Verbal abuse on LKML

I'm not familiar with LKML or any of the developers, but Sarah is very impressive in this thread. Every time someone else tries to shift the topic, she brings the conversation back on course. She's right about a minimum standard of civility being crucial in email. Even if no one on the list is personally affected by the language (a big if for a large list), a single vitriolic email can poison the atmosphere for days.

Sarah according to those who know more than me wrote "the entire USB3 stack" and then in one discussion

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.stable/58049/focu...

thus reacted on Linus claims:

On Fri, 12 Jul 2013 08:22:27 -0700, Linus wrote: "Greg, the reason you get a lot of stable patches seems to be that you make it easy to act as a door-mat. Clearly at least some people say 'I know this patch isn't important enough to send to Linus, but I know Greg will silently accept it after the fact, so I'll just wait and mark it for stable'.

You may need to learn to shout at people."

Seriously, guys? Is this what we need in order to get improve -stable? Linus Torvalds is advocating for physical intimidation and violence. Ingo Molnar and Linus are advocating for verbal abuse.

Not _fucking_ cool. Violence, whether it be physical intimidation, verbal threats or verbal abuse is not acceptable. Keep it professional on the mailing lists.

Let's discuss this at Kernel Summit where we can at least yell at each other in person. Yeah, just try yelling at me about this. I'll roar right back, louder, for all the people who lose their voice when they get yelled at by top maintainers. I won't be the nice girl anymore.

I think she's definitely right. Keep it professional. The implementation of any piece of something can be stupid. It's often not because we want to make it that way, or because it's stupid as it is, it's stupid in a given context. Somebody like Linus is somebody who must handle at that level. There bluntness can help. Still it's about the context, not about what people who produce work are or aren't.

Just don't call people stupid, don't intimidate, threat or abuse them personally.

I share Lucas De Marchi's perspective:

    I see lots of strong words in LKML. So much that in some other lists there's the say "hey, this isn't LKML and this behavior is not appreciated here".

    However in this case I don't see it. Linus and Greg were in no way calling out for violence, but instead making joke about it.

    What I am seeing more often than I'd like is people losing the ability to joke at ourselves. For me over reaction is as disturbing as the strong words.  Go to the link you pointed out here, read it again. Knowing the people who wrote them can't you imagine their troll face?

Honestly, she's just stirring the community into aggression mode and I'm not overly fond of what may follow.

Linus' reply:

  Because if you want me to "act professional", I can tell you that I'm
  not interested. I'm sitting in my home office wearign a bathrobe. The
  same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm *also* not going to
  buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and
  backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because
  THAT is what "acting professionally" results in: people resort to all
  kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their
  normal urges in unnatural ways.

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel.stable/58049/focu...

I'm just pointing out that even the law doesn't want to try to solve this problem, and it tries to solve everything. :)