When I first read this, back in 2012, I thought Linus' was kind of a dick for being so insulting about it. With more experience I have more empathy for Linus' though -- sometimes developers will get hell bent on getting their PR through no matter how bad it is, and you almost have to be mean in order to get through to them. If you just pick at specific issues instead of saying "This is all bad, start again", sometimes you just waste a lot of time.
Also, to be fair I don't think I would know about this "We Do Not Break Userspace" rule if this hadn't been so famous at the time.
"Running a successful open source project is just Good Will Hunting in reverse, where you start out as a respected genius and end up being a janitor who gets into fights."
That is one of the best quotes I’ve ever heard lmao
404
Somehow I dropped the trailing 's'. Edited.
Thanks! :)
Sometimes being a parent is like this too.
But I think the "don't break user space" rule would be more effective if it was very clearly stated and you could point to a doc that made it obvious to the committer that it was against policy.
Linus seems to have a strong internal sense of what the policy means, and he heaps on Monty Python style verbal abuse to get his point across. But while that's good at indicating how angry it is, it's not clear to me that it's the most effective way of reducing violations of the rule.
You don't need to be "mean" to make clear that a PR is fundamentally flawed. You can literally say, "the entire approach here is unacceptable, and we won't merge it or anything like it." No profanity, no personal insults, not even picking at ancillary details, just facts.
There are different management techniques. Some focus purely on the thalamus and some engage the amygdala.
For example, maybe you work as a program coordinator in a liberal arts college, then you may target the thalamus- the center of logical reasoning. You explain to professors how the program you’re responsible for will advance some goal that seems logical though no one feels emotional about it.
Or maybe you’re a drill sergeant whose job it is to ensure that when soldiers are under duress in war, your barked commands and insults will be burned into their amygdala, their emotion center that handles fight or flight immediate responses and related fast and deep emotional memories, so that they will respond as trained instead of forgetting everything that was learned and running away, because that may not be as effective. Logic doesn’t play into decisions under duress.
Linus may have later decided that hurting others was not as helpful, but he wasn’t being a bad leader when he did and said what he felt he needed to at the time.
Sometimes it takes a little tough love to make things happen. Even Jesus had to overturn some tables.
I think there's a lot of people that would find saying "the entire approach here is unacceptable" to be "mean" though. But I generally agree with your point of not making it a personal insult.
[deleted]
I have learned that number one rule of working in a corporation is "do not offend people". You can explain away a major delay. You can explain away an incident. You can explain away a project not being delivered at all. You can explain away all and any failure, but if you offend someone, you have a big problem. People's egos are extremely fragile, and it makes zero sense to risk even tiniest chance of conflict, unless your very job is at stake.
Seeing someone value a serious project higher than random guy's personal feelings is extremely refreshing.
> But you don't need to be mean
You don't need to be nice either
Should isn’t must.
> You don't need to be nice either.
...right, mostly. Being nice is nice, but the truth is more important. A corporation that could figure that out would run far better.
Maybe. Maybe not. Given the human material (yes I know a dehumanizing formulation, but that's what Corporate does) it seems it's better not to step on anybody's toes except if it's abundantly clear that the person doesn't have a voice in things, but even then it's risky. Corporate is self-selecting: companies that don't generate profit die off sooner or later. Therefore we can conclude (if a bit shakily) from the norm in Corporate not to insult anybody that internal strife has been very damaging and therefore that Corporate self-selects in an evolutionary manner to avoid anything that leads to internal strife.
That's giving evolution far too much credit. The same logic would tell you the appendix has some secret critical function.
It does. The appendix is probably a reservoir for repopulating your microbiome with a “backup copy” after particularly nasty stomach bugs.
I know. I said critical function for a reason. If you can remove it, it's not critical.
The point is, "but evolution" is a weak argument to justify any particular feature of an entity facing selection pressure. The laryngeal nerve detour would have been a better example but I wanted to stay accessible.
I wouldn't say it has a good function on its own, but rather it's a mitigation strategy. People's fragile egos are a fact and this is not going to change anytime soon. So if you want to have a big organization, eventually you'll need to accommodate those who can't tolerate anything even remotely offending. Only organizations that aren't focused on growth can afford having a personality.
> eventually you'll need to accommodate those who can't tolerate anything even remotely offending.
Nah, I don't want these people in my company. Speaking specifically, to be clear, of people who can't tolerate polite, precise correction. If I can't find enough reasonable people to grow, then that's fine. But honestly I think there are fewer of those people than you might think, given the right environment where (among other psychological safety factors) being proven wrong is fine and normal and genuinely does not require a counter attack.
>With more experience I have more empathy for Linus' though
I am glad the pendulum is ( slowly ) swinging back.
The main problem with "we don't break userspace" is that all general statements are false at some point. As what point is some specific instance considered by everyone incorrect that it doesn't get fixed? This is a strawman arg since I know it is simple enough to create new interfaces to bypass old problematic approaches and Linux is full of evolution.
Say what you will about the language, but I’ve come to appreciate how important it is to stick up for your users/customers, which is what Linus is doing here. It’s not ok to inconvenience them without an extraordinarily good reason to do so, and it absolutely is not ok to blame them.
I’m sure my reaction to this was different when I first read it many years ago. But now, I can strongly relate to the feeling behind these words.
I guess his comment is acceptable because this is OSS and it's not like he can get fired over it.
In a past employer I've left a PR comment with a much less aggressive tone, and the PR author messaged me saying "your message is unprofessional". Granted, it wasn't my best moment, I had snapped. But if I wrote something like what Linus wrote, i'd be insta-fired.
It's not really acceptable, and he's since been persuaded to make some strides towards more moderate tone.
I saw this at the time, but reading it again now what struck me is how coolly his correspondent responded, without escalation, hurt, or resistance; and no-one else chimed in to confront the attitude. In other words, this kind of aggression was acceptable. It's a real sign of how things have changed--for the better. As you say, Linus has since made strides, and it's not as if he was the only one; I used to do it too (if not nearly as egregiously) until various people I respected called me out for it. Now I shudder to recall what passed for normal 20 years ago.
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I recently had a coworker reach out to my tech lead to tell me that my very clearly noted DRAFT PR was "not collaborative". Dawg that's the entire point of git...
> unprofessional
This label is such a blatant Americanism. AFAICT it simply communicates a social threat for violating implicit cultural norms, shutting down communication, and carries virtually no useful content beyond that.
Communication takes two. If we want peers to take responsibility for their words and actions, then shouldn't we also take responsibility for our role in interpreting and reacting the same?
Some of the best work environments I've been part of allowed space for people to accept the fact that we're all human with human emotions. If someone blows up, maybe they're overstressed or maybe they're yelling at a kid about to get run over by a car.
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the only reply to that is 'that is your opinion'
Offence is taken, not given.
This is obviously a famous "Linus gets mad" moment. Honestly, I think Linus' comments, while intemperate, were not super-unreasonable, and I think the amount of flak he got for this was unfair. It's better in some sense if you can express anger at a collaborator for making a bad technical decision that makes things harder for other people without telling them SHUT THE FUCK UP, but that kind of emotion is also pretty natural when you're working on something that you passionately care about. If I had made this kind of error in kernel code, and gotten yelled at by Linus about it, I would've felt appropriately chastised (as Mauro appears to have here), and wouldn't have held it against Linus.
> Btw, why pulseaudio is even trying to access a V4L2 control?
I would expect an audio application to take care of its own audio
business, and to not try to access other random Kernel APIs.
> In other words, only an application that handles video should be
using those controls, and as far as I know, pulseaudio is not a
such application. Or are it trying to do world domination?
Mauro's first response does seem a bit defensive, and reads like an attempt to justify his actions. It even feels a bit like an accusation against PulseAudio. I didn't know the exact context at the time, but now that I read the entire email, I think I'm getting why Linus was triggered.
very funny considering linux userspace is the most fragile thing imaginable
The Linux userspace ABI has actually been remarkably stable for decades - that's why containers, ancient binaries, and compatibility layers like Wine work so reliably despite kernel changes underneath.
when was the last time you tried running a binary that was compiled against an ancient glibc?
All the time, where ancient is, say, 15+ years old. I can't remember ever having an issue with it, unlike the reverse [1]. Even if there were issues, though, glibc's symbol versioning is a different beast than the Linux ABI.
I'm really impressed by how Mauro handles himself in the face of a huge man-baby temper tantrum.
Linus is not a man-baby. He’s an actual man. This is what a man looks like- he stands up for users and the integrity of the product with force, even at the risk of being called man-baby by someone over a decade later.
There is a tendency among conflict-avoidant people to lionize "keeping cool" as a moral virtue. This strategy of putting passionate (yet justifiable) anger to shame ensures there is minimal rocking of the boat, thereby allowing all aboard to sit peacefully with smiles on their faces as the ship sinks due to their own negligence and dereliction.
Do you believe conflict resolution requires telling someone to "shut the fuck up" in all caps and then insult their abilities as an engineer? Do you believe this is the most effective method of conflict resolution that doesn't involve "rolling over?"
Personally I think Dale Carnegie cracked that nut nearly a century ago and had the research of many great figures in history to back it up. If you haven't read "How to Win Friends," spoilers: he never suggests screaming someone out of a room.
Do you believe Linus was interested in "winning a friend" in that conversation?
I agree that the book's title is a bit old fashioned. The other half of the title is "...and Influence People," though. Surely Linus is interested in influencing people, effectively? Surely he's interested in being an effective leader?
I'll answer for you: yes, he is, and also yes he believes this screaming version of him was wrong to be so cruel and abrasive: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/9/16/167
If Linus is trying to grow out of the emotional outburst version of himself I don't understand why people continue to try to defend it. The man himself now believes it's the wrong way to be.
Fair enough. Thanks for sharing.
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SHUT THE DUCK UP, KOMALI /s
You can “stand up for users and the integrity of the product” without telling someone to SHUT THE FUCK UP
You’re generalizing expectations for an average human and trying to apply it to an human with extraordinary responsibilities.
It takes an incredibly strong hand to lead a team whose product is the operating system of most of the Internet.
Do you think Jobs, Bezos, or Gates would say, “Hey guy. I respect you, man, and you write great code. I think we should work together to solve this. Are you cool with that? Maybe we can grab a latte.”
No, they didn’t do that shit.
Pretending you’re their HR manager and get to tell them what’s acceptable doesn’t make you equal or better than them. People have faults, but you can’t get on your high horse picking on them when you’re using their shit everyday.
This is a toxic masculinity form of mythology that ignores reams of historical evidence of effective ways of leading people.
If you want a good bibliography, check out the sources of any Dale Carnegie book. He went through letters, journals, biographies, and writings of leaders as far back as the ancient Greeks. His conclusion is the opposite of the one you're making here. The best leaders lift people up, not shout people down.
Others here discuss absurdities like drill instructors. None of us work on a battlefield, none of us are in life or death situations here.
We're talking about leading people in labor. It's basically a solved problem, but for some reason people keep needing to debate the effectiveness of "tough love" approaches. It baffles me.
Masculinity is fine in all it's forms.
Being a dick isn't masculinity though. In fact the Inuits consider it childish.
Anger is a feeling, it's internal. Reacting externally with anger is a choice to be a dick. If you can't tell the difference, you have some growing up to do. Linus did.
Like I said, it's fine in all it's forms. You claimed it's toxic. Now, it's not masculinity. If it's not, why relate it to masculinity at all?
The whole thread is about overt display of anger being linked with masculinity (with or without the label of "toxic"). You said "Masculinity is fine in all it's forms." It is reasonable to assume that you meant childish displays of anger was included in masculinity and that you didn't consider it toxic at all.
But being a castrated yes man is not masculine either.
No does not need to be said in anger. Being firm has nothing to do with being castrated. Maybe overt anger itself is a sign of insecurity and insufficiency.
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> None of us work on a battlefield
Startups are absolutely like battlefields. Maybe even worse since you can't die.
Please, please be saying this ironically. If not I say this out of genuine concern for a fellow forum member: never say this to anyone in real life, you'll be mocked relentlessly.
Give a friend a pack of firecrackers and tell him to pop one off directly next to your ear randomly for a week. See if it feels anything like even your worse day at a startup. Combat is so traumatic you can see the physiological changes in people's brains.
Get real! On a battlefield, if you stop fighting you get shot. In a startup, if you stop fighting you can go and start a new life.
This is interesting to me because usually the attitude on this forum is that emotions get in the way of rational behavior and thought. Of course we're all different people but I've noticed that trend. The more Spock, the better, at least in technical fields and debate.
Yet that goes away as soon as it becomes time to defend Linus Torvalds. Then it's "actually his emotional outbursts are rational and necessary."
I hate to say it but I've always wondered how different the attitude towards Linus would be if everything about him and his history was the same, except, he was a woman.
If your gut reaction is to defend him because he's so clearly a once in a generation engineer and very smart, remember, the even more experienced and wise version of him has disavowed this earlier, emotional outburst version of him: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/9/16/167 Why defend behavior that he himself has agreed is indefensible?
>Why defend behavior that he himself has agreed is indefensible?
Great point and a great link. For someone not as fully immersed in the context of this history of Linus outbursts, I found this comment to be the most clarifying and important in the thread.
He's essentially being celebrated for behavior that, as you noted, he himself has agreed is indefensible. Just quoting from your link:
>This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me.
>I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry.
>The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat
painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my
behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal
behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development
entirely.
>I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to
understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately.
Impressively introspective, at least compared to the comments that are the topic of this thread. Fascinating how many people think they're taking Linus' side are taking a side that he wants nothing to do with.
I’d defend the hell out of Linus as a woman.
My best mentors in the tech field (software QA, sysadmin) have almost all been women.
Seconded. Makes no difference
Well great, you two are good people. I recommend searching through the mailing list and forums for when Sarah (now Sage) Sharp was recommending a code of conduct and pushing back on people for being brutes. Many were opining along the lines of Sharp was just a girl that couldn't take the heat, was trying to make the FOSS world all fluffy rainbows etc. Strong evidence that girl Linus wouldn't haven't had the same amount of success and his emotional outbursts would have been seen very differently by the community, despite us three staunch defenders.
Linus' whole come to Jesus and apology was kicked off by that and the code of conduct saga, which was predicated on the fact that 98% of kernel developers were men. I think we can agree it'd be naive, despite us three not being misogynists, to believe that the community wouldn't construe girl Linus' outbursts as hysterical?
The two are not comparable behaviors, though. Sarah was doing the opposite of Linus's (mostly former) communication style. She was pushing for a "let's all get along" style, and got pushback for that from the Linux kernel community who said "We don't need our hands held and our feelings massaged, we're fine with a 'tough love' communication style". And you're using that as evidence for an assertion that if a woman in Linus's position was using a "tough love" communication style, she would have gotten pushback from the kernel community. I just don't believe that the evidence supports your argument.
> and got pushback for that from the Linux kernel community who said "We don't need our hands held and our feelings massaged, we're fine with a 'tough love' communication style".
Yes, because that was what was selected for, a toxic masculine form of communication. My point was I believe these emotional outbursts wouldn't have been treated as tough love if Linus had been a woman, they would have been perceived as hysteria, because the community had selected for a 98% male environment of men losing control of their anger at each other.
Now Linus has changed, and so has the community's communication style, and so too has the demographics of the contributors. People of all stripes that were turned out by the old brutish, uncontrolled way of communicating are coming back, and the project is much better for it.
Maybe it's unrelated but this new era of Linux, where the project has a code of conduct, is also the era of record high market share of Linux based desktop operating systems.
The market share numbers you read are sus.
They are also significantly mostly Chromebooks, Steam Decks and TV's.
Also there's nothing wrong with masculinity of any form.
The version of masculinity portrayed by early James Bond, slapping women at random, nothing wrong with that? The version used to convince hundreds of thousands of German men to give up their lives uselessly in WWI in some kind of manly imperialist crusade, nothing wrong with that?
As a man I completely reject these forms of masculinity. There are plenty of positive aspects of traditional western male culture we can trim out from the fat of historical toxic masculinity. We don't need to keep the terrible parts. They hurt us almost as much as they hurt others.
When I first read this, back in 2012, I thought Linus' was kind of a dick for being so insulting about it. With more experience I have more empathy for Linus' though -- sometimes developers will get hell bent on getting their PR through no matter how bad it is, and you almost have to be mean in order to get through to them. If you just pick at specific issues instead of saying "This is all bad, start again", sometimes you just waste a lot of time.
Also, to be fair I don't think I would know about this "We Do Not Break Userspace" rule if this hadn't been so famous at the time.
"Running a successful open source project is just Good Will Hunting in reverse, where you start out as a respected genius and end up being a janitor who gets into fights."
Credit: https://web.archive.org/web/20200909035546/https://diff.subs...
That is one of the best quotes I’ve ever heard lmao
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Somehow I dropped the trailing 's'. Edited.
Thanks! :)
Sometimes being a parent is like this too.
But I think the "don't break user space" rule would be more effective if it was very clearly stated and you could point to a doc that made it obvious to the committer that it was against policy.
Linus seems to have a strong internal sense of what the policy means, and he heaps on Monty Python style verbal abuse to get his point across. But while that's good at indicating how angry it is, it's not clear to me that it's the most effective way of reducing violations of the rule.
You don't need to be "mean" to make clear that a PR is fundamentally flawed. You can literally say, "the entire approach here is unacceptable, and we won't merge it or anything like it." No profanity, no personal insults, not even picking at ancillary details, just facts.
There are different management techniques. Some focus purely on the thalamus and some engage the amygdala.
For example, maybe you work as a program coordinator in a liberal arts college, then you may target the thalamus- the center of logical reasoning. You explain to professors how the program you’re responsible for will advance some goal that seems logical though no one feels emotional about it.
Or maybe you’re a drill sergeant whose job it is to ensure that when soldiers are under duress in war, your barked commands and insults will be burned into their amygdala, their emotion center that handles fight or flight immediate responses and related fast and deep emotional memories, so that they will respond as trained instead of forgetting everything that was learned and running away, because that may not be as effective. Logic doesn’t play into decisions under duress.
Linus may have later decided that hurting others was not as helpful, but he wasn’t being a bad leader when he did and said what he felt he needed to at the time.
Sometimes it takes a little tough love to make things happen. Even Jesus had to overturn some tables.
I think there's a lot of people that would find saying "the entire approach here is unacceptable" to be "mean" though. But I generally agree with your point of not making it a personal insult.
I have learned that number one rule of working in a corporation is "do not offend people". You can explain away a major delay. You can explain away an incident. You can explain away a project not being delivered at all. You can explain away all and any failure, but if you offend someone, you have a big problem. People's egos are extremely fragile, and it makes zero sense to risk even tiniest chance of conflict, unless your very job is at stake.
Seeing someone value a serious project higher than random guy's personal feelings is extremely refreshing.
> But you don't need to be mean
You don't need to be nice either
Should isn’t must.
> You don't need to be nice either.
...right, mostly. Being nice is nice, but the truth is more important. A corporation that could figure that out would run far better.
Maybe. Maybe not. Given the human material (yes I know a dehumanizing formulation, but that's what Corporate does) it seems it's better not to step on anybody's toes except if it's abundantly clear that the person doesn't have a voice in things, but even then it's risky. Corporate is self-selecting: companies that don't generate profit die off sooner or later. Therefore we can conclude (if a bit shakily) from the norm in Corporate not to insult anybody that internal strife has been very damaging and therefore that Corporate self-selects in an evolutionary manner to avoid anything that leads to internal strife.
That's giving evolution far too much credit. The same logic would tell you the appendix has some secret critical function.
It does. The appendix is probably a reservoir for repopulating your microbiome with a “backup copy” after particularly nasty stomach bugs.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12128343/
I know. I said critical function for a reason. If you can remove it, it's not critical.
The point is, "but evolution" is a weak argument to justify any particular feature of an entity facing selection pressure. The laryngeal nerve detour would have been a better example but I wanted to stay accessible.
I wouldn't say it has a good function on its own, but rather it's a mitigation strategy. People's fragile egos are a fact and this is not going to change anytime soon. So if you want to have a big organization, eventually you'll need to accommodate those who can't tolerate anything even remotely offending. Only organizations that aren't focused on growth can afford having a personality.
> eventually you'll need to accommodate those who can't tolerate anything even remotely offending.
Nah, I don't want these people in my company. Speaking specifically, to be clear, of people who can't tolerate polite, precise correction. If I can't find enough reasonable people to grow, then that's fine. But honestly I think there are fewer of those people than you might think, given the right environment where (among other psychological safety factors) being proven wrong is fine and normal and genuinely does not require a counter attack.
>With more experience I have more empathy for Linus' though
I am glad the pendulum is ( slowly ) swinging back.
The main problem with "we don't break userspace" is that all general statements are false at some point. As what point is some specific instance considered by everyone incorrect that it doesn't get fixed? This is a strawman arg since I know it is simple enough to create new interfaces to bypass old problematic approaches and Linux is full of evolution.
Say what you will about the language, but I’ve come to appreciate how important it is to stick up for your users/customers, which is what Linus is doing here. It’s not ok to inconvenience them without an extraordinarily good reason to do so, and it absolutely is not ok to blame them.
I’m sure my reaction to this was different when I first read it many years ago. But now, I can strongly relate to the feeling behind these words.
I guess his comment is acceptable because this is OSS and it's not like he can get fired over it.
In a past employer I've left a PR comment with a much less aggressive tone, and the PR author messaged me saying "your message is unprofessional". Granted, it wasn't my best moment, I had snapped. But if I wrote something like what Linus wrote, i'd be insta-fired.
It's not really acceptable, and he's since been persuaded to make some strides towards more moderate tone.
I saw this at the time, but reading it again now what struck me is how coolly his correspondent responded, without escalation, hurt, or resistance; and no-one else chimed in to confront the attitude. In other words, this kind of aggression was acceptable. It's a real sign of how things have changed--for the better. As you say, Linus has since made strides, and it's not as if he was the only one; I used to do it too (if not nearly as egregiously) until various people I respected called me out for it. Now I shudder to recall what passed for normal 20 years ago.
I recently had a coworker reach out to my tech lead to tell me that my very clearly noted DRAFT PR was "not collaborative". Dawg that's the entire point of git...
> unprofessional
This label is such a blatant Americanism. AFAICT it simply communicates a social threat for violating implicit cultural norms, shutting down communication, and carries virtually no useful content beyond that.
Communication takes two. If we want peers to take responsibility for their words and actions, then shouldn't we also take responsibility for our role in interpreting and reacting the same?
Some of the best work environments I've been part of allowed space for people to accept the fact that we're all human with human emotions. If someone blows up, maybe they're overstressed or maybe they're yelling at a kid about to get run over by a car.
the only reply to that is 'that is your opinion'
Offence is taken, not given.
This is obviously a famous "Linus gets mad" moment. Honestly, I think Linus' comments, while intemperate, were not super-unreasonable, and I think the amount of flak he got for this was unfair. It's better in some sense if you can express anger at a collaborator for making a bad technical decision that makes things harder for other people without telling them SHUT THE FUCK UP, but that kind of emotion is also pretty natural when you're working on something that you passionately care about. If I had made this kind of error in kernel code, and gotten yelled at by Linus about it, I would've felt appropriately chastised (as Mauro appears to have here), and wouldn't have held it against Linus.
> Btw, why pulseaudio is even trying to access a V4L2 control? I would expect an audio application to take care of its own audio business, and to not try to access other random Kernel APIs.
> In other words, only an application that handles video should be using those controls, and as far as I know, pulseaudio is not a such application. Or are it trying to do world domination?
Mauro's first response does seem a bit defensive, and reads like an attempt to justify his actions. It even feels a bit like an accusation against PulseAudio. I didn't know the exact context at the time, but now that I read the entire email, I think I'm getting why Linus was triggered.
very funny considering linux userspace is the most fragile thing imaginable
The Linux userspace ABI has actually been remarkably stable for decades - that's why containers, ancient binaries, and compatibility layers like Wine work so reliably despite kernel changes underneath.
when was the last time you tried running a binary that was compiled against an ancient glibc?
All the time, where ancient is, say, 15+ years old. I can't remember ever having an issue with it, unlike the reverse [1]. Even if there were issues, though, glibc's symbol versioning is a different beast than the Linux ABI.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31963255
I'm really impressed by how Mauro handles himself in the face of a huge man-baby temper tantrum.
Linus is not a man-baby. He’s an actual man. This is what a man looks like- he stands up for users and the integrity of the product with force, even at the risk of being called man-baby by someone over a decade later.
There is a tendency among conflict-avoidant people to lionize "keeping cool" as a moral virtue. This strategy of putting passionate (yet justifiable) anger to shame ensures there is minimal rocking of the boat, thereby allowing all aboard to sit peacefully with smiles on their faces as the ship sinks due to their own negligence and dereliction.
Do you believe conflict resolution requires telling someone to "shut the fuck up" in all caps and then insult their abilities as an engineer? Do you believe this is the most effective method of conflict resolution that doesn't involve "rolling over?"
Personally I think Dale Carnegie cracked that nut nearly a century ago and had the research of many great figures in history to back it up. If you haven't read "How to Win Friends," spoilers: he never suggests screaming someone out of a room.
Do you believe Linus was interested in "winning a friend" in that conversation?
I agree that the book's title is a bit old fashioned. The other half of the title is "...and Influence People," though. Surely Linus is interested in influencing people, effectively? Surely he's interested in being an effective leader?
I'll answer for you: yes, he is, and also yes he believes this screaming version of him was wrong to be so cruel and abrasive: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/9/16/167
If Linus is trying to grow out of the emotional outburst version of himself I don't understand why people continue to try to defend it. The man himself now believes it's the wrong way to be.
Fair enough. Thanks for sharing.
SHUT THE DUCK UP, KOMALI /s
You can “stand up for users and the integrity of the product” without telling someone to SHUT THE FUCK UP
You’re generalizing expectations for an average human and trying to apply it to an human with extraordinary responsibilities.
It takes an incredibly strong hand to lead a team whose product is the operating system of most of the Internet.
Do you think Jobs, Bezos, or Gates would say, “Hey guy. I respect you, man, and you write great code. I think we should work together to solve this. Are you cool with that? Maybe we can grab a latte.”
No, they didn’t do that shit.
Pretending you’re their HR manager and get to tell them what’s acceptable doesn’t make you equal or better than them. People have faults, but you can’t get on your high horse picking on them when you’re using their shit everyday.
This is a toxic masculinity form of mythology that ignores reams of historical evidence of effective ways of leading people.
If you want a good bibliography, check out the sources of any Dale Carnegie book. He went through letters, journals, biographies, and writings of leaders as far back as the ancient Greeks. His conclusion is the opposite of the one you're making here. The best leaders lift people up, not shout people down.
Others here discuss absurdities like drill instructors. None of us work on a battlefield, none of us are in life or death situations here.
We're talking about leading people in labor. It's basically a solved problem, but for some reason people keep needing to debate the effectiveness of "tough love" approaches. It baffles me.
Masculinity is fine in all it's forms.
Being a dick isn't masculinity though. In fact the Inuits consider it childish.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/6855333...
Anger is a feeling, it's internal. Reacting externally with anger is a choice to be a dick. If you can't tell the difference, you have some growing up to do. Linus did.
Like I said, it's fine in all it's forms. You claimed it's toxic. Now, it's not masculinity. If it's not, why relate it to masculinity at all?
The whole thread is about overt display of anger being linked with masculinity (with or without the label of "toxic"). You said "Masculinity is fine in all it's forms." It is reasonable to assume that you meant childish displays of anger was included in masculinity and that you didn't consider it toxic at all.
But being a castrated yes man is not masculine either.
No does not need to be said in anger. Being firm has nothing to do with being castrated. Maybe overt anger itself is a sign of insecurity and insufficiency.
> None of us work on a battlefield
Startups are absolutely like battlefields. Maybe even worse since you can't die.
Please, please be saying this ironically. If not I say this out of genuine concern for a fellow forum member: never say this to anyone in real life, you'll be mocked relentlessly.
Give a friend a pack of firecrackers and tell him to pop one off directly next to your ear randomly for a week. See if it feels anything like even your worse day at a startup. Combat is so traumatic you can see the physiological changes in people's brains.
Get real! On a battlefield, if you stop fighting you get shot. In a startup, if you stop fighting you can go and start a new life.
This is interesting to me because usually the attitude on this forum is that emotions get in the way of rational behavior and thought. Of course we're all different people but I've noticed that trend. The more Spock, the better, at least in technical fields and debate.
Yet that goes away as soon as it becomes time to defend Linus Torvalds. Then it's "actually his emotional outbursts are rational and necessary."
I hate to say it but I've always wondered how different the attitude towards Linus would be if everything about him and his history was the same, except, he was a woman.
If your gut reaction is to defend him because he's so clearly a once in a generation engineer and very smart, remember, the even more experienced and wise version of him has disavowed this earlier, emotional outburst version of him: https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/9/16/167 Why defend behavior that he himself has agreed is indefensible?
>Why defend behavior that he himself has agreed is indefensible?
Great point and a great link. For someone not as fully immersed in the context of this history of Linus outbursts, I found this comment to be the most clarifying and important in the thread.
He's essentially being celebrated for behavior that, as you noted, he himself has agreed is indefensible. Just quoting from your link:
>This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me.
>I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry.
>The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely.
>I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately.
Impressively introspective, at least compared to the comments that are the topic of this thread. Fascinating how many people think they're taking Linus' side are taking a side that he wants nothing to do with.
I’d defend the hell out of Linus as a woman.
My best mentors in the tech field (software QA, sysadmin) have almost all been women.
Seconded. Makes no difference
Well great, you two are good people. I recommend searching through the mailing list and forums for when Sarah (now Sage) Sharp was recommending a code of conduct and pushing back on people for being brutes. Many were opining along the lines of Sharp was just a girl that couldn't take the heat, was trying to make the FOSS world all fluffy rainbows etc. Strong evidence that girl Linus wouldn't haven't had the same amount of success and his emotional outbursts would have been seen very differently by the community, despite us three staunch defenders.
Linus' whole come to Jesus and apology was kicked off by that and the code of conduct saga, which was predicated on the fact that 98% of kernel developers were men. I think we can agree it'd be naive, despite us three not being misogynists, to believe that the community wouldn't construe girl Linus' outbursts as hysterical?
The two are not comparable behaviors, though. Sarah was doing the opposite of Linus's (mostly former) communication style. She was pushing for a "let's all get along" style, and got pushback for that from the Linux kernel community who said "We don't need our hands held and our feelings massaged, we're fine with a 'tough love' communication style". And you're using that as evidence for an assertion that if a woman in Linus's position was using a "tough love" communication style, she would have gotten pushback from the kernel community. I just don't believe that the evidence supports your argument.
> and got pushback for that from the Linux kernel community who said "We don't need our hands held and our feelings massaged, we're fine with a 'tough love' communication style".
Yes, because that was what was selected for, a toxic masculine form of communication. My point was I believe these emotional outbursts wouldn't have been treated as tough love if Linus had been a woman, they would have been perceived as hysteria, because the community had selected for a 98% male environment of men losing control of their anger at each other.
Now Linus has changed, and so has the community's communication style, and so too has the demographics of the contributors. People of all stripes that were turned out by the old brutish, uncontrolled way of communicating are coming back, and the project is much better for it.
Maybe it's unrelated but this new era of Linux, where the project has a code of conduct, is also the era of record high market share of Linux based desktop operating systems.
The market share numbers you read are sus.
They are also significantly mostly Chromebooks, Steam Decks and TV's.
Also there's nothing wrong with masculinity of any form.
The version of masculinity portrayed by early James Bond, slapping women at random, nothing wrong with that? The version used to convince hundreds of thousands of German men to give up their lives uselessly in WWI in some kind of manly imperialist crusade, nothing wrong with that?
As a man I completely reject these forms of masculinity. There are plenty of positive aspects of traditional western male culture we can trim out from the fat of historical toxic masculinity. We don't need to keep the terrible parts. They hurt us almost as much as they hurt others.
Could you mention a few of these "form"s?