This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person and that probably doesn’t come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of all me. The fact that I then misread people and don’t realize (for years) how badly I’ve judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good.
This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry.
The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my
behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development
entirely.I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately.
Actions speak louder than words, so we’ll see if this sudden realisation will lead to anything tangible.
It’s true that it’s “just words” right now, but it’s still hard to say things like this about yourself.
And: It were just (wrong) words to beginn with – so apologizing with words for words seems all right to me.
I am quite surprised by this apology after so many years of being abrasive. I am very curious about exactly what was said to him this time to trigger this sudden change of heart? Maybe he got compared to someone he detested (like trump) and decided to change himself?
Anyways, this made me think about the time he gave nvidia the middle finger:
https://www.wired.com/2012/06/torvalds-nvidia-linux/
That was unprofessional, but it still reflects the way a whole lot of FOSS people feel about proprietary hardware.
He’s a practical man, and his comparison to when he had to take some time off to develop git, and referencing the miscommunication that lead to the rescheduling, leads me to believe it must have been an argument of practicality that lead to this. He wants kernel development to improve and it’s come to the point where he thinks it’s he needs to change for the better.
kwan_e,
Maybe, but he’s been posting ugly hate filled rants for a long time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linusrants/
The practice us using hateful insults was never practical. So why now? I get the impression it is at least partly an emotional response to something. Does anyone here follow the linux forums more closely and have a better clue?
Regardless, linux echelons have grown under this flame-war culture, so I wonder how much can actually change? For better or for worse, linux is much bigger than linus now with many other individuals who are just as stubborn as him.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/lennart-poetterings-linus-torvalds-ran…
There’s not much I agree with Poettering on but this is one such thing.
Hi,
I have no idea; but I’d assume it started with Linus getting confused about when/where the maintainer’s summit was, deciding he’d rather skip it (see https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/ksummit-discuss/2018-Sep… ); and then facing a backlash of people telling him that’s not good enough that probably led to people close to Linus mentioning other aspects of his behaviour and/or responsibilities as a figurehead.
– Brendan
The big F.U.! Or a middle finger or two. Or “P!$$ off!”.
Honestly, I’ve mostly cheered Linus when he threw out insults to individuals or parties, when they failed to “get it done, already!”. Major architecture changes require major planning, which holds up major parties. If you’re going to bring a big idea to the leader, you’d better have big resources at your disposal to make that big idea happen.
nVidia tried to do that with their proprietary driver, but they failed to account for 60% of the corner cases, leading to a crap-tonne of panicked kernels. Linus’s GBMF (Great Big Middle Finger) motivated nVidia to clean up their Linux act, along with their Linux driver.
That moment was a breath of fresh air for me. One geeky nerd told a major company that they had new challengers to support, if they (the company) wanted to maintain their reputation. And the geeky nerd did it in a really ill-mannered way. nVidia may have regarded him as ill-mannered, but he knew how to turn such a low reputation into an “I can drag you down with me” statement.
Yes, he has offended parties and individuals who didn’t deserve such vitriol. Then again, so did Terry Davis. So did Steve Jobs. But Linus Torvalds is now owning the fact, with the implication that he wants forgiveness for (some of) his earlier offenses.
My hope is that Linus finds a way to avoid personal attacks on undeserving individuals. Beyond that, he can continue being Linus Torvalds as often as he deems necessary. It’s one ingredient in his leadership that has made Linux so much more than a college kid’s side project.
Honestly, not believing this is good.
Coders emotional, code shouldn’t.
Edited 2018-09-18 02:43 UTC
it’s part of the movement away from meritocracy https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/9go8cp/linus_torvalds_daught…
Oh good, more nonsense from the scared white guys on reddit. Isn’t that special.
no racism pls
Merely mentioning colour is not racism.
It’s the assumption that anyone who supports meritocracy must be a white guy that seems just a tad “racist” to me.
I know a fair few women and minorities (not that Asians are such a minority in tech) who are outright libertarian leaning, value technical skills over ideology, oppose quotas and affirmative action, and would probably disagree with much of the “Post-Meritocracy Manifesto”.
Then you need to read better because that’s not what he was saying at all.
If I dismissed an anti-meritocracy piece as “more nonsense from scared black women” I suppose that wouldn’t in any way look like a silly racist/sexist assumption…
“look like”?
Very subtle backtracking there.
The original complaint wasn’t that it “look like” racism, but that it IS racism.
And you completely misread my reply.
I said:
“that’s not what he was saying at all.”
in response to:
“It’s the assumption that anyone who supports meritocracy must be a white guy that seems just a tad “racist” to me.”
I quoted your whole sentence, because your whole sentence was wrong.
No way was he saying “anyone who supports meritocracy must be a white guy”. And because he wasn’t saying that, therefore it isn’t racist.
In that case, maybe it isn’t such a good idea to assume that “scared white guys” are responsible for pro-meritocracy comments.
Supporting a meritocracy doesn’t make somebody a white male.
Now, thinking a field dominated by white males when that dominance was achieved in a not-insignificant part by abusive and exclusionary behavior, is what a meritocracy looks like, well, that’s different.
That’s an interesting hypothetical. Do you have an example of a field where that’s the case?
I would like to see the data that supports the statement – especially the “not-insignificant” part of it.
thank you in advance.
Only an Orange guy would say that.
If Linux development was supposedly a meritocracy before SJWs got involved, then are people now admitting that systemd is a meritocratically worthy inclusion in Linux?
Cue the systemd fanbois…
Reporting for duty. Systemd is awesome. So is linux. Abusive behavior isn’t. But what’s abusive? Kind of depends on the individual.
While I was never the source of any vitrol in any linux community ( probably because of you know, I’m not an easy or obvious target), its easy to dismiss this stuff as just ranting for ranting sake. But I think there really have been some really dumb things that have happened that made the code base worse because of the rants. I think the CFS Rotating staircase episode with Con Kolivas in particular. Linus should reach out to the ones he’s been the worst about. Alan Cox too.
Sometimes Linus was right, but just an asshole about it. Sometimes he was wrong and just an asshole about it.
Systemd is shit and so is abusive behaviour
Edited 2018-09-18 06:27 UTC
Correction. Systemd is *the* shit. I apologize for being *that guy*, but it almost seemed as if you were implying that systemd was not good somehow. Which all of us smart people here can all agree is an absurd proposition. I mean its basically *the* pulse audio of init systems!
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Not to all of us, no. As someone who very much disliked sysv, that doesn’t automatically make me a fan of systemd. It violates the unix “keep it simple stupid” principal and adds dependencies that don’t really belong in the init system. I like the simplicity of alternatives such as “runit”.
In my distro I’ve developed an init daemon “rund”, which takes the simplicity of “inittab” but adds an interface to add/remove/control/monitor processes on the fly. I created it for my distro to work around the issues of using file system based init systems with a read only file system. I find that I like this approach better than systemd.
Anyways, just wanted to point out that smart people don’t have to be proponents of systemd.
I guess I didn’t sarcasm well enough. Next time I’ll go bigger.
Bill Shooter of Bul,
Haha, I can’t wait
I didn’t catch on until the pulse audio comment.
I’ll support that assessment. ALSA doesn’t have a -k option…. nor does it need one.
I can’t upvote this as funny because osnews still have the idiotic “cant upvote anywhere in posts where you commented” policy in place.
It got upvoted anyway, so the system works (you’re sure the limitations are “idiotic”?…)
zima,
I actually don’t like the voting system either, not only do I think it’s unfair to people who comment, but it’s buggy at times with invalid reasons for rejection.
Hm, I don’t recall any such bugs, and I vote quite a lot… (typically I read and vote through all the comments in a thread before posting myself, that mostly gets rid of “unfair to people who comment”
hm, perhaps we could have “voting after commenting” for accounts that are, say, 5+ years old, that might avoid troubles…)
zima,
I’ve erroneously gotten the “you’ve recently voted for this person…” rejection several times even when I’m positive this was not the case. It’s either a bug in the logic, or the message is just inaccurate. Oh well, I don’t put too much stock in the voting system anyways given that it’s so restrictive for legit users and extremely vulnerable to dup account fraud and even admin moderation. IMHO reading the comments is a far better indication of what others are thinking.
When the project gets taken over by racists, sexists, demagogues and people who identify as a giraffe on thursdays, the devs can always fork the Kernel.
It’s like watching a new religious right. Gonna need lots of pop corn.
Having Read The Man Before, Sounds More Like A Searching for Oxygen.
He is no longer in age, to cocoon the basic architecture of his mental processes.
Edited 2018-09-18 21:56 UTC
Cool dog whistle transphobia, my guy.
?…
The matter of fact is that Linux is an outstandingly successful project. It is quite astonishing that is has not been forked or fragmented in any significant way after all those years.
It is hard to not see factor in this in the very ‘open discussion style’ and the resolute leadership of a genius mind not getting bogged down by trying to please every moron out of political correctness but rather cutting through the bullshit.
As it so happens that approach to sorting out ‘differences in understanding’ was also what distinguished Jobs’ way of managing people.
Here we go…
On the other hand, maybe it would have been even more successful and better engineered if he hadn’t been such an ass.
Also, you can “cut through the bullshit” without being an ass.
Edited 2018-09-18 07:25 UTC
ThomasFuhringer,
Well sure, but let’s not ignore the huge difference between cutting through the BS and being nasty/abusive towards people just because you can (you are right to use jobs as an example here). The former is an asset while the later is a character fault, which IMHO only hurts the community and those around you. We can accomplish more together. There are a lot of leaders that aren’t assholes to other people and assuming torvalds is sincere in trying to become more professional, I respect him more for that.
Yes he can!
http://www.osnews.com/permalink?662618
Do you know who thinks differently about that? Linus Torvalds: Android Is A Linux Fork – YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duDC_u4ydVo
I would say that Android uses the Linux kernel is testimony to the tremendous success of Linux.
Nowadays everybody in the industrialised world has a few Linux kernels running around of them and most people even in their pockets.
Of course! Linux is by far the most used general purpose OS and a major success in every way. I was just responding to the “not forked” comment.
There are lots of other successful OS’s, like Windows for “the Desktop/Business-Servers” and macOS/iOS for Apple hardware, and probably a lot of “firmware-OS’s” for in toys/electronics/tv’s/cars that only developers directly interface with.
[off-topic]
Unfortunately for OSnews, the OS-market seems to have completely stalled in the above state for the last decade and the mobile revolution didn’t bring us many new OS’s, but just variations of Linux/macOS/Windows which roughly translates to Google/Apple/Microsoft (with MS already having disappeared despite major investments). Instead of an influx of “new” OS’s like MeeGo/WebOS/FirefoxOS/”mUbuntu” and so many others that I have seen come-and-go we had diversity disappear instead of appear with the demise of BlackBerryOS/Symbian.
On the non-mobile front the situation isn’t any different either. The “Hobby-OS” alternative scene is still alive, but nothing is rising up* . Your only chance is to find a really specific niche, completely focus on that, work really hard for a decade or more and keep you, your team and your (potential) users interested all that time.
The only dark horse seems to be Google’s Fuchsia. I don’t know enough about that yet but we will see if it is a really new OS or “just” a Linux variation
* Let’s define “rising up” as getting 1% of a big market**
** Let’s define a big market as 1 billion active devices, or 10 billion USD, yearly.
I hope not. I always enjoyed his rants. And they were always justified.
Using harsh language shouldn’t be necessary but an iron fist and ripping people a new one for DESERVED conduct is fully justified. He doesn’t attack you for a mistake. He attacks people who refuse to own their mistake and/or refuse to fix it. Linux (or broad) community development is not a place for emotional midgets. You either grow a damn skin and take your licks for f’king up for get the hell out. The Marines^H^H^H^HLinux Kernel coders don’t need no pansy-waist wimps in their company. People^H^H^H^H computers die when mistakes are made.
And no, the community is not “suffering” from the lack or exodus of “brilliant but emotionally fragile” programmers. Good riddance of those who are incapable of understanding the logic and justification behind a public thrashing. The world is not a nice place. It is violently ANTI-“inclusion”. It does not tolerate incompetence and shoddy work. And it doesn’t give 2 sh*ts how earnest you might be nor your GD “identity”. If your code is wrong, IT’S WRONG!
Edited 2018-09-18 13:46 UTC
shogun56,
While I agree with torvalds in principal that reading one character at a time is not efficient, the code in question actually exposed a bug in *linux*. So 1) he should be more appreciative of that. His attacks can make linux worse if people are hesitant to work with him and/or report bugs due to his bad attitude. 2) it’s just ridiculous to pretend these insults contribute anything of technical value. We can take his side in an argument, but it doesn’t excuse the ad hominem attacks. There are countless times when he choose to be an ass rather than be professional about it. That doesn’t help to advance linux. The good news is that he recognizes this now, being professional could encourage more people to contribute meaningfully to the technical debates.
Edited 2018-09-18 14:28 UTC
I don’t read LKML so didn’t pick up on that Linus’ comment was directed at the guy (actually a veritable legion of similar-minded idiots) doing the ‘dd bs=1’ dance. From my (lack of) context I thought he was calling out a Kernel writer who did something dumb.
“The net is full of bugreports of stuff going wrong with running dd bs=1 on /proc/kmsg. It is a really stupid idea, and can not work for many other reasons too. The interface can not safely be used that way, it does not have the usual semantics, it always returned 0 for read() whenever it needed to.” (per https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/8/45)
Given that people have persisted in doing stupid things when reading /proc/kmsg I now understand why Linux went off against this bug reporter. His frustration with people who WILL NOT learn that certain things are just not done, is understandable. “It worked before” is not an acceptable justification. It just means you got lucky or it was a bug that allowed it to “work” previously.
So this might be one (of?) example where an argument could be made that the diatribe was not deserved (I personally beg to differ). I’m all in favor of trying to break code by doing “silly” things. But when it’s been established for YEARS that something is not supported and is KNOWN to not work, to open a bug yet again is surely going to piss off the maintainer. It just shows the reporter is ignorant of history. If it was me the Bugtraq would be closed, “won’t fix, user is stupid. RTFM.” And then put a nice, big warning in klogd(8) which is still not there to this day… So in some sense that this issue kept coming up is Linus’/Kernel team’s fault.
I read thru https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/eb02dac93708f581c99858a1916…
and that’s a lot of work for hand-holding people who do unsupported/stupid things. I’m a proponent of defensive programming and covering all REASONABLE use cases. But this one is clearly out of bounds.
I doubt Jukka is still nursing a grudge after seeing Linus finally throwing in the towel to make it go away. The comment in the code is still a bit snide though “Some people seem to think is is a good idea to run:
$ dd if=/proc/kmsg bs=1 of=…
as a klog bridge.”
We’re not privy to private apology if any Linus directed toward Jukka but the number of bugs that go unreported because Linus can be a dick is likely not statistically relevant. It’ll get passed off to any of the other staff who are capable of shrugging off any blowups.
I sincerely hope Linus continues to tear into people that deserve it. He might need to take 10 and make sure the target of his ire is properly focused. I read a collection of prior insults. I would hardly rate them as egregious.
Edited 2018-09-18 15:36 UTC
I can only guess this is satire ..?
I hope he bounces back with a rant that hurts all the precious fee-fees of all the special snowflakes out there
Apparently he already hurt a lot of special snowflakes by just deciding he shouldn’t rant any more.
Edited 2018-09-18 09:09 UTC
No more about rants. He Bent. At the least, short term.
could the reason be the “color” Fuchsia?
Now there’s a reality show i might watch
SJW cancer/political correctness has finally infiltrated Linux – hopefully it doesn’t mean the end of it.
Shut up, snowflake.
Every time someone does virtual signalling about SJWs and political correctness, I think of Stewart Lee’s grandmother and Richard Littlejohn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_JCBmY9NGM
Edited 2018-09-18 12:20 UTC
It’s truly a tragedy of epic proportions that you can’t be an asshole to people any more.
Linus’ employer is the Linux foundation and any inappropriate behaviour in public of an employee falls back to the employer. So the LF had to intervene.
The LF is currently strongly enforcing their code of conduct. I think enforcing a code of conduct is good, the way the LF does it might not be perfect.
Ongoing inappropriate posts on LKML would mean the LF had to fire Linus. Which in turn would mean an organization or company that strongly relies on the Linux kernel would hire him. Since such companies are also LF members, the game would start again.
So my guess is, that Linus’ will more likely receive some sort of coaching on fair and neutral speech than psychological treatment. Posts like…
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?
…are just weirdly unprofessional. It should not go down to a personal level. Critisize the work, do not insult the person:
Read things ONE F*CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte is one of the WORST ideas I’ve ever seen.
Only one problem:
The 2nd version will be forgotten the next day, especially if it wasn’t directed at you.
But the first one will stick with you even when it was meant for someone else.
probably being scared of pathetic SJW mob that seeks power in the form of “equity” and other such nonsense that is being perpetuated by pathetic losers who have no skills and just want to gain benefits without actually doing the work.
there is probably no greater concentration of SJW idiots than in the IT scene.
what’s wrong with harsh words if you deserve them? i.e. Nvidia has most definitely deserved the middle finger.
Edited 2018-09-18 14:13 UTC
Linus has been attacked by his enemies and is staging a strategic retreat so he can emerge to fight another day. He is not going to start caring about folks emotions any time soon but is capable of trying a new strategy to get what he wants done. He will change his instrument but not his tune.
Trump world is a factor. Just like when the Dems are in power the Red Necks go and buy more guns. So too when Trump is in power the political correctors will go on the rampage. It’s weird but true.
Edited 2018-09-18 14:27 UTC
I previously did work for and frequented a website where Linus still posts quite a lot (won’t post the name as it is a pretty quiet and exclusive community, although I’m sure some of you know it anyway). He can be rather scathing to say the least. It is often entertaining, even endearing in an odd sort of way, but sometimes he can come across as just plain mean.
As someone who has a similar online disposition (although I really do it mostly in jest for entertainment value and try to make it obvious as best I can) I sincerely hope he can follow through with this and find a balance. I think he could tone it down a bit and still retain the sharp wit he is known for. He is in a position where, like it or not, he is a major influence on the behavior of those around him – a bit more honey to balance out all that vinegar would go a long way in my opinion.
ps. To all those trying to color this as political posturing and defending his behavior, your a bunch of F*CKING IDIOTS. kappa
Edited 2018-09-18 17:23 UTC
Though I think that Linus is a professional troll who earned his right to be so
(I wish I could earn it even nearly like that; so I’m not trolling much; I don’t even know the secret website you mention… 
)
Linus behavior has been an extreme example of what was pretty common behavior among engineers back in the 80’s and early 90’s. Most sw devs came from similar backgrounds (by training or by schooling), and while nobody preferred taking a verbal beating, almost everyone understood not to take it personally… because it was about the engineering. Linus behavior is… stuck in time in the early 90s. The world moved on, and his behavior never changed.
Cutler behaved very similarly while at DEC and during the development of NT at MSFT.
Anybody remember BillG commenting in an engineering review that something being presented was “the stupidest fucking thing” he had ever seen?
What’s made Linus famous for his particularly ill-advised spleen venting is (a) he continued it longer, (b) he continued it more publicly, and (c) he made the attacks more viciously personal than most other folks.
This shtick is out of style. It might have been cute and well understood 40 years ago, but the world changes. This type of behavior isn’t necessary, it isn’t useful, isn’t enjoyed by most people, and it isn’t productive.
It’s not about being PC. It’s about evolution, growth, learning, and civility. A lot has changed in 40 years. Thank goodness, huh?
Maybe he found out that he may have some low level of Asperger and he now realizes some of his limitations with human interaction. To “get some assistance” maybe means that he is getting some professional psychologist.
OMG, so now the Pussyfied kernel-dev mailing-list is full of SJW’s. I for one think that’s bad news for Linux.
Perhaps it’s a European thing, people also complain about the Dutch all the time, for speaking up and not mincing words.
https://stuffdutchpeoplelike.com/2011/05/28/dutch-directness/
This kind of behavior of tech leaders (Linux is not the kind of person that will repent and turn to budism per criticism) are usually precedent of big transaction deals. Is linus selling LINUX to Microsoft? Oracle? Google? much probably this is not the last surprise we are hearing from Mr. Linux.
Why the apologies? I can understand it, but at the same time, I don’t. I can see how his behavior must have been harsh for some who oftentimes deserved to be treated like idiots, but he’s the man, he has proven himself more than most devs out there, and he deserves quite a bit of slack for keeping Linux on track all these years, and demanding high quality work from every kernel contributor.
I hope this sudden change won’t lead to lower quality kernels, that would be a disaster.
i3v1,
Who says a stick is the best way to encourage open source developers who are voluntary contributors? I’d argue the opposite is perhaps true: lots of bright people may not put up with unprofessional abuse when they don’t have to – I know it’s a turn off for me. So who knows, maybe he could have been better at attracting bright people if he had been less abrasive.
Edited 2018-09-21 22:26 UTC