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Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

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Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#101

Post by anothergoogler »

craftyguy wrote: post #56
SBArbeit wrote: post #9

It's about fucking time. I personally stay away from software created by people who lack empathy; technical goodness !> creating a good environment and product for actual people. I don't go to restaurants run by douchebags either, no matter how good the food might be. And Git has the UX of software created by someone with no empathy. I hope Linus heals from this, and I hope the culture of the Linux community changes…

> And Git has the UX of software created by someone with no empathy. I would really like to understand what you expect a UX for a command line tool to look like. Maybe instead of throwing an error if you did something wrong, it would apologize to you first? Or perhaps it should preface all output with "dearest Sir/Madam, here is the information you requested:" ?

There would be no output. Sometimes you just need your software to listen, not try and solve everything, and it would understand that.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#102

Post by ufo »

onurcel wrote: post #93
_wldu wrote: post #43

Way to go Linus... this is a great lesson for all of us! It's easy to get caught-up in the heat of the moment and say and do things that we regret. We've all done it. It's part of being human. The key is to realize it, apologize and do better.

when the heat of "the moment" lasts 20 years, the least we can say is it's about time.

Better late than never, I suppose.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#103

Post by sonnyblarney »

eridius wrote: post #73
tomohawk wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can be forceful without being an asshole about it.

In reality, being 'forceful' will almost always be perceived as being kind of an asshole.

BUT - there's a world of difference between being 'forceful perceived as jerk' and 'demeaning and needlessly insulting or derogatory'.

Never a reason to put people down.

In Linus' 2008 speech at Google talking about Git, he said he created it partly to avoid politics - he can just have people copy his stuff into their own repo and go off yonder and not have to deal with them.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#104

Post by Rainymood »

cowmoo728 wrote: post #75
wolfgke wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People can be ruthless without being abusive. Everybody has a different conviction about what is abusive and what is not.

One of Linus's more colorful rants: "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?"

Honestly it's a well-crafted insult, I give him that

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#105

Post by wolfgke »

Mtinie wrote: post #76
wyclif wrote: post #31

As someone familiar with LBT's mailing list rhetoric since the early days, I'm guessing a big part of what's happening here is that LBT hasn't changed the way he communicates but the rest of the world has moved on. And let's face it, the engineering and programming world has gotten a lot more politically correct—I think the main factor driving this is the increasing presence of women in technology. What I mean is tha…

> [...]I think the main factor driving this is the increasing presence of women in technology. I don’t agree. I find situations like these stem from the number of qualified developers interacting within these communities. In the past, when the depth of talent was small, people put up with epic levels of ego and bullshit. The only way to move the needle forward was to grin and bear it. Today, we have a greater density…

> In the past, when the depth of talent was small, people put up with epic levels of ego and bullshit. [...] Today, we have a greater density of talent

I do not believe that the density of challenged. What has changed is that modern programming languages/technologies/... require much less talent to do something useful with. So a lot more people can (perhaps) do a meaningful contribution to the project. This makes much more projects possible. But it does not lead to the situation that more people can now contribute to projects of hard difficulty.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#106

Post by JoshTriplett »

The other huge news here, both for Linux and for numerous other communities trying to make similar changes:

The most recent commit, right before the release, deletes Linux's "Code of Conflict" and replaces it with a real Code of Conduct, the Contributor Covenant.

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/code-of-condu...

Quoting the commit message:

> Explicit guidelines have demonstrated success in other projects and other areas of the kernel.

> Here is a Code of Conduct statement for the wider kernel. It is based on the Contributor Covenant as described at www.contributor-covenant.org

> From this point forward, we should abide by these rules in order to help make the kernel community a welcoming environment to participate in.

Something worth emphasizing here: adopting a code of conduct, and choosing to be welcoming and inclusive, does not mean a project and its developers avoid disagreement, or avoid feeling passionate about their work, or avoid discussing and fixing issues. It just means not letting things turn heated or hateful, and treating people well.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#107

Post by derefr »

cowmoo728 wrote: post #54
Sharlin wrote: post #29

A certain sort of ruthlessness and lack of empathy, accompanied by having an extraordinarily driven personality, certainly seems to often make things happen (see also: Steve Jobs). The ages-old question is – is it worth it? Do ends justify the means?

People can be ruthless without being abusive. Linus had effectively ultimate power over the kernel for quite some time, so he could have said things like: "I disagree with this patch and I'm not going to merge it. It does these things wrong, and this line of reasoning makes no sense. Change these things and explain the reasoning behind this and I'll look at it again." Most of his rants that I've read could have been…

Sure. It takes a certain level of emotional passion to actually keep driving you forward in this kind of project, though, and that passion will come out in a "naive conversational style" as brusqueness and even personal attacks.

It takes a certain level of self-awareness to realize that you should still say what you're thinking, but you shouldn't say it how you're thinking of it.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#108

Post by dralley »

tomohawk wrote: post #63
wyclif wrote: post #31

As someone familiar with LBT's mailing list rhetoric since the early days, I'm guessing a big part of what's happening here is that LBT hasn't changed the way he communicates but the rest of the world has moved on. And let's face it, the engineering and programming world has gotten a lot more politically correct—I think the main factor driving this is the increasing presence of women in technology. What I mean is tha…

Men and women express aggression in different ways. While they can both be toxic, female aggression is more acceptable at this time. Linus was forceful at times, but his focus was on the work, not on trying to make people feel bad. Be critical all you want, but his achievement is amazing.

I think this is understating it bit. He did mostly focus on technical aspects, but he did also occasionally say things like "whoever wrote this should be retroactively aborted", which is going waaaaaay too far and is going to make someone feel bad, period.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#109

Post by dx87 »

wolfgke wrote: post #69
cowmoo728 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People can be ruthless without being abusive. Linus had effectively ultimate power over the kernel for quite some time, so he could have said things like: "I disagree with this patch and I'm not going to merge it. It does these things wrong, and this line of reasoning makes no sense. Change these things and explain the reasoning behind this and I'll look at it again." Most of his rants that I've read could have been…

> People can be ruthless without being abusive. Everybody has a different conviction about what is abusive and what is not.

Very true. I remember when one of the kernel maintainers announced why she was going to stop contributing, one of the reasons listed was "Linus has advocated physical abuse of kernel maintainers." Looking at the email that was given as evidence though, Linus told one of the maintainers something like "You're over 6 feet tall, if the contributors won't give you their patches in time to be merged, say you'll smash them :)" Hopefully Linus figures out a way to stop the over the top aggression while on break, but still keeps his no-nonsense attitude towards development.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#110

Post by [deleted] »

dstroot wrote: post #17
Nasrudith wrote: post #16

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…

Can’t you blend them? In other words I’d love to work in an organization that can politely call bullshit early and often. It is possible to fundamentally disagree without making it personal. Really good to see him acknowledge this and tackle it head on. I hope he gains a better perspective. Thank goodness for Linus and Linux!

[deleted]
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