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 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.