Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

Total aside, I'm a spoken word poet and performer. The original Poetry Slam started in Chicago and it's still run by the original guy; a dude who is kinda a dick and encourages the audience to be rude and boo people off stage who are bad.

I use to think this was kinda neat; you know where you stand right? I went up on the open mic several week and did really well. I saw some people get booed off stage that were really terrible, but a few that I really enjoyed -- they typically got booed off due to people not liking the content.

Then I eventually did a narrative about a prostitute in LA. I almost changed what I was going to do since I realized it was an x-mas show and maybe I should do something brighter/happier. But I've had other experiences where changing last minute was a bad idea, so I stuck to my guns and got booed off stage.

I was told I went too long, but people were already hissing at me for all the parts about the prostitute growing up on the streets.

I've gotten good feedback every other time I've done this story. I misread the audience, theme and time of the year.

I thought the booing was a good thing, until it happened to me. I've literally done shows in Dublin, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Denver, Vegas and I've never seen any other venue do anything remotely similar at their open mics. Some have a timer and go are pushed off stage if you go over, but the audience is never encouraged or praised for being rude.

In the comedy circuit, we stopped heckling and booing people off stage years ago. You can push the edge of jokes, but you don't disrespect people on stage .. unless they go over time.

The guy who runs the Chicago scene is the first and the original in this concept of Spoken Word, and the scene is crusty and old just like him. I know a number of performers who hate going there and I think I'm included too.

I still think the master/slave thing with Redis was/is dumb. But with Torvalds .. I am glad that he said this, in the way he did. I think he could benefit from the basic rules on StackOverflow. You can simply say, "I don't think that's going to work because of x, y, z. Look at commit x and try doing a, b and c instead and resubmit," compared to the yelling we've often seen.

I've generally been against code of conducts, maybe because I've only seen them misused or people get pushed out for non-clean/arbitrary reasons. But maybe we're moving into a new era? Who knows, but I hope we find a balance in the middle.

And I still don't think the Redis guy should have made that change; but asked the issue requester to submit a patch with all the changes if they wanted them.

I think there is a balance in the middle.

"This seems stupid to me" is a considerably lazy statement. What's worse, it doesn't have any meaningful content beyond "I don't like it." I've yet to see anyone's feelings hurt with the following:

"I'm rejecting your proposition because I believe it will lead to X, Y and Z (problems)"

"Your proposal is not going to work because of X, Y and Z".

"I'm not seeing the benefit of this. Can you explain what we have to gain by it?"

And probably a dozen other direct statements.

At the workplace, I don't care who thinks what idea is idiotic. I care whether they can speak for or against it. And I care whether they are open or close minded about it. Saying "This seems stupid to me" is providing zero contribution to the process.

I doubt it was less of a "Straw that broke the camel's back" and more of just a "We all know this was coming," thing.

Or maybe it was? ... from the e-mail, it might have been words/things from maintainers, specifically around the meeting/conference he mentioned, that forced him to re-evaluate the way he works.