punished by the project for breaking an "unwritten" rule. And it informs outsiders about the standards and decorum of the community, and they're free to join up or pass.
There are more benefits IMO to having a well-developed CoC, but I'll end my already wordy comment by saying that we should evaluate the value of CoC's independently from the political beliefs of their vocal proponents. Schito's situation isn't a good one; I'd like to see examples of how a community's agreed-upon CoC, whether it's the Contributor's Covenant or something lighter-weight, has led to capricious/unjustifiable action by that community.