[fermienrico]

Curious - why do people get offended by Torvalds? If you know anything about the guy, his rants are a caricature. It's like going for a Tarantino movie and expecting no violence. You're going to get violence. And, it's going to be excessive, over-the-top, ridiculously offensive that there is no other explanation than to treat it as comedy. Any other attempt to explain Linus is flapping wings in a vaccuum. If I was on the receiving end of it, I would play along.

[ivraatiems]

No, this is like going to Quentin Tarantino and saying "hey Quentin, here's that work you need for your film, which I did for free," and him screaming at you for not doing your free work exactly how he wanted.

Linus has often been a dick. Being offended at being abused for asking a question or doing a relatively normal thing is reasonable. (He's gotten better, recently, because even he acknowledges it's harmed the project.)

[inimino]

Nobody is doing free work for Linus. People including Linus are doing work on Linux which everyone is allowed to use for free. And which most people on Earth have benefitted from, directly or indirectly, to at least some extent.

Not getting paid for your work does not automatically entitle you to see your work used, or to ignore the standards put in place by those who would use it.

And yes, if everyone in Hollywood tried to contribute to every Tarantino movie, and showed up and didn't follow instructions, he'd probably yell at some folks too.

[fermienrico]

People still work with him and he is successful. From what I can see (I've never dealt with Linux community), people that work with him know what to ignore and what to listen to.

Moreover, I guess I have a different way to deal with offensive people even if they were serious - to ignore and scoff it off. I would never feel "offended" ever. Offense is taken and it is a choice. That's how I operate but your mileage may vary.

[ben0x539]

> People still work with him

That's part of the problem. A bunch of people effectively didn't have a choice but to put up with this sort of communication style because their job required them to interact with the Linux community.

> Offense is taken and it is a choice.

This is a meaningless platitude. Whether you take offense or not, sometimes the most productive response is to tell someone their behavior is counterproductive, instead of stoically shrugging it off.

[fermienrico]

This is the surefire way to create conflict where there could have been a peaceful resolution. Learning to tolerate and ignore is a blessing IMO. If it gets excessive and affect's people's lives, jobs, personal threats, yes - that's not excusable.

It turns out when you ignore people, they get the point. You don't need to bark back at dogs. Keep your head up, mind your own business and move on.

[ben0x539]

Not acknowledging it when someone's causing problems under the banner of "taking offense is a choice" is definitely a surefire way to make problems worse, too.

[nonotreally]

I agree with this. Just ignore him. Use him for what he's good at.

The guy is good a computers. He's less good a humans. Act accordingly.

[staticassertion]

Torvalds solved low hanging fruit problems (reimplementing a version control system with a permissive license, implementing a toy OS with a permissive license) when computer science and programming were niche skills, and for that he's become a highly paid celebrity with a cult following that forgives him for anything. It's so embarrassing to see people celebrate abuse years after the fact, I honestly cringe at these threads. I pity people who relish the idea of being attacked by someone they respect and I wish we could all just move past this dumb hero worship culture.

P.S. please add a (2012) to the topic, this is NINE years old who cares.

[phist_mcgee]

But what purpose does that antagonism serve? I fundamentally reject the way linus treats people, and I think him hiding behind his maintainer position is even more petty. A lord of his kingdom, rude and sarcastic to everyone who comes and visits. I will never accept someone as hostile as he is in my workplace, and I think the only way he gets away with it, is by surrounding himself with other people who express themselves just as indecorously as himself.

What a shame.

[fermienrico]

> But what purpose does that antagonism serve?

It's a good question. I am not advocating this behavior, just trying to circumvent his rants and see them as comedy.

Of course, the better choice is to not do this in the first place.

[andrewzah]

Reminder that Linus is part of the reason you and I have a job in the first place.

How many people contribute to the linux kernel? Let’s see how quickly you get jaded after dealing with people refusing to read basic instructions.

Also, reminder that not every contributor is desirable. Linus has a specific vision and criteria for his project. It’s true he could use kinder language, but I imagine he gets fed up having to deal with this sort of stuff over -decades-.

[phist_mcgee]

Jaded is not an excuse for abuse. That's like a parent saying that their children's bad behaviour is an excuse to abuse them. It is not ok to treat people that way, and no amount of being fed up justifies it.

Also I do not accept the idea that my job exists because of him, so I have to have deference. Again, this is an abusive way to look at things, and puts people on pedestals that they deserve respect, but we do not deserve it in turn.

[andrewzah]

I said part of the reason, not the sole reason. His projects have had immeasurable impact on computing, and it’s arrogant to dismiss that because you don’t like how he conducts himself.

He can definitely do better regarding his language, that I agree with. But this specific instance isn’t even against the contributor but against GitHub.

“they deserve respect, but we do not deserve it in turn”

Nobody deserves respect. You may be referring to basic decency towards each other. He earned respect with his work and maintainership over the years and decades. Abusive language towards contributors is not appropriate, but that doesn’t mean they -deserve- respect either. The first step to becoming respected is learning to RTFM and submit patches according to how a project expects them. And for basically every rant of his I’ve seen, it was directed at someone who 100% should’ve known better, not random new submitters.

[phist_mcgee]

You are 100% perpetuating the culture of 'deserved abuse' that I spoke about. People DO deserve respect. Everyone does, and I will assume someone is a good person until proven otherwise. People like yourself and linus create toxic communities of insular looking people hurling insults outward to people looking, and feel justified in their behaviour because they have trod the golden path to 'earning the right to not be belittled'.

[andrewzah]

No, people deserve common decency. Respect is earned. I think we're going to disagree on terminology here. I do not think every person is automatically worthy of respect, until proven otherwise.

Linus has already apologized for his past outbursts, and I do not condone abusive language to people.

[paulmd]

> Reminder that Linus is part of the reason you and I have a job in the first place.

yikes, operating systems existed before linus.

[andrewzah]

Imagine reducing the impact of linux/git/etc to merely an operating system.

[ben0x539]

Don't you think we'd largely have palette-swapped jobs doing basically the same thing on some BSD derivative instead?

[andrewzah]

Maybe, maybe not. There are infinite hypothetical realities, so I do not find it productive to muse on them.

The reality is such that Linus wrote Linux, people adopted it, and here we are.

[ben0x539]

Getting jaded is a good excuse for taking a step back and reevaluating your life choices, and maybe finding another hobby. It's not a good excuse for going out of your way to hurt the feelings of people who aren't measuring up to your standards.

[andrewzah]

I don’t disagree that Linus has gone way overboard when chewing people out. The language in some of his rants is completely inappropriate, and he has since apologized for that. But if someone who 100% knew better did something they shouldn’t have, sometimes getting chewed out is appropriate.

“maybe finding another hobby”

It’s very easy to sit here in our armchairs and go “yeah he should just abandon his project”. I’m not sure how any of us would react to one of our projects growing to the scale linux has, but blithely suggesting one should just swap careers or hobbies (since programming is -just- a hobby apparently) is not productive at all.

[ben0x539]

We're talking about the point where someone has become jaded enough that they can't help themselves from lashing out at well-intentioned strangers. That's a fairly advanced level of jaded. I definitely consider myself jaded but I probably have a long way to go before I get there. I'm not saying you have to retrain into a different career path, but I think at that point it's not unreasonable to reflect on whether what you're doing with your spare time is really making you happy, and whether you wouldn't be better off for purely selfish reason if you gave up on project management and idk wrote some scuba software.

> But if someone who 100% knew better did something they shouldn’t have, sometimes getting chewed out is appropriate.

I don't think this is unqualifiedly the case, and I very much don't think this is the case in a situation where a hapless stranger's transgressions only go as far as wasting five minutes of your time by making an unacceptable pull request.

[andrewzah]

"whether you wouldn't be better off for purely selfish reason if you gave up on project management and idk wrote some scuba software"

It's selfish to assume that because you might be happy doing that, then all people should do that. Maybe he wants to work on Linux? Nobody is forced to contribute to or work on his project.

[ben0x539]

Torvalds ca. 2012, via callous and hyperbolically insulting comments, makes people feel bad to get what he wants. We can argue about whether he gets to do that because his job is very important, or because we also want what he wants (eg high quality commit messages), or because people shouldn't interact with Linux if they can't deal with that, or whether it's an effective way to get what he wants, but at the end of the day the mechanism is still making people feel bad.

I think the negative effect that has or could be reasonably expected to have on the subjects of his comments is enormous and fundamentally unjustifiable in the context of running an open source project or a community. I sort of get it when it's aimed at an adversarial higher-order entity like NVidia (or Github for not letting you turn off pull requests on your repos), but absolutely not with human beings, no matter how frustrating it is to have to work with people who aren't fluent in your processes.

I think we should try to be kinder than that, and I don't think being kinder would have stopped Torvalds from getting useful patches out of contributors.