As someone familiar with LBT's mailing list rhetoric since the early days, I'm guessing a big part of what's happening here is that LBT hasn't changed the way he communicates but the rest of the world has moved on. And let's face it, the engineering and programming world has gotten a lot more politically correct—I think the main factor driving this is the increasing presence of women in technology.
What I mean is that it's getting less and less acceptable in tech to make excuses for abusing people either verbally or in writing. Back when engineering was almost totally male-dominated, you were excused for using harsh criticism and vituperation at work. Many people, I think, will be glad that sort of culture is going away.
If you look at the tech world of the 80s, 90% of it was very buttoned-up and proper, despite being male-dominated.
The rudeness comes from Linux' roots in a youth-dominated hacker subculture. It just doesn't work very well when they aren't teenage hackers anymore, but have gone mainstream and are working at it in a professional capacity.
Not sure if this is the case because Linus always appeared to go over the limit even to the most old style, cold and technology focused engineers. You may not get into the empathy thing and yet be able to avoid replying in certain wrong ways, keeping the reply focused on the technical points, without attacking the human being and so forth. Moreover to be honest I don't even think that the way he used to handle it guaranteed the best technological outcome too, since some soft touch is needed in order to spur people to do their best.
Men deserve to be treated with respect too. I'm a man, and I would absolutely quit any job where someone talked to me the way LBT did in his emails. I'm sure someone reading this thinks that makes me a snowflake.
Sorry, I guess I read your comment uncharitably at first, but I do know there are people who do think that the workplace where we are free to behave in an agressive, insulting ways is the ideal workplace, in 2018.
I agree. While I think it's good that he's trying to take more responsibility for his abrasiveness, and would have been good even decades ago, I think society is shifting (for the better) in a direction where it's much less acceptable to be abrasive. As an abrasive person myself, who's easily frustrated, but has a thick skin when it comes to other people being abrasive with me, I don't personally care if the world gets more polite or sensitive. But I also recognize that not everyone is as comfortable with roughness as I am, and the world will be a better place if everyone learns to be respectful and sensitive to the needs of others.
Linking it to "PC" or "women" I think sort of undermines it on a larger level.
To take part in opensource, especially a big project like Linux you have to be willing to put yourself out there a little bit. You have to put in some work, and then put something out there to possibly (probably?) be crapped on by people you respect. They might love it and merge it, they might hate it and tell you why, they might come back somewhere in the middle with a list of things to change that you may or may not agree with. They might ask you questions you can't answer, they might point things out that make you feel really silly. That element of risk is something many computer people have a hard time with, not just women or minorities.
I got involved with the kernel a long while back, sent in a couple smallish things. Then I found what seemed like plutonium, the embedded project I was working on, we were literally spending like 1/3 or our cycles zeroing pages. Did some stuff to use MMX like instructions to do it and got a nice little bump. Turned if off entirely and got a huge bump. I/O took off like a rocket, all sorts of things got noticeably faster; like we were able to double what our project had to do. I had a more senior Linux guy coaching me up on this, a made man in the community, it was late one night when we discovered this so I put together some patches and sent if off to Linus, he was encouraging it. Linus was quiet for about a day and then sent back some pointed observations and was kind of making fun of me. Zeroing newly allocated pages is kind of important, it's a security risk to not do it and it happens for a reason. I felt like a total newb, and Linus had poked fun at me in an email, it didn't feel good. The made guy I was working with sort of picked me up, told me he does that to everybody and that it's good natured ribbing for the most part but before that I had just felt like crap. This guy I respect the hell out of was making fun of my contribution, I got over it pretty easily but I could easily see how others might not.
There have been some fairly popular contributors (or maybe not, I don't know..) over the years that have basically managed their own forks with various patches (Con Kolivas' scheduler stuff stands out to me) because for whatever reasons they couldn't or wouldn't get stuff merged or accepted, even though it seemed to be really useful and appealing to a lot of others. In the heat of it all, it can seem really arbitrary too, you put some code together, you know it solves some problems and the community of developers doesn't want it or won't take it.
Not sure what caused Linus to recognize it this time but I hope things improve, it's better for everyone.
> This guy [...] was making fun of my contribution
That isn't entirely correct, because you contributed nothing. He (kind of) made fun of your attempted contribution. What else could he do?
He could tell you in sterile, technical language that zeroing pages is done for security reasons. You'd probably perceive that as condescending. He could instead ignore you. That wouldn't be nice, either.
If you were Linus, how would you handle your not-quite-contribution?
I don't know much about Linus's personal background prior to his announcing his project as a student. His communication style always struck me as surprisingly easy to understand and relate to. It reminds me of what used to be a common subculture in tech fields in California, namely the ex-military enlisted men's culture. I have wondered if he somehow had similar early exposure.
It's the combination of swearing like a sailor, sarcasm, thick skin, and being prone to hyperbole when talking about any kind of trained skill or procedure. As a child, I learned from my dad (and eventually figured out what he really meant), "There is the right way, the wrong way, and the Navy way" to everything. This culture is indoctrinated when young men go through boot camp, but it also spreads itself when concentrated enough other environments. In boot camp, the yelling, the swearing, the insults, and rigid expectations are used to shock, reset, and motivate. Initiates are bootstrapped into a command hierarchy and also taught trust, duty, and shared responsibility. A lot of this rubs off on the successful graduates.
When people with this sort of background mingle, it is easy to fall into this sort of brusque communication. Language may be harsh, colorful, and full of crude imagery, but usually isn't intended to be cruel or hurtful. Those with fluency will take it as quite the opposite... people are signaling trust and fraternal interest. Such insults and jokes are exchanged to strengthen bonds. Ironically, while someone communicating in this mode can easily hurt the feelings of someone not conditioned to understand it, in turn they can feel hurt themselves as they were putting their feelings out there (albeit in a coded form) and having them slapped down and rejected. To a person steeped in this culture, it is frustrating dealing with the subtlety and opacity of "polite" and "diplomatic" society whose practices often seem perverse, passive-aggressive, and insincere.
I feel that the tech scene used to be more strongly influenced by these ex-military participants. Some of the older hacker ethos also seemed to mix this with other hippie and subversive attitudes which could somehow tolerate and complement each other. This is disappearing. I would not link the change to political correctness nor women, but to a general dilution of those old norms. More and more participants are coming in as tech becomes mainstream. There is a new wave of youngsters further removed from military experience, in spite of US activities abroad. There are also far more immigrants from many other cultures throughout the world.
The only thing less effective than groups of people speaking different languages at each other is when they mistakenly thing they are speaking the same language...
I don't think it has anything to do with PC and has a lot to do with being C. There's a lot of bravado among older programmers that carries over from a time when they really could do whatever they wanted because stuff needed to get done and a principled, lone gunman solution could actually be a much closer approximation of correct than some BS consensus built monster.
That simply isn't the world we work in anymore. Everything has been done and if it's being done again it's because the subtle mistakes and approximations of the past aren't good enough. Linus' complaints about the scheduler are the best example of what I'm talking about. A scheduler is a super hard problem now and there's a lot of complexity to wrestle with that simply didn't exist in 2001.
Anyway, the kernel is still open and discussion is still happening so I don't think we're in some kind of crisis. Good for Linus to take time off - maybe this will be an opportunity to develop processes that can create a more dynamic open source environment, one less reliant on a few individuals.
False. "The percentage of CS-degree holders who were women peaked in the 1980s at 34% and has been on a downward trend ever since" [1]. Women do not have an increasing presence in terms of population. Maybe the real phenomenon is that women are no longer accepting the culture that tends to form in male-dominated fields.
> when engineering was almost totally male-dominated, you were expected to be able to bear harsh criticism and vituperation
I don’t you intended this, but at first read your comment comes across as sexist. It implies men could take the heat while women can’t. More than being offensive, I find it untrue. Anger-driven management doesn’t scale. Tech has scales, and its heroes of yore much brave a bigger world than they were originally used to.
I didn't intend that. What I'm implying is that "men taking the heat" and having supposedly thicker skin was the excuse used to justify the lack of empathy and sociopathic behaviour in the culture.
> Linus was forceful at times, but his focus was on the work, not on trying to make people feel bad.
It may have started this way when he began one of his emails, but even he admits the attacks often went from “let me critique your contribution” to “here’s why your contribution sucks and beyond that here’s why I think you suck as a contributor”.
I think this is understating it bit. He did mostly focus on technical aspects, but he did also occasionally say things like "whoever wrote this should be retroactively aborted", which is going waaaaaay too far and is going to make someone feel bad, period.
So, what would you do? Would you rather have Linux, or would you rather that noone ever get their feelings hurt by harsh comments?
Perhaps he should have been given the boot years ago for saying such things, but would we have Linux today?
I really don't think that that is a false choice. You and I did not create Linux - Linus did. You and I did not keep it going despite the massive flock of ducks constantly pecking. Perhaps if we achieve something similar, we can judge.
Sometimes you have to take the bad with the good. Linux now has a whole community, likely calling for a different leadership style. I hope Linus is able to make that transition.
Would you rather have Linux, or would you rather that noone ever get their feelings hurt by harsh comments?
Sounds like a false dilemma or externalized either/or to me. It's not as if Linux could not have existed had Linus learned 20 years ago to dial down his abrasiveness.
If it did, then good riddance. Linux is barely able to attract hardware vendors to write less-than-afterthought drivers as it is; let alone with, say, even more non-Unix OS flavors as distraction.
Things like Redox and Haiku may be interesting theoretical constructs, but without the ability to use Linux (or BSD) device-drivers, they're not generally useful to the free software community and we can only hope they don't draw too many resources away from more useful pursuits.
> [...]I think the main factor driving this is the increasing presence of women in technology.
I don’t agree. I find situations like these stem from the number of qualified developers interacting within these communities. In the past, when the depth of talent was small, people put up with epic levels of ego and bullshit. The only way to move the needle forward was to grin and bear it.
Today, we have a greater density of talent with the diverse skills needed to contribute to these core projects. Caustic personalities aren’t worth dealing with any longer when you have a bunch of non-assholes you can rely on.
Don’t be a dick, do your job without being abusive, and if the community you’ve been trying to contribute to finds you to be boorish and not worth the effort to engage with, adapt—as Linus is going to try to do.
> In the past, when the depth of talent was small, people put up with epic levels of ego and bullshit. [...] Today, we have a greater density of talent
I do not believe that the density of challenged. What has changed is that modern programming languages/technologies/... require much less talent to do something useful with. So a lot more people can (perhaps) do a meaningful contribution to the project. This makes much more projects possible. But it does not lead to the situation that more people can now contribute to projects of hard difficulty.
I don’t think it has anything to do with so-called PC or women, it’s just unprofessional behavior and tech has gone from people in a garage to the leaders on the market in that same time. Tech grew up, became a profession, and perforce people involved have had to grow up too. It has literally nothing to do with the usual culture war bullshit that gets paraded around. It’s sort of tragic that some people have so little experience in the real world beyond the tech bubble that they think basic standards of decorum and professionalism are gendered.
That doesn't sound plausible to me. Tech has been "grown up" in terms of professionalism for a long time. What didn't catch up was emotional intelligence and workplace ethos. What is new is that people aren't going to tolerate Linus ranting at them and their colleagues and cussing them out anymore like in the old days. And I'm sticking to my guns, thinking that a lot of this has to do with a more diverse workplace (and the pressure doesn't have to come from the LKML, but from the larger software engineering ethos).
Linus is a very smart guy, and I'm glad he's accepted that he needs to change. He should be lauded for that.
First of all I opened with, tech has gone from people in a garage to the leaders on the market in that same time. The scale has dwarfed essentially everything except finance. Second, when I look around at major professions, I see standards of practice and organizations to enforce them. There is no functional AMA of tech, and it shows in every janky IoT product, dishonest and borderline illegal privacy invasion or growth hack, and MVP that forgot the V. If you want the respect, you need more than just money, you need accountability. In Linus’ case he’s lesrning that in the real world it is (as he said) unprofessional to suggest that a colleague should be aborted.
What I mean is that it's getting less and less acceptable in tech to make excuses for abusing people either verbally or in writing. Back when engineering was almost totally male-dominated, you were excused for using harsh criticism and vituperation at work. Many people, I think, will be glad that sort of culture is going away.