[oreganoz]

You can still be direct without having to act out or treat people like they're idiots.

It is not impossible to narrow down the complaints without being rude. Most people do that just fine, with way larger projects than his kernel.

His behaviour is just unnecessary and distracting. It's almost as if he does it for publicity or shock value. Maybe that contributes to his success, but it shouldn't.

I find it weird that people try to defend him rather than acknowledge it is just one of his character flaws. People aren't perfect, and neither is he. Doesn't take from his achievements but acting like he's in the right to behave this way is just enabling him. If people want to emulate him, they should look at the good and leave the asshole behaviour behind.

[beagle3]

> Most people do that just fine, with way larger projects than his kernel.

What are your examples? Please qualify project size by number of contributors and their organizational and cultural diversity.

According to [0], in 2015-2016 there were over 5,000 contributors sending patches, representing over 500 organizations (and likely, something like 50 countries/cultures/languages). Linus, through the LKML, corresponds with many of them, and has a small number of deputies. He is not paying any of these contributors, so he can't actually fire them, unlike e.g. Zuck, Jobs or Gates which, according to rumour, are/were all much less polite than Linus to their subordinates.

> It's almost as if he does it for publicity or shock value

He most definitely does, and uses it effectively. When he does, he mostly attacks ideas, not people. I've been following the LKML very intermittently, but my impression is that he is mostly kind and thoughtful in his answers while being direct. Those times that get to HN/Slashdot/Reddit/common-knowledge are few and far between, and mostly the 3rd or so response to the same thing (though, it has happened before on a "first offence").

> People aren't perfect, and neither is he. Doesn't take from his achievements but acting like he's in the right to behave this way is just enabling him. If people want to emulate him, they should look at the good and leave the asshole behaviour behind.

No one said he was perfect. Some of us believe that it is effective; call it "necesary evil", but it's one of the very few management tools that he has - basically, refusing a merge, and voicing an opinion.

I eagerly await your examples, as my experience is that people with much more management tools at their disposal are not better in this respect than Linus. Especially those examples (of "most people") that coordinate submission from 5,000 people mostly interacting directly with them.

[0] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/blog/the-top-10-developers-a...

[oreganoz]

Well, look up what companies like IBM, Google, Amazon, etc. are doing with thousands of workers and all the organizational and cultural diversity you want.

I don't get what is "necessary" with his insults. Would delivering the message calmly not be understood?

There's nothing to make anyone believe it's an "effective" strategy. Some people are deterred from contributing because this guy can't act professionally. The only reason people still want to contribute is because of the importance of the project (aka thousands of projects depend on a good linux kernel).

He can accomplish the same things, without going ballistic, in shorter time and with the respect of others earned. It's still using the same few management tools and he can retain his bad temper for when a situation actually calls for it (which is almost never). Blowing everything out of proportion is crying wolf.

Maybe he is not that bad of a person to work with. Hopefully lower than how bad Gates and Jobs were. But he sure seems to hide it well since that's all I ever hear about him. But I guess bad publicity is still publicity.

[beagle3]

> Well, look up what companies like IBM, Google, Amazon,

Does any of these companies run a team with 5,000 people contributing to the same codebase?

Do you have it on good authority that most of the people in IBM, Google, and Amazon that manage those 5,000 people teams are nice and polite? Because I've heard a lot about Amazon to the contrary. Do consider your selection bias: You know everything Linus tells the world, you only hear about Ballmer's chair throwing, but not any other profanities,

> Would delivering the message calmly not be understood?

Yes, he tries/tried occasionally. The wikipedia entry for LKML has more info.

> He can accomplish the same things, without going ballistic, in shorter time and with the respect of others earned

That goes counter to Linus' experience, and a few other people's.

> It's still using the same few management tools and he can retain his bad temper for when a situation actually calls for it (which is almost never). Blowing everything out of proportion is crying wolf.

Are you on the LKML? He almost never does it. You hear about it when he does. He is not shy with criticism, and he never sugarcoats anything, sure, but he goes ballistic very rarely.

> But he sure seems to hide it well since that's all I ever hear about him. But I guess bad publicity is still publicity.

You admit that you have no idea what happens between the times you hear of him. You implicitly say your model is "IBM, Amazon and Google", in which you hear nothing of how disagreements are handled, and none of which have the scale and diversity of the LKML in a single team.

It is my impression that your beliefs are not grounded in data or even anecdata. It does not make them wrong, and I'm not saying you are wrong. I'm saying you have not made any convincing argument to say you are right.

[gkya]

> Especially those examples (of "most people") that coordinate submission from 5,000 people mostly interacting directly with them.

This is wrong. He has said himself on video multiple times that his correspondents are the subsytem maintainers, which are way fewer in number (a handful of people).

[beagle3]

He is on the LKML[0], and does respond to many people, not just the handful of maintainers. I'm sure he doesn't read the entirety of the LKML (hundreds of messages per day), and for sure he has a private channel (mailing list or otherwise) with subsystem maintainers, but he DOES correspond with a lot more than that handful, and when I was reading the LKML, he would even occasionally respond to first-time posters.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_mailing_list

[vidarh]

It is very rare to see him treat people like they're idiots.

There's a very fine but very clear line in a lot of his rants between very harsh language used against solutions he doesn't like, but without making it personal, like in this case where he's attacking the rationale, and attacking the C standard, but is very explicitly avoiding attacking the people (even taking pains to point out he's not suggesting people on standard bodies in general are incompetent). The closest he comes to attacking people directly here is when he calls people who use -fstrict-aliasing "fcking morons" when* they use -fstrict-aliasing, so even that is conditional on behaviour rather than assigning a trait to the person in general. You'll sometimes see him making wide-ranging accusations about general categories of people (e.g. I remember a rant about people who think it's a good idea to do reads a byte at a time), but rarely about specific people.

On the rare occasions when he attacks people directly, I have yet to seen an example which doesn't fall in the category of either attacking persistent repeat offenders who has refused to listen to more polite rebukes (his attack on Kai Sivers being the most obvious example [1] - notably while very direct and personal, that rant was also comparatively civil in terms of actual language), or attacks that fall in the "I know you know so much better, or you wouldn't be in the trusted position you're in" category (his attack on Mauro Carvalho Chehab for a change that broke userspace [2] falls in that category; Mauro has contributed to the kernel since 2005, and have worked on it as his job for years - in this case Mauro took it on his chin, apologised for the breakage and the discussion remained strictly on topic on the technical issues afterwards).

Frankly if I'd gotten a dressing down by Linus in that category, I'd print it out and frame it, because harsh as they may be, I don't know of any case of people having gotten those without having demonstrated time and time again that they should know better first. You don't see him ranting like that at beginners. You see him ranting like that when he's disappointed because he has high expectations of you. Doesn't mean people can't get upset by them, of course, but it changes the nature of it quite a bit.

Note that I'm not saying that it's a good thing- I'm sure there'd be more civil ways to express that too -, just that I think the importance of these rants is exaggerated.

[1] http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01331.html

[2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75