I don't know about anyone else, but when I read Linus write:
"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?"
> (p.s. the irony of posting such an offensive post by starring out the u in fuck... does he not see the irony?)
Linus is fully capable of writing "fuck", as evidenced by e.g. [1]. If he stars it out, assume it is a stylistic choice for that particular message.
> then I don't think I'd ever contribute to the LKML.
If you can't handle a message like that, then perhaps it's just as well. Note the context (though I can appreciate it may not matter to you, and that you simply won't contribute regardless of it):
A senior developer who have repeatedly made Linus exasperated by submitting code that Linus have had massive issues with, up to and including unacceptable levels of breakage, appears to have written code so idiotic that it should not even have occurred to him. 1 byte reads with sys-calls is a beginner mistake. Kay was/is not a beginner. He also had at that point had repeated complaints from Linus about the quality of his code, and showed no sign of listening.
This conflict eventually culminated in Linus making it clear he'd had enough, and will no longer merge code from Kay until he cleans up his act [2]
While I don't think I'd be as caustic as Linus, I can totally understand the level of exasperation that saga must have caused him given the series of issues in question. And at the point of this outburst, nothing appears to have worked: the stream of crap had kept on coming.
>1 byte reads with sys-calls is a beginner mistake. Kay was/is not a beginner. He also had at that point had repeated complaints from Linus about the quality of his code, and showed no sign of listening.
This conflict eventually culminated in Linus making it clear he'd had enough, and will no longer merge code from Kay until he cleans up his act
Then this is all Linus had to say. This, exactly, is a great sentence on why you'll no longer be accepting code from a party, and sums up both what they can do to get back in, and what other developers can learn from this. There's no need to sink to insults, especially at the level Linus can dish out.
We have to deal with clients so clueless, I don't know how they manage to even email us with the stupid questions. But we're polite to them and when speaking about them publically. We keep the abortion-comments private, between the developers whenever we go out for happy-hour. It's not very hard for the open-source community to do the same. (I know the majority of the open source community does not do this. But a vocal minority do, and the rest of the community seems to be okay with this, when it's not okay).
Yeah, me too. We're paid for the lip service - that's our incentive.
Linus has no incentive, financial or social, to be nice to Kay. Chewing him out, however, probably lowers his blood pressure and saves him the time of refactoring his immediate emotional reaction into a polite response, both of which are probably critical metrics to him.
> If you can't handle a message like that, then perhaps it's just as well.
Such conduct is not tolerated in workplaces, where people are paid to contribute, why do you consider it acceptable in an environment where people contribute for free?
Because, you know, in your workplace, you are in an actual inferiority position. Your boss is the one that says how much are you going to be paid next month (or IF your are going to be paid), or whether you are going to work in a nice project or maintaining a 20 years old codebase. If he bullies you, verbally or otherwise, facing up or quitting might have dire consequences.
On the other hand, in most open source projects you contribute what you want, where you want, and if you don't like the project lead, it takes you as much as closing the browser window to quit.
That said, I don't really know if this is the situation of the people working directly under Linus. ¿Aren't the key kernel developers usually paid by big corporations to work there?
> Because, you know, in your workplace, you are in an actual inferiority position. Your boss is the one that says how much are you going to be paid next month (or IF your are going to be paid), or whether you are going to work in a nice project or maintaining a 20 years old codebase. If he bullies you, verbally or otherwise, facing up or quitting might have dire consequences.
Even between two coworkers of equal status, this behaviour would not be tolerated by a good employer.
Okay, fine, remove workplace if you want to quibble about semantics and broaden it to "Most human interactions". Most human interactions consider a modicum of respect for the other party to be a basic requirement.
> While I don't think I'd be as caustic as Linus, I can totally understand the level of exasperation that saga must have caused him given the series of issues in question. And at the point of this outburst, nothing appears to have worked: the stream of crap had kept on coming.
I don't mean to put words in your mouth, but are you saying that being exasperated is justification to be arbitrarily caustic?
There are plenty of open-source project leaders who deal with incorrigible people and do not talk this way.
I'm saying that sufficient exasperation makes it understandable whether or not it is justified. Linus is human. Humans are not flawless.
> There are plenty of open-source project leaders who deal with incorrigible people and do not talk this way.
And a lot of people who "do not talk this way" are a lot worse by dealing with these kind of issues through backstabbing or veiled insults.
While some are saint-like and never say or do a bad thing to contributors, I don't buy that the lack of abrasive language in any way is a reliable indicator of civility.
I think Linus (and others) choose to stay verbally abusive because there they exist in a community that both facilitates and defends that poor behaviour.
There is a choice to be made. The choice stems from the basic mindset: am I fundamentally ok with verbally abusing people around me, or should I try to stop doing that?
I don't know what's in Linus' mind. Perhaps he is utterly incapable of never resorting to verbal abuse. But I doubt that's true.
Random theory time: People who are harmful to the project, should be removed from the project. If you're not a company but an "open" project that can't fire people, you pretty much have to do this my making them not want to say. So if someone causes enough trouble, just pile on the verbal abuse until they get fed up and leave.
I think this is another false dichotomy. It's quite possible to efficiently limit the damage someone can cause to a project without resorting to verbal abuse.
Most simply, refuse to merge their stuff unless it has quality. You don't have to hold their hand; say: "You are making the same mistakes over and over again. Your stuff isn't going to get merged, and we're not going to spend any time explaining to you why."
In the same video interview where Linus famously gestured toward Nvidia, he also said that he believes people capable of being offended should be offended. I suppose one could think of it as a way of filtering out people who focus too much on the messenger and medium rather than the actual message.
It is in part a cultural issue. Realise that this form of "abuse" does not carry much weight in a lot of cultures. A lot of the strongest criticism of Linus comes from a cultural background where people are hyper-sensitive to direct language.
"I am upset and angry that you keep making the same mistakes."
No, remember the context: you've already used nice, direct words, and Kai has ignored them multiple times. Now you need to shake Kai's cage. Linus might have gone overboard, but his technique has more chance of success than yours.
Also, this is not a sterile corporate environment. The LKML is more like a dive bar than Applebee's and that's the way they like it.
This debate exists on a spectrum of gray areas, but I'm pretty sure "you should be retroactively aborted" crosses the line from "shaking someone's cage" to "flagrantly excessive verbal abuse", if for no other reason than it equate's the target's worth as a human being with their skill as a developer, which is obviously not a healthy viewpoint.
I'm a big believer in 'spectrum of gray areas'. This particular quote from Linus is particularly bad.
What I want to firmly point out is the general community's level of acceptance of verbally abusive language.
There could be a debate about what constitutes verbal abuse, on a case by case basis. And that would turn into a mess.
What I'd love to see is the community acknowledge that using and even encouraging such language is bad for everybody, and it's bad for the open source movement, big time.
I agree with you. The problem I'm seeing in this thread relates to this point:
> There could be a debate about what constitutes verbal abuse, on a case by case basis. And that would turn into a mess.
Right now, a lot of people simply do not make the distinction between verbal abuse and direct language. In other words, they are arguing that we should not bother discouraging verbal abuse because it "shouldn't" affect targets any more adversely than direct but non-abusive language.
I guess it's a debate one can approach from many angles. But maybe you're right, perhaps focusing on highlighting why one thing constitutes verbal abuse and others don't is too semantic of an argument, and it's more productive to focus on the fact that just because one person has never been truly bothered by verbal abuse doesn't mean that should be the universal expectation.
Universal expectation? It seems you two are railing against a straw man. Abusive behavior, even on the LKML, even by Linus, is rare. If you feel as strongly as you seem to, please subscribe, form a first-hand opinion, and maybe contribute to positive change. (I contributed around 2001-2003 and really enjoyed it; I don't subscribe now).
Too many misunderstandings have been caused by well-meaning people reading too much into cherry-picked HN comments.
Hm. Because these comments are WAY off topic and have now drowned out the article and any rational discussion, I won't comment any further. Diederich, I hope you'll show more restraint with the Reply button.
The problem isn't that it's too abundant. The problem is that people make excuses for it every time it happens, instead of just saying, "Yeah, that was really verbally abusive."
I'm not trying to be pedantic here but, despite your quote marks, Linus never said that.
My interpretation of that email chain reads: anyone who is stupid enough to continue reading byte-by-byte after being told that it's a bad idea should be retroactively aborted.
The implied subject makes a big difference. (I still think it's over the line but I understand that everyone makes mistakes in the heat of the moment)
WRT what specifically Linus did and didn't say, that's a fair reading.
And everybody, myself included, says things out of frustration, in the heat of the moment. That's not what I'm talking about here.
I'm talking about how many (most?) open source technical communities are very much ok with language that is abusive. Indeed, many take pride in that fact.
When I say something that's inappropriate, I'll make a point of retracting it later on when I'm calm.
If you equate 'sterile' with 'not verbal abuse', I suppose that's true.
Given that direct words were ignored multiple times, I would suggest that the next action is simply to not merge, without comment, after a final "You are ignoring us, we can't the time to keep correcting you. Your bad merges will be ignored without comment."
Such a path will get a developer's attention, and it involves no verbal abuse.
A problem with flinging abusive words around is that it artificially and needlessly limits the diversity of your community. Though, it might be that that's t
he intent:
"The LKML is more like a dive bar than Applebee's and that's the way they like it."
It's a style choice, and I think both the choice to utilize it and the reception to it are heavily dependent on the participant's cultural background and upbringing. A lot of people see this kind of message, applied to someone who Really Should Know Better, as a form of tough love and half-tongue-in-cheek way to place extra emphasis on an important message.
Some people can form that understanding as the basis of their relationship and continue on happily, able to both give and receive this kind of criticism. To others, it is completely foreign and incomprehensible and they don't see the tongue-in-cheek at all and just interpret it as blatant, outright hostility, which is generally not the actual subtext.
Note that the above referenced "retroactively aborted" rant was not directed at Kay. It was instead directed at some unnamed developer who had set up kernel log handling in Debian with a "dd bs=1 if=/proc/kmesg of=/var/run/klogd/kmsg", which was copying the kernel log one byte at a time to a FIFO (presumably because something reading the log was better able to deal with a FIFO than whatever strange semantics /proc/kmesg has).
Kay had then made /proc/kmesg semantics somewhat weirder, by not blocking but instead returning 0 when the available buffer wasn't big enough to read into; normally, returning 0 to a read indicates that the file has been closed, while if there simply isn't data available yet the call is supposed to block until it is.
So Linus was asking Kay to fix the issue, but also making an aside about how stupid it is to try to read one byte at a time from the kernel.
Now, there was the other incident you mention, in which Linus did get upset enough at Kay for not responding very well to a big report, but this one was not that; he was merely asking Kay to fix a bug, and cursing out some unnamed other developer for having done something as dumb as byte-at-a-time reads.
Not really defending either side here. I find Linus excessively caustic on these issues, and Kay a bit too unwilling to admit when he needs to fix a bug. I feel like Lennart gets way more hate than he deserves; he can be a bit difficult to work with sometimes, but it's crazy how some people think that he's single handedly out to destroy the Linux ecosystem.
I run a lot of software originally written by Lennart (Avahi, Pulse, systemd, heck, I recently even started using ifplugd on systems that still needed to use ifupdown but we wanted to respond properly to network cables being connected and disconnected), and find that it tends to be higher quality, more well designed, and more stable than a lot of the other code in the stack. Due to the fact that much of it changes the "traditional" way that systems worked to a very different but friendlier way, there tend to be a few integration issues along the way for early adopters; if you don't want such integration issues, it's probably best to use a stable distro like RHEL/CentOS or Debian Stable, rather than a quickly updating distro that ships code that's not yet ready for primetime like Ubuntu, Fedora, or Debian testing/unstable.
For such a smart guy, Linus was being extremely dumb in this. Ok, I admit that's my opinion.
Most people are not going to see the context of that statement. I'm sure he had his issues with the developer and the relevant code, but that doesn't excuse such a public display. All he did in that matter is make himself look bad and, to a degree, made his project look bad. As it's been stated elsewhere, such actions most likely just drives people away.
Open source software, especially the big projects, are a public facing entity. Just like any large corporation. A public lashing with this type of language should not be considered healthy for the project nor the open source movement. It only causes negativity within and towards the project with the additional issue, as you show yourself, of not always actually solving the problem.
> Most people are not going to see the context of that statement.
Most people are never going to contribute to the Linux kernel in the first place. Anyone who is likely to, is likely to 1) actually get at least some cursory knowledge about the community and the process, 2) not deal directly with Linus until they've spent a lot of time getting up to scratch, including submitting patches to sub-system maintainers, 3) get only polite responses from Linus if/when they do deal with him.
I don't think Linus has any reasons at all to be concerned about whether or not people see the context of the statement. The people who don't are not likely to affect his ability to do his job.
> All he did in that matter is make himself look bad and, to a degree, made his project look bad.
Any reasons why Linus should care?
> As it's been stated elsewhere, such actions most likely just drives people away.
Linux does not have a problem with lack of developers trying to get stuff into the kernel. If it drives away some good people, then so be it. If it makes some shitty developers think twice about ignoring repeated admonitions from Linus, then it seems to me like good use of his time.
> A public lashing with this type of language should not be considered healthy for the project nor the open source movement. It only causes negativity within and towards the project with the additional issue, as you show yourself, of not always actually solving the problem.
From my point of view, the negativity tends to show up in discussions like this, rather than in forums where people are actually concerned with these projects. The level of desire for political correctness annoys me greatly. I find a lot of the responses here far worse than the direct language Linus sometimes uses because of insinuations and underlying implications of the statements.
I got it. Since so few people are likely to see the conversation then I suppose it's okay for him to belittle someone in such a manner. If no one sees you behave badly, then all's good.
If someone involved in a public facing project open to the masses doesn't care in any way how they appear in public, then that's just a problem that will likely never go away. I suppose as long as people are willing to accept the abuse then it won't negatively affect the project that much in terms of contributions.
Another one, got it. As long as people still continue to desire to contribute then other people's behavior is totally acceptable.
So far, I have yet to see any one person's comment reach the level of the quoted statement. If you can't see that then I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. Also, you are assuming quite a lot about my level of tolerance for political correctness. Simply pointing out that someone behaves in a bad manner and suggest that maybe there was a better way is not political correctness.
Again, we shall have to agree to disagree. Projects will carry on regardless.
Not to excuse this, but this involved a person with a Finnish name who specifically CC'd Linus complaining about a perceived regression when doing things a wrong way. Note that there is even a phrase about a Finnish phenomenon, "management by perkele," referring to a militaristic managing style which steamrolls dissent with a lot of profanity.
Therefore, I doubt that a random person on LKML that wasn't CC'ing Linus to complain about the bad performance of doing things wrong would draw random fire from Linus about his ability to suck a tit.
Meanwhile, Steve Jobs was a total asshole to many people, including family, and this has been approved in his hagiography as a condition for his incredible inventions which revolutionized all mankind. If that is true for Apple then presumably it is also true for Linux?
Or maybe we should be more uniform in criticizing for people being assholes, rather than singling out Open Source with an implicit double standard.
I have no idea who these people are that you think celebrate Steve Jobs' asshole behavior. Those are not people who actually know anything about him; those are randos on crappy tech forums if they exist at all. He was an unusual person with many good and bad qualities, not all of which were factors in his success.
Usually when people cite Steve Jobs' (or Linus', or anyone's) asshole moments as being somehow constructive, it's because they wish they could act the same way towards the people around them but they can't get away with it due to their own lack of power. It's not an attractive quality for someone to have. It's one thing to be somebody's lousy manager, it's another thing entirely to be envious of lousy managers.
There's no double standard here. It's a conversation specifically about jerkish behaviour in the open source world, and merely having this discussion does not ignore jerkish behaviour in other companies, communities, etc.
Why is is that each time offensive Linus quotes are used only a handful of them show up ? Over the thousands of emails that have been exchanged in the last fifteen years there surely must exist a bigger variety.
1. very nice.
2. receiver of whatever shit (including good shit) people send.
3. productive.
4. responsible to make a critical system work.
5. a filter of bad code.
6. ...
On the other hand, I don't consider this bad. Sure, it's offensive, but he has quite a good reason to be upset - reading one byte at a time will be really slow. Could he say it in a better way? Obviously. Could you interpret his words in a less literal way? Obviously.
I don't know Linus, but he seems a good, selfless guy, with the best intentions at heart. If he's not politically correct, who the fuck cares? Sometimes I get the feeling that even murderers are more respected, as long as they talk nice.
In my opinion the insistence on political correctnes has much more chilling effect than some passionate, if insulting, words.
Whoa. Timeout. This isn't political correctness--it's basic human decency. Political correctness is replacing the use of a term for a euphemism. Even putting this in euphemistic terms should be completely unacceptable. If I told somebody at work that they were so stupid, I wasn't sure how they survived childhood, I'd be asked to leave, post haste.
I think that the OSS community (and IT community in a broader sense) has this idea that "they're just words," and so therefore, they should just be able to say what they want without consequence. But, words matter. A whole lot. Empires are built upon words. People rally around words. Words convey ideas, thoughts, feelings, and everything that goes with them. Why is rampant bullying accepted in this culture? Why is it the norm?
I'm not saying that things have to be all sunshine and rainbows. Yeah, sure, it's stupid to read a byte at a time, but you don't have to be an asshole about it. You can say, "Hey, that won't work," and be done with it. People should be treated with a modicum of decency. Remember the human, and all of that.
Contrary to this, I find myself envious of a person who can dress down another in a flagrant and creative way.
If I got dissed in such a hyperbolic way from a boss that was paying me, I would leave.
In a situation where I've toiled in a position of importance in a project I work on in my free time, and I screwed up, I think I'd be hurt if I was dismissed lightly and without creative ire. I mean, I want to know that if I screwed up, I screwed up enough for someone to admonish me creatively, since there isn't any method of management. Your tool is primarily shame, you can't suspend someone without pay from a mailing list.
Well, presumably a job well done is the primary motivation, or perhaps the recognition of your peers. It is only when you have previously achieved importance and are now in a position to have face to lose; here is where shame can come into play.
Constructive criticism is helpful and should always be the first stop on the train. But if you should already know better, or that ground has already been well-trodden, then it just sounds patronizing. This is where being told to shape the fuck up is the kind of message I would expect to receive.
What would be even worse is being ignored or shunned.
It's really not political correctness to just keep technical discussions calm and non-personal. Meanwhile, consider the chilling effect that kind of attitude has. I know quite a few skilled engineers who would just walk out if their boss talked to them like that, regardless of the merits of the underlying discussion. It's just wildly unprofessional and when Linus does that kind of thing, it sets the tone for all the other Linux-wannabe's who think "great engineers flame people!! i should flame people too!!".
In this case Linus had tried for quite some time to get the person in question to stop pushing crap. Linus eventually told him he'd stop merging his code. From that point of view, if he'd walked after being talked to like that, it'd have been seen as a benefit by many.
EDIT: I find it quite amusing that I get downvoted for a fairly dispassionate and mostly objective explanation of context, yet several of my far more subjective and controversial comments elsewhere in this thread have gotten heavily upvoted. Figures.
It's quite possible to make it clear that he'd stop accepting code without descending to abusive language. Erecting a 'safety barrier' against someone who was doing a poor job and being verbally abusive are entirely unrelated.
You say that blocking these merge requests would benefit many; so be it. Being polite about doing that would benefit the same set of people, and may others at the same time.
In my opinion, there is a huge distance between politely pointing out the faults and problems with something and sugar-coating.
And maybe this approaches the crux of the problem. It seems that there is a false dichotomy at work here.
Being polite (or, indeed, just not being verbally abusive) takes less time and energy, and is overwhelmingly more effective, than being overly abrasive.
I don't believe 'Sugar-coating' has anything to do with being polite and accurate. 'Sugar-coating' is all about being less accurate and on point.
When we're dealing with someone who repeatedly have ignored advice, instructions and admonitions and continues to cause major breakage, then yes, it would be sugar-coating to write something similar to what you suggested.
The point is that the person in question was being rude and disrespectful by continuing to ignore the instructions he'd been given in the past, and repeatedly caused a lot of very real, very heartfelt anger from a lot of people over the time he wasted for them.
Pretending not to be angry over that is very much sugar-coating to me.
Now, there are nicer ways of being direct and expressing anger, but pretending there was no anger and no valid reasons to be angry would be flat out dishonest. And I really don't think the recipient in this case had any reason to expect any civility from Linus at this point, even if others might choose less direct language.
Exactly. And I'm not impressed with the way the "professionalism" police are so quick to condemn Torvald for one justifiably angry email while giving such a conspicuous pass to a sustained pattern of passively aggressive, measurably destructive, and flatly un-collegial behavior that is the true definition of unprofessional.
In other words, there's a pretty egregious double standard being applied here. In my experience, that typically favors the kinds of abusive personalities who have discovered some easily-exploited aspect of the social system to simultaneously provide cover for their own bad behavior while limiting their target's ability to retaliate.
If I were on a team stuck with this guy, and required by professional norms to bite my tongue, I can safely say I'd take supreme satisfaction in seeing such a nasty employee get this severely excoriated. And make no mistake, this isn't about "feedback" or "criticism". It's about driving the guy out of the shop in a way that provides a suitable catharsis for everyone who has had to put up with his actual and sustained unprofessionalism.
Of course, tf this were an arbitrary, unjustified, or otherwise baseless response, I could see how it would be hugely damaging to Torvald's authority, and the trust he relies on. But in a case like this, the opposite seems true. And if it puts others who present similar problems on notice, so much the better.
I don't think "political correctness" has anything to do with suggesting that someone is so braindead that they ought to have starved to death. Rather, you appear to be using it as a strawman to discredit the notion that we should treat people like decent human beings.
As for his "passion", I don't think that resorting to public humiliation is any way to lead a project. Rather, it sounds like an item out of that "How To Minimize Employee Retention" article that made the rounds last week.
Linus certainly has many good qualities that have contributed to the success of Linux. He's diligent, he's technical, and he's great at solving problems. But it's important to acknowledge that Linux has thrived despite his abrasive outbursts, not because of them.
> But it's important to acknowledge that Linux has thrived despite his abrasive outbursts, not because of them.
No, you don't really know that! These outbursts may bother you and other people but it is also possible that they have been very, very beneficial to the community. Like it or not, they are a form of humor to many people and that may improve team cohesiveness.
I for one think that the reaction to this particular retroactive-abortion-outburst as "not treating people as human beings" is taking things absolutely way too seriously.
For most people the difference between being a complete jerk and a normal guy is simply what they say.
Would you tolerate a manager who talked to you this way? I wouldn't. Not even Linus. And then I'd point out all the pretty crappy code Linus had checked in.
Then you'd point out all the pretty crappy code Linus had checked in? That would be your, what, revenge? And a way of showing how not to be a jerk?
I don't think Linus would care. Everyone makes mistakes. Linus is a gatekeeper of sorts and he has to "point out crappy code" whether people like his language or not. The outside world just needs to decide how seriously they take these outbursts. I don't think there's any evil dimension in that.
There are certainly evil outcomes when potential contributors actively avoid the Linux kernel and/or other open source projects because the culture can be so hostile.
It's a double loss. It makes the code weaker and less innovative, and it makes the culture seem unappealing to outsiders.
You might not think that's significant. But how can you know what you're missing by not being more exclusive?
Consider: open source could be set up on a semi-formal apprentice/mentor basis. It could easily become a way for programmers at all levels to develop professional standing.
Code on a GitHub profile is not the same as being able to say "I worked on X and was mentored by Y and Z."
And "You're a moron, fuck off" is maybe not the best way to create a culture of collaborative support.
I don't see any evidence of a huge number of people, that could otherwise contribute anything meaningful, avoiding Linux kernel because it's "hostile". They avoid it because they simply don't have anything meaningful to contribute, or are not able to contribute with the level of quality required in Linux kernel, or they are unable to handle the inevitable criticism.
Also, I'm pretty sure Linus has never used those words to tell people to get lost. Don't invent stuff. He might use strong language but in many cases it is humor or he knows the receiver personally.
You're talking about the Linux Kernel, one of the most productive cultures of collaborative support ever created by humans. If you're going to argue against success, you're going to need to bring a lot of evidence.
Whenever I hear complaints about Political Correctness, I'm reminded of this:
> Disdain for "political correctness" is often positioned as a concern that some important truth is not being spoken for fear of offending someone. But that concern is nothing but smoke and mirrors. To invoke "political correctness" is really to be concerned about loss of power and privilege. It is about disappointment that some "ism" that was ingrained in our society, so much that citizens of privilege could express the bias through word and deed without fear of reprisal, has been shaken loose. Charging "political correctness" generally means this: "I am comfortable with my privilege. I don't want to have to question it. I don't want to have to think before I speak or act. I certainly don't wish to inconvenience myself for the comfort of lesser people (whoever those people may be--women, people of color, people with disabilities, etc.)"
* Whenever I hear complaints about Political Correctness, I'm reminded of this:*
I really hope you aren't. Posts that recast and interpret someone else's opinions like this are toxic to any political discussion. The framing makes the topic into an caricature you can easily oppose all while whispering in your ear "this is what's _REALLY_ going on."
Maybe you don't think this interpretation is wrong. Maybe you think I (like they) just can't realize or admit it's right. Maybe you don't think it's such a bad thing if this armchair psychologist is just a bit wrong. But have you ever seen someone post about how stupid social justice is when the thing they're trash talking isn't social justice at all? Have you never had someone disagree with you assert that you believe something you don't? Posts like that are exactly how it happens.
Wait.. but what the guy did (whoever is) is really stupid; of the unbelievable type..
Now i imagine that Linus suffer a tremendous pressure to not let any bug pass, cause everybody in the world would eat his liver if there's a smallest security hole in the Kernel
Millions of lines of C code, that run in every gadget we can think of, the guy is stressed out; and you have a "code terrorist" do deal with?!
Also Linus has a strong personality, everybody knows that; so i dont see this as something bad as its being painted here; And we have to take the cultural background into account; i prefer the German/Nordic tought/transparent way than the hypocrisy/"you are great, but i will stab you when you turn your back" kind of culture (and im from a relaxed kind of culture)
Linus is great enough, and known enough, to be allowed some idiosyncrasies. If you follow LKML long enough you realize these hard language comments do not carry one tenth the negative message a primary read would convey.
Note that this happens because you can read it with knowledge of the writer's personality. If it were an anonymous author, your impression would be perfectly correct.
No, I know that the standard reply here is that no one is above being polite. I disagree. This is a Linus' flaw, of course, but one we can live with in the context of his hugely positive net contribution.
It takes an extreme lack of understanding of how people actually use English to believe that Linus was actually advocating murder with the message he made, no matter the literal content.
If you seriously believe he was advocating murder, I presume you have reported the matter to the police, as in that case it is a criminal offence.
Be reasonable. Do you seriously read that meaning into Linus' message? Couldn't it have an interpretation other than a literal one? I know a lot gets lost in written format, but ... come on!
I'm wondering what kind of world you would like instead? Would you like those mailing lists to be an environment similar to what you have in the mass media, where political correctness and hypocrisy is rampant, and anytime someone crosses the boundary we use words like 'hate'?
"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?"
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495
then I don't think I'd ever contribute to the LKML.
(p.s. the irony of posting such an offensive post by starring out the u in fuck... does he not see the irony?)