I feel it’s equally important to point ot that Torvalds recognized his toxic behavior, apologized for it, and took steps to rectify it.
In an email to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, which also addresses the kernel update of Linux 4.19-rc4, Torvalds writes: “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.”
So two wrongs make a right? Or could this have been a civil private email instead? And if civil private conversations aren’t working, then it’s time to part ways.
Acceptable, yes. But a good manager knows not to shine a spotlight on the mistakes of the team. There’s nothing to gain keeping it public that you wouldn’t also gain by keeping it private. But your team’s morale is kept high if you sing their praises instead of their shortcomings.
I get what your saying, but i feel like the aggressively public development model means that more could be public here than i would accept on another team.
I’ve heard he’s not perfect but he doesn’t lose his temper anymore and has only gotten better with age. I respect anyone who can self reflect and introspect and come out a better person.
I feel like people are overlooking the fact that this is typical early internet behavior lol.
I get that its the linux kernel mailing list, but I’m pretty sure Linus was way more wild online than in person because that’s how public internet forums and IRC used to be like.
Stallman has also said some equally braindead stuff lol.
In the following responses Mauro was very professional. l haven’t heard much about recently but Linus had some high tier anger issues. Most of the cases I was following back then he was right, but desperately needed to cool off.
Poor Mauro: they weren’t good at what they loved, they blamed others for their failings, and their community leader was nuts.
Jokes aside, we’ve already got toxic right there. Linus isn’t right, but someone like that would be fired with good cause. It’s one thing to make a mistake, it’s quite another to blame your co-workers for your own shoddy work.
I wonder if the guys here who are moaning like the snowflakes they are about Linus’ way of conveying the message (not the message itself) are from the US? I sometimes really wonder about the US mindset. The boss is critisizing you justifyably but in an inadequate tone? Hell breaks lose. But as an employee insisting on healthcare, an adequate number of days on paid time off, unionazing or at least have an able workers’ representation? Nah, that’s unheard of.
How about having some priorities? Grow a pair and chose your battles more wisely. The boss criticizes you? If he’s right, own up to your mistakes. Want some rights you are actually entitled to? Yeah, that’s what you fight for.
After twenty plus years of watching LKML and Linus’s behavior in general, I have to concur with you. Reading a lot of the ‘linus is an asshole’ threads, there’s generally a clear runup towards an outburst.
Just recently he called some developers out because it seemed evident they weren’t testing their patchsets on bare metal. So it’s not just code that gets called out, it’s also development methods that end up causing upstream pain.
Don’t allow your boss to speak to you like that, unionize, and fight for your workers rights - including the right for dignity and respect, listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but also for higher pay and better working conditions.
One does not simply break userspace. You’ll receive more than just angry bug reports. There are restless maintainers who will not sleep. And the great corporations are ever watchful.
Why so many people see letter as containing onlt 3 words and ignore part where Linus says that maintainer shouldn’t randomly blame userspace, how unrelated error code is(it’s like if your router crashed with message “there is no milk in the fridge”), repeats that maintainer shouldn’t randomly blame userspace, asks if patch good enough, says “WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE”,
I’m angry, because your whole email was so horribly wrong, and the patch that broke things was so obviously crap.
The fact that you then try to make excuses for breaking user space, and blaming some external program that used to work, is just shameful. It’s not how we work.
Linus only reacted this way to people who really should have known better. This isn’t a “here is my first ever patch, I read all the rules and I hope I didn’t break any” situation. The person he is chewing out is a kernel maintainer. They are someone who is experienced and trusted and Linus was rightly angry that this poor quality work was submitted.
However… Linus has also worked a lot on himself in the past few years, fully acknowledging that he shouldn’t behave this harshly when someone fucks up. If the same situation was to present itself today, he would be much more professional, but would probably still be a bit angry and you’d know about it.
Linus is a flawed human being, but credit where it is due, he has worked on some of his character flaws.
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