This Just In - Linus Torvalds Is A Big Mean Poopyhead



  • In the past couple of days, two Linux kernel developers have announced that they will no longer contribute to the Linux kernel because of a "toxic" and "unprofessional" environment.

    Based on some of the interviews I've read over the years, I always thought Linus Torvalds was an Atwood-grade dickwad, But I came across this post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List and I really can't say I completely disagree with him.

    OK, it's a little harsh, and I still think he's a dickwad, but, come on, it's not like you didn't already know that when you volunteered to do Linux development. And it's a mailing list, FFS. It's some guy you've never met, except maybe for 5 minutes at some Linux nerd conference, and who's 3000 miles away. It's not like you're an employee of his, you depend on him for a paycheck and he's in your face.

    Jeez. unbunch your panties and get over it.

    Filed Under: Apparently Finlandians like to curse a lot



  • You should read the Slashdot comments on this one.

    There's a bunch of Slashdot aspies arguing that Linux is a better OS because Linus is a complete dickhead. That one blew me away. I mean, there's delusional, then there's cloud cuckoo-land, then there's that.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @blakeyrat said:

    You should read the Slashdot comments on this one.

    I tried, but my hosts.txt file keeps resolving it to 0.0.0.0. Looks like that entry went in sometime around Feb 10th, 2014. Weird.

    Has anyone posted the story to Soylent News?


  • BINNED

    There is no such thing as interviewing to get the top talent in open source, with a project the size of the Linux kernel the strategy to weed off has been to shout: some guys are joking among themselves, then suddenly she comes in and starts lecturing them to behave themselves

    Lets see if the Polite Linux fork gets any traction, and surpasses the quality (as claimed)





  • I'm not a particularly sensitive person, but that was a rather extreme reaction from Linus.

    Also Sarah can go shove that whiny "waaah violence 🍼" shit up her ass, holy fuck.



  • I like how "he's so fat he might squish people without noticing" turned into "COMMIT ACTS OF VIOLENT ASSAULT" in her head.



  • This is going to turn into another gamergate thread isn't it.

    Fuck this forum.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    I read Sarah's blog post and it was mostly reasonable. Not sure I'd have made the same choice in her position, but I can understand that people may not want to work in a environment such as the Linux kernel community. No bullshit SJW accusations, nothing funny to see here, move along...



  • Well and more to the point it demonstrably does not create a better product. There's nothing Linux does better than NT, a good amount of things it does significantly worse (like rebooting crashed drivers) and guess what? Microsoft employees are professionals.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election

    Well, we'll have to agree to disagree there. But at least we agree that this huge discussion around this blog post is bullshit.

    BTW: The only Microsoft employee I know is a belgium'ing asshole and no better than Linus.


  • BINNED

    It is open source, if community is unhappy they have all the right to fork. If the fork works better than original (and it has happened before so many times), all the better for the users, and we learn one thing about a better governance. Making fuss over it though, that should be left to closed source software :) where there is no option but to rant.

    @blakeyrat said:

    This is going to turn into another gamergate thread isn't it.

    I hardly see the relation here, she does not accuse any one of sexism. Just poisenous environment (and she is right).

    @blakeyrat said:

    Fuck this forum.

    I like your persona, please never change always remain correct


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    Actually, the "you're too nice, you let people walk over you" is what (rightfully) turned into "you should commit acts of violence and verbally abuse people" in her head.



  • "you should verbally abuse people" is not the same as "you shouldn't have such low standards for what pull requests you handle".


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    It's not, but "you should verbally abuse people" is pretty similar to

    create some real threat: be frank
    with contributors and sometimes swear a bit



  • @Fox said:

    >be frank with contributors and sometimes swear a bit

    If that's the same as

    @Fox said:

    you should verbally abuse people

    then I really don't understand English at all.


  • Winner of the 2016 Presidential Election Banned

    That part by itself is not the same. It's vague on its own. The part before it is what makes it more similar to "you should verbally abuse people"



  • Or maybe it's a joke.

    Like this:

    Or you could do something really dangerous, like algebra homework.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Spanky587 said:

    a "toxic" and "unprofessional" environment.

    Maybe they should use Discourse. As a bonus, they can use it as a bug tracker too. 🍥


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    If she can't fit in, she should leave. The environment shouldn't adjust itself to suit you. Adjust to the working environment or fuck off. There are other places to work. If you can't fit in anywhere maybe you need to look in the mirror and ask what the fuck is wrong with you.

    @blakeyrat said:

    This is going to turn into another gamergate thread isn't it.
    Could be worse. Could be the vampire turnpike thread. There is some real idiotic and humorless shit going on there.


  • BINNED

    @DogsB said:

    humorless shit

    You are reading it wrong ... it's hilarious.



  • If a change results in user programs breaking, it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. How hard can this be to understand?

    Oh look, it's that stupid philosophy again.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Well and more to the point it demonstrably does not create a better product. There's nothing Linux does better than NT, a good amount of things it does significantly worse (like rebooting crashed drivers) and guess what? Microsoft employees are professionals.

    Maybe the drivers shouldn't crash in the first place? Windows thinking that crashing is a normal state of computing.



  • @anonymous234 said:

    Oh look, it's that stupid philosophy again.

    Don't Microsoft do a similar thing?


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @Luhmann said:

    @DogsB said:
    humorless shit

    You are reading it wrong ... it's hilarious.

    Beating a dead horse gets dull after a while


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Microsoft employees are professionals.

    Wooo! They get paid to work on Microsoft's software! Who'd have thought it…



  • Hence the "again".



  • @Spanky587 said:

    I always thought Linus Torvalds was an Atwood-grade dickwad

    Atwood pretends to be nice, but then bans you when you disagree with him. I think that's worse.



  • @hifi said:

    Maybe the driversFlash shouldn't crash in the first place? WindowsBasically every browser ever thinking that crashing is a normal state of computing.

    FTFY



  • People still use Flash? 😕





  • “I didn’t like Steve Jobs too much,” he said. “Who would want to work for a prick?”

    Could it be a ... a cultural shift?



  • The linux kernel team seems to be a boys club. "Work hard party hard", cue Michael Ironside throwing goodies to his soldiers in Starship Troopers. She wanted it to be a more silicon valley-esque "yay inclusiveness" "everyone deserves respect" type of place. Since she couldn't adapt the environment to fit her style and she couldn't adapt herself to fit its style, she packed up and left. Fair enough.

    Not everything needs to be like github. There are different styles of management, with different strengths and weaknesses.

    And if the kernel team is truly that awful, then enough people should have left by now and formed their own, much more successful, branch. Since that didn't happen, I'll conclude Linus must be doing something right.



  • I think he knows he's harsh, and just believes that it is necessary to get things done.

    That sounds suspiciously like Trump's claim that America can't afford to be PC

    I have to agree with that commenter. There's assertive, and there's unnecessarily insults all the time.

    Would it have changed that much to say

    No, we NEVER break compatibility, and that's not up for discussion, your patch is wrong because your entire approach is wrong.

    instead of

    Shut the fuck up, your patch is wrong, and I don't ever want to hear that kind of obvious
    garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again.



  • @cartman82 said:

    And if the kernel team is truly that awful, then enough people should have left by now and formed their own, much more successful, branch. Since that didn't happen, I'll conclude Linus must be doing something right.

    The problem is network effects: the value of a project increases exponentially with the people who are using it.

    Like how everybody uses Facebook because everybody uses Facebook, or how I use YouTube despite it being broken in many ways because the (few) competing sites just don't have the same amount of content.

    To get people to abandon Linus and join your own Linux project you'd need to do it much, much better than him.



  • Not exactly. An imaginary competing kernel team could just take the current kernel code and take off from there. At that point, all advantages linux proper has, they'd have as well. So moving forwards, If they did even a little bit better than Linus, people could switch over with little cost (presuming sjw-kernel would remain backwards compatible for some time).

    This is not unheard off in the OSS world. Examples: io.js forking off node.js, mariadb forking off mysql, libreoffice forking off openoffice. All these forks succeeded by being slightly better in some way than the base.

    With facebook and youtube the problem is people have stuff invested in the platform that can't easily be moved to a different platform (friends, reputation, etc). With software, as long as versions are compatible, network effect is much less pronounced.



  • Why do you hold this bizarre false dichotomy that "if someone doesn't like obnoxious SJWs they MUST BE GAMERGATE"?! This entire fucking thread contains exactly zero other posts with the words "video games" in them. :wtf:


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    Pretty much any time someone mentions women complaining on the internet it becomes a gamergate thread. I usually mute around that point as well, I just don't post advertising it.



  • To me, "women complaining on the internet" -ne "crazy people complaining whining about ridiculous things on the internet" though.

    Although I, too, would probably just avoid a gamergate thread anyways because I really don't care.


  • I survived the hour long Uno hand

    Sure, but either one side shows up saying "this is why women can't speak up online because death threats" to which the other side replies "OMG ethics in journalism", or the other side shows up saying "lol she's just like Anita, what a bitch" and then the first side says "OMG death threats". I generally mute to prevent myself from falling into the former trap.

    ETA: The more I look at it, I think I've found and fallen for a third trap ()-.- I won't delete now, but know that I am aware I've been 🎣'd



  • Ethics in rape isn't a joking matter.


  • BINNED

    @cartman82 said:

    Ethics in rape isn't a joking matter.

    but it might be a laughing matter?


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @Luhmann said:

    @cartman82 said:
    Ethics in rape isn't a joking matter.

    but it might be a laughing matter?

    Not when they decide to charge by hour instead of fixed rate. Do you think raping is free? The union won't stand for this. Won't stand for this at all.



  • What is gamergate?



  • An online store for games!



  • Then what's the big deal? Gamergate sounds quite nice.



  • You keep typo-ing ...


  • FoxDev

    @aliceif said:

    You keep typo-ing ...

    CURSES! my secret identity is revealed!



  • @DogsB said:

    If she can't fit in, she should leave.

    Well sure, fine. And she did, so. Congratulations?

    @DogsB said:

    The environment shouldn't adjust itself to suit you.

    That doesn't make it immune to criticism.

    @DogsB said:

    Adjust to the working environment or fuck off. There are other places to work.

    True, but Linus is asking for volunteers, then treating them like shit when they show up. This has two effects:

    • He's undoubtedly losing tons of potential contributors who would like to work on Linux, but don't want to be treated like shit

    • He's creating a monoculture in the Linux kernel development community where treating people like shit is the norm-- because everybody else left.

    Basically, he's created the DOTA2 of software development projects. He's incentivized being an asshole, and so the only people participating are assholes.

    Now obviously Linus is ok with that. And right now he has enough people who are assholes to I guess keep the project going. (Although, like I said, it's not improving nearly as fast as its closed-source competitors, and so if Linus ever spent a few hours outside his reality distortion bubble he might be surprised by what he sees.)

    @DogsB said:

    If you can't fit in anywhere maybe you need to look in the mirror and ask what the fuck is wrong with you.

    Wow, you went from zero to asshole in ten seconds.

    Think about this: what if you really love open source kernel work, but don't want to be treated like an asshole? Maybe nothing's wrong with you, except there's nowhere for you to go because the assholes took it all over.

    I mean, it's like the Wikipedia problem: what if I want to write an encyclopedia article and post it on the Internet, but I don't want to deal with dickholes? Well. Tough shit. There's no place left. The Wikipedia dickholes have taken it all over.

    @DogsB said:

    Could be worse. Could be the vampire turnpike thread.

    Is that the thread I created like a year ago about lazy drivers cutting corners? Yeah I muted that shit ages ago.


    Why the FUCK doesn't Chrome's dictionary have the word "incentivized" in it? What a piece of shit. I'm sensitive enough about typos in my writing without the software being an asshole and telling me I got shit wrong when I didn't.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @DogsB said:

    Beating a dead horse gets dull after a while

    Not if it's a trans horse. That'll never get old.

    @Yamikuronue said:

    Pretty much any time someone mentions women complaining on the internet it becomes a gamergate thread.

    It goes like this:

    • Woman voicing opinion / complaining (there's a spectrum, we won't get into it)
    • Someone posts "great, women bitching again"
    • Someone else says "let's not SJWGGBBQ this all up"
    • First persons says it isn't GG
    • Second person says it is GG-related
    • Random people with "GG" on Google Alert see a random forum is talking about GG we need to go defend it
    • People pile into the thread to argue what GG is and isn't, and what is and isn't GG
    • The thread meta-singularity collapses upon itself, and becomes a GG thread
    • Sane people mute and exit

    I'm on post 39 of 48 at the moment. Let's see how the next 9 posts go.

    Now on 48/48... looks like "intentionally trolling about Gamergate" is another possible outcome.

    :hanzo: Then @blakeyrat comes out with 49 ON TOPIC. What a world.


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