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.Now that’s something I never in a million years thought he’d be capable of thinking, never mind admitting in public, without reservations. I sincerely hope that it sticks, and the result is good not just for the community, but Linus himself. Good luck, and I hope people give him the chance to make good on his attempt to grow as a person. It takes a lot of courage to be this vulnerable in public, especially when you know and that you hurt people.

..and if productivity was better from disrespecting people, then that would be the way to go?Well...That seems to be the actual case. Our current system seems to not to respect people, or the planet (or other animals besides humans.) It seems to respect money, &#x27;productivity&#x27;, &#x27;efficiency&#x27; and &#x27;growth&#x27;.

I don&#x27;t treat people the same way, but I appreciate the blunt honesty. If we&#x27;re having a few drinks as friends and you tell me that I&#x27;m an idiot, of course I will take that personally; however, tell me that as a developer and I&#x27;m motivated.So far as that goes, my mind works the same as Linus. I err on the side of praise, which makes me different - although my lack of praise for some individuals probably speaks as loud as Linus&#x27; vitriol. Your ability is not a reflection of your character, i.e. &quot;you are not your code.&quot;I have no interest in maintaining Linux, maybe I would 20 years prior to now when choices were generally more than &quot;drivers.&quot; That being said, Linus would make an excellent mentor for those who can separate their code and themselves.He is an artisan, in the most classical sense. Every one of his maintainers is an apprentice. It&#x27;s an incredibly unpopular perspective to have - but the epitome of professional decorum is to attack a person&#x27;s work without attacking their life.Smart people are able to discern the difference between their work (which is fallible) and themselves (which is infallible). I am a great developer, but the fact that even better ones exist is inspiring and I&#x27;d hope they would tell me what I&#x27;m doing wrong.My assignment for the next N sprints is to clue up employees on debugging prod. I will destroy that assignment but, hell, I would prefer to work with people who cared enough to research it themselves; as I did.

I&#x27;m not empathetic and have poor EI (medical reason) and have concluded similarly that being rude as a general rule is unproductive. First, I don&#x27;t want to be on the receiving end of it myself(!), but nor do I want the time sinks of drama, a mutiny, or a revenge attack. Being thoughtful about your words seems to be a good idea for anyone, whether they&#x27;re emotionally intelligent or not :-)

I&#x27;ve worked with assholes, that think they are god&#x27;s gift and really they are just hampering the business goals of the company and don&#x27;t realise it. They were constantly like a petulant 5 year olds during a tantrum, and I don&#x27;t work with people like that. I quit such jobs. Done that 3 times now, first time took me 6 months, second time 3 months, last time 18 hours. Note - this is not rage quitting - they were a reasoned decision based on the likelihood of being about to resolve the problem through negotiation, and comparing that to opportunity cost. Fuck it life is too short.Similarly would I contribute to an Free&#x2F;OS project with such people for free? Hell no.

Yes. Tech people the world over need to remember the person. I don&#x27;t even mean in a slightly soppy &#x27;everyone is a real person with real feelings&#x27; way. I mean that in a practical sense you really hit productivity if you&#x27;re rude. Simple exchanges or corrections become arguments because one party was acerbic or inflammatory which caused the second party to be defensive. The discussion gets derailed, the point gets lost. Nobody learns. The project deviates.Social skills and emotional intelligence aren&#x27;t fluff that smart people don&#x27;t have to deal with. If you want to make great software and create great organisations you have to treat people with professionalism and respect.

&gt; As opposed to success via being polite and flattering while being wrong.&gt; And rudeness can be very called for in response to evil.You have constructed quite the strawman to argue against the myth, well done.

There&#x27;s no dichotomy here - you can be both right and wrong, and rude and polite. These are not related, and frequently not correlated at the least either, these are just two independent coordinates. Moreover, in many cases, you yourself is not in the position to know where on the right-wrong spectrum you ended up. Linus tends up to end closer to the right than wrong end, usually - but this is not universal, and it&#x27;s not correlated with rudeness. Since being in rude-wrong quadrant makes you a jerk, and being in rude-right quadrant is no better than being in polite-right one, it is a good rule to try and stay on the polite half-plane as much as you can. Linus seems to realize that too, which is especially great because he is one of the few that can actually get away with many things. So his realizing he still should not is IMHO a positive development.

“Indefinitely” presumes you can be right one hundred percent of the time. I’m not, and I don’t believe it’s even possible.How one handles human failure is important, just as it is with handling bad input in code.

Is that really a myth though? Being surly and right can be workable indefinitely. As opposed to success via being polite and flattering while being wrong. Fundamentally they would be a parasite. Not a dichotomous extreme though in that it is better not to be rude unless it is called for. And rudeness can be very called for in response to evil.

You can be forceful without being an asshole about it.

Or maybe his brashness was irrelevant.What would Steve Jobs have been known for if not for his turtleneck? &#x2F;s

Many things fail when they get pecked to death by ducks.Haven&#x27;t heard that idiom before, but its interesting.

I have to wonder if Linux would even be remembered other than as a footnote at this time without his forceful personality being in the mix.He probably would, because he&#x27;s a fairly prodigious developer working on hard problems. He was already noteworthy long before the modern era of the Internet, simply for getting early Linux working.Being a jerk didn&#x27;t create Linux and git. Hard work did.

Creator or Linux wouldn&#x27;t be remembered other than as a footnote? What?

I have to wonder if Linux would even be remembered other than as a footnote at this time without his forceful personality being in the mix.Many things fail when they get pecked to death by ducks. His forceful personality carried the day on many occasions.

&gt; You can absolutely be rude and insulting as long as you&#x27;re right.What is the basis for this &quot;might makes right&quot; axiom when it comes to collaboration? I mean, obviously, anyone -- winners and losers -- can choose to be rude and insulting for any reason they&#x27;d like, they aren&#x27;t barred by law or regulation. What tangential or moral benefits do you believe come from adopting a &quot;winner has the right to be rude&quot; mentality, particularly in an open source community? I think it&#x27;s almost self-evident what the drawbacks are -- for example, that the risk of humiliation might stifle people&#x27;s willingness to debate at all -- so what are the upsides to fostering that kind of environment?

He could, and still can. Literally nothing&#x27;s stopping him other than a personal decision to subjectively improve his behavior.You can absolutely be rude and insulting as long as you&#x27;re right.

&gt; Maybe this will finally end the myth that &quot;you can be rude and insulting as long as you&#x27;re right&quot; that people seem to attribute to Linus&#x27;s outburstsIt is not the trueness or falseness of that myth that has changed, but the mainstream in the society.

That&#x27;s my impression as well. He definitely seems to be mocking whoever told him &quot;look yourself in the mirror&quot; at least.

Of course, no one is suggesting he become a pushover. I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s really that hard to not be a weakling and at the same time not be a douche. It&#x27;s not a &quot;gray line&quot; either, unless the extremes are either 31 Kelvin and 1000 KeV.

I&#x27;m mostly parsing this as external pressure forcing him to change, rather than a comment on the value of the behavior one way or the other. I suspect on net this is going to be seen as martyrdom, with a vocal minority of people who will bring it up in every conversation as a suppression tactic.EDIT: That having been said, my personal opinion is that Linus could stand to tone it down a bit. He often goes beyond &quot;unrelentingly firm on quality&quot; and into &quot;personal attack&quot;, the line between them can be subtle but hopefully he&#x27;ll figure it out without becoming a pushover.

It&#x27;s not a myth, and Linux is an unmitigated success to this point. Torvalds&#x27; admission is a reminder that, for all but the most callous, it&#x27;s not sustainable way to behave. It catches up with your conscience. It took almost 30 years for it to catch up with Torvalds&#x27;.

That&#x27;s not a myth. Moreover, people here seem to simply rejoicing.

It certainly will if Linux kernel development continues successfully. I don&#x27;t see why that wouldn&#x27;t be the case, but you can&#x27;t really use this to end the myth just yet.

I don&#x27;t code to make friends.  I code to survive.

You don&#x27;t have to be rude to be right.

As my partner once put it, “you can be right or you can have friends.”The truth is you can have both but if you put such a high importance on being right, all the time, then you’ll drive most people away.

Maybe this will finally end the myth that &quot;you can be rude and insulting as long as you&#x27;re right&quot; that people seem to attribute to Linus&#x27;s outburstsYeah, reading the comments here, I&#x27;m not so hopeful.

The &quot;Dr. House&quot; or &quot;Rich Sanchez&quot; effect?

Maybe this will finally end the myth that &quot;you can be rude and insulting as long as you&#x27;re right&quot; that people seem to attribute to Linus&#x27;s outbursts

Why doesn&#x27;t BDFLhood scale? Eventually people step down (Python, now Linux) -- but I&#x27;d say those projects have been wildly successful.

Good for him, I wonder how this will affect kernel development though.“Benevolent dictator for life” might not scale. And it might sound horrible; but there are some strengths involved that I feel the Linux project benefits greatly from.I figure that Linus has insulated himself very well with competent leaders, but, I don’t have much insight-

&gt;That&#x27;s the second BFDL stepping down (this one claims to go just for a while), after Guido. And note that this is one is also about psychology.It&#x27;s not the first and is unlikely to be the last time Linus takes a break - it&#x27;s not really stepping down.Everyone needs some time away from something when they&#x27;ve spent decades working on it.

probably a very common fear, at least I felt it, at times being to willing to accept different viewpoints and renouncing your own emotions was like death.

&gt; Some years ago I had to go to therapy for some issues of my own and back then I was afraid that it would fundamentally change who I am in some way. In retrospect that was a foolish thought. It made me wait longer to seek help than I should and in the end I was still like my old self (but better).I&#x27;ve been in therapy off and on most of my post-adolescent life. In the beginning, it felt like its only use was to have a place to vent about life to an agent who is largely external to it (i.e., my therapist doesn&#x27;t know my family or my friends), but who has your back and is interested in helping you succeed. That certainly had value, but it didn&#x27;t especially change how I lived.There was a point where my attitude towards therapy changed completely, when I started really listening and paying attention to what my therapist was doing. I might describe to him an incident which made me feel some unusually bad (or good!) emotion, and the therapist would ask just the right questions (and follow-ups) to get at the root cause of why I really felt that way.Eventually, I started to experience these internal dialogues which resemble a therapy session when I felt angry or sad or upset for some other reason. I might ask myself, &quot;Why is this trivial argument with Person X making me so angry?&quot;, then examine my relationship with Person X, and then other recent incidents with this person, etc. etc. These internal &quot;therapy sessions&quot; not only help to calm me down, but also tend to point in the right direction to improve the overall relationship with Person X. I think it&#x27;s been an amazing turn in how I interact with other people and helps me enjoy life.So, in conclusion, I think that&#x27;s one way to really benefit from therapy: deducing, by observation, the system or process your therapist is using to help you, and applying that same system to yourself. In other words, good therapy helps you learn to be your own therapist.

&gt; Which kind of brings me to the other point - would Torvalds be Torvalds if he was treated before?Some years ago I had to go to therapy for some issues of my own and back then I was afraid that it would fundamentally change who I am in some way. In retrospect that was a foolish thought. It made me wait longer to seek help than I should and in the end I was still like my old self (but better).

Can you provide sources for this evidence? Seems interesting.

&gt; would Torvalds be Torvalds if he was treated before? Is the same piece of his personality that made him a truly unpleasant person also the one that made him super motivated?This is a common trope in psychology known as the &quot;ideology of creativity.&quot; According to the overwhelming body of research, the answer is &quot;yes, he would still be Torvalds, and no, the same piece of his personality that makes him an unpleasant person is not also responsible for making him super motivated&#x2F;successful&#x2F;etc.&quot;Success and intelligence are oftentimes cited as reasons to excuse bad behavior, but the evidence is clearly against that.

Guido&#x27;s letter for reference: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mail.python.org&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;python-committers&#x2F;2018-July&#x2F;005664.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mail.python.org&#x2F;pipermail&#x2F;python-committers&#x2F;2018-Jul...</a>

&gt; I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately.Wow. Torvalds going to a therapy. I seriously couldn&#x27;t be more impressed about him, because he always seemed too much of a narcissist to me. I understand how difficult it might be to decide to admit that you have a problem at this stage. And for doing that, he has my deep respect.Which kind of brings me to the other point - would Torvalds be Torvalds if he was treated before? Is the same piece of his personality that made him a truly unpleasant person also the one that made him super motivated?That&#x27;s the second BFDL stepping down (this one claims to go just for a while), after Guido. And note that this is one is also about psychology.

The long answer to your question is essentially the entire field of Developer Experience Design, but good intros to it are this Joel Splosky post:
 <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2000&#x2F;04&#x2F;10&#x2F;controlling-your-environment-makes-you-happy&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.joelonsoftware.com&#x2F;2000&#x2F;04&#x2F;10&#x2F;controlling-your-e...</a>And this talk at pyTexas: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-vZ_E1OO_PY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;m.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=-vZ_E1OO_PY</a>I think git does have some significant design warts but I think when we use the word ‘empathy’ in this context, we should remember that we are referring to a skill not some innate quality that makes someone more or less human.

I&#x27;ll bite, what makes a version control system empathetic?

Made me think &quot;ok, now let&#x27;s have an apology for Git&quot;...

Downvoted, although your git UX comment made me smirk.

There would be no output. Sometimes you just need your software to listen, not try and solve everything, and it would understand that.

As a first step, you&#x27;d need to know what empathy is [1]. It&#x27;s the ability to perceive a situation from the experience of another. It is the very essence of UX design.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Empathy" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Empathy</a>

Good UI for command line tool = consistent syntax?I&#x27;m only slowly getting the hang of basic git usage, so I&#x27;m probably not qualified to criticize it myself, but I&#x27;ve seen some Web pages (blog posts?) that seemed to make a pretty cogent argument that git isn&#x27;t too great in that department. Sorry, no links to hand.

&gt; And Git has the UX of software created by someone with no empathy.I would really like to understand what you expect a UX for a command line tool to look like. Maybe instead of throwing an error if you did something wrong, it would apologize to you first? Or perhaps it should preface all output with &quot;dearest Sir&#x2F;Madam, here is the information you requested:&quot; ?

It&#x27;s about fucking time. I personally stay away from software created by people who lack empathy; technical goodness !&gt; creating a good environment and product for actual people. I don&#x27;t go to restaurants run by douchebags either, no matter how good the food might be.And Git has the UX of software created by someone with no empathy.I hope Linus heals from this, and I hope the culture of the Linux community changes as well, but that will take years to get past his past behavior.

The Times They Are a-Changin&#x27;.

There is never an excuse for being an ass, even less so when it&#x27;s a known pattern of behavior. When you screw up without bad intentions once that&#x27;s one thing, when you continue harmful behavior having been told by many that it&#x27;s harmful then it&#x27;s intentional.

He gets focused on a task at hand, and everything else is sight in the distance. Talented people can&#x27;t be entirely social 100% of the time. That will burn you out real fast trying to keep a smile on your face all of the time. I&#x27;m the same way and I&#x27;m up-front with everyone I hire about this. That when I become so focused on a task, that sometimes, you just have to take what I may say &quot;with a grain of salt&quot; and move on. I&#x27;ve lost one person who couldn&#x27;t handle it. The rest are still with me so far (it&#x27;s been years).

Too bad that message won&#x27;t reach politicians.

Hopefully this will inspire leaders of other projects to realize that it&#x27;s not okay to be a toxic jerk just because you&#x27;re smart and in-charge and confident that you&#x27;re right.

I don&#x27;t see why you&#x27;d ever need to go further than &quot;I strongly believe that your view is incorrect, and here is why&quot;. Attacking people is not &quot;calling bullshit&quot;

I think it&#x27;s possible to blend a polite environment and a no-nonsense environment as long as you&#x27;re physically working together, or at a minimum doing video conferences.  IIRC, Linus said that one of the reasons he used such strong language and is so abrasive on the mailing list is because so many communication cues are lost when you don&#x27;t have tone of voice and body language to add context to the actual words.  Being over the top aggressive and harsh was his way of ensuring that his message was completely unambiguos.  That said, most people don&#x27;t want to work with someone like that, and he addresses this when he talks about people leaving kernel development specifically because of him.  If they continue using the mailing list for development, I think we need to expect that development will slow a little at first since there will probably be more back-and-forth between developers.  That said, hopefully having a better working environment will encourage more people to be kernel developers, negating the slowdown caused by a more cordial mailing list.  I&#x27;m also really happy to see Linus setting a positive example for taking care of yourself in addition to your project.

Can’t you blend them? In other words I’d love to work in an organization that can politely call bullshit early and often. It is possible to fundamentally disagree without making it personal.Really good to see him acknowledge this and tackle it head on. I hope he gains a better perspective. Thank goodness for Linus and Linux!

There’s a difference between negative feedback and being rude. The former is necessary when crappy work gets submitted, the latter drives people away before giving them a chance to improve. The way you phrased your question implies that there’s an exclusive choice to be made here, which is not the case.How much toxicity a project can tolerate is in inverse proportion to how important it is, but every project has its limits no matter what.I think this is a wise choice. Either Torvalds needs to figure out people better, or he needs to bring in a lieutenant who can handle people more effectively than he does.

Depends on how rudeness is defined as well. Based soley on people&#x27;s feelings or above and beyond objective truth. Saying that Bob hasn&#x27;t proven good at network programming and is prone to spaghetti code may be absolutely true yet he would likely take offense to it.

&gt; It is directly counterproductive.Linux is by far the most successful floss project in the history of mankind. God knows there are plenty of floss OS projects out there, most of which have far nicer leaders but a small fraction of the success. Either you&#x27;re overplaying the effect on productivity or the relevance of being nice.

Actually this was written by Eric Raymond in &quot;The Cathedral and the Bazaar&quot;. Raymond dubbed it &quot;Linus&#x27;s Law&quot; which may be the source of the confusion.

&quot;Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.&quot; - Linus TorvaldsA rude leader drives people away from the organization. It is directly counterproductive.

Agreed. What can be worse than having a comment to the effect of &quot;if x is -1, which is feasible, this will cause undefined behaviour resulting in a crash&quot;. For most people this stings more than enough.

He reserved the insults for bad design decisions defended by senior committers. It&#x27;s not like he threw out insults to anybody who ever made a mistake.

If someone reviews your code, it will sting when they point out silly mistakes. The insults that the kernel devs fling about just aren&#x27;t needed to drive home the point.

Code reviews fly around our team without any trace of vitriol or insults, even when the mistakes are mindnumbling stupid or disagreement on approach is strong. You don&#x27;t have to be insulting to maintain code quality. If insults are the only way you can make your point, you&#x27;ve got some way bigger personal issues to deal with.The thing is, being insulting is largely counterproductive. Even where the best response from the person being insulted is that they shrug it off, it still modifies the relationship and attitudes towards the insulter.

He used strong words but where did he actually attack the person? Tell them they&#x27;re &quot;worthless scum&quot;?

Criticize the behavior, not the person. Linus often included personal attacks against people who were making errors. You can get a message across without telling people that they are worthless scum.

I flat out don&#x27;t understand why people keep suggesting that it&#x27;s a choice between eggshells or vitriolic insults.

Why do so many people on this forum seem to believe that being polite inherently implies lying to each other? I just want to understand this line of thinking.My workplace is extremely polite to each other AND we don&#x27;t lie to each other. I recently submitted a code review that was full of violations of the style guide, and nobody was rude nor dishonest.

A slowgoing development for him, still I sympathize and wish him the best while wondering ironically if personal issues aside what works best.It brings to mind fundamental organizational and management. Is it better to have a &quot;rude&quot; organization? Calling bullshit early and often instead of polite everything is fine stacks of lies since it would be impolite to point out having O(N!) code just can&#x27;t work for anything of appreciable size? The optimal approach likely varies on several variables.

Being combative rarely works out the way you want to, at least in my experience. That being said, it&#x27;s still important to have standards beyond just empathy. I hope that Linus, and the Linux community can &quot;do both&quot; in some sense.

For what was acceptable from Linus, sure.

&gt; This email alone set the tone for what was acceptable.Did it really? Did other contributors adopt his &quot;style&quot;? Linus gets a pass because he&#x27;s Linus, I&#x27;m not so sure about other contributors, who presumably have their own reputation to maintain.

I wish he had recognised this six years ago:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lkml.org&#x2F;lkml&#x2F;2012&#x2F;12&#x2F;23&#x2F;75" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lkml.org&#x2F;lkml&#x2F;2012&#x2F;12&#x2F;23&#x2F;75</a>This email alone set the tone for what was acceptable.It was discussed previously:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5107495" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=5107495</a>

I think it&#x27;s important to react to people&#x27;s progress with encouragement rather than, &quot;Why didn&#x27;t you do this sooner?&quot; We all have issues we should&#x27;ve worked on by now and may not ever work on.This is, of course, separate from holding him accountable for treating others badly. He can and should have consequences when that happens.

&gt; I need to take
a break to get help on how to behave differently and fix some issues
in my tooling and workflow.I find it interesting that this is happening now instead years&#x2F; decades earlier.

Site is down, but here&#x27;s a mirror: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mail-archive.com&#x2F;linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org&#x2F;msg1767002.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mail-archive.com&#x2F;linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org&#x2F;ms...</a>

Do you have relevant examples (or even better, some statistics)? How do you measure this and how do you know if they were assholes or not? I guess you don&#x27;t have a record of SLT meetings of large companies (as you have access to the emails between Linus and the maintainers).Leaders of large companies are _usually_ more aggressive, selfish and less agreeable than average people. This is a well-researched topic (and also makes sense intuitively -- leading a Fortune 500 company comes with so unique perks that there&#x27;s an immense fight for those roles).

I think that&#x27;s the point. However, such people &quot;disappear&quot; and end up being less known, even though they had a substantial impact of what they started. This fact then becomes part of entrepreneur folklore, reproducing more and more toxic people, etc, etc.I&#x27;m not sure why it has to be this way or whether it has to be.

Completely agreed. But it&#x27;s definitely one of the archetypes of effectiveness, oddly.

People have been able to build successful organizations without being abrasive dickheads to their colleagues and subordinates all the time. I think it&#x27;s a false dichotomy.

&gt; People can be ruthless without being abusive.Everybody has a different conviction about what is abusive and what is not.

Sure. It takes a certain level of emotional passion to actually keep driving you forward in this kind of project, though, and that passion will come out in a &quot;naive conversational style&quot; as brusqueness and even personal attacks.It takes a certain level of self-awareness to realize that you should still say what you&#x27;re thinking, but you shouldn&#x27;t say it how you&#x27;re thinking of it.

Simply not accepting poor patches isn&#x27;t ruthlessness though. It&#x27;s just doing your job. Ruthlessness is disregarding negative externalities (in this case, people&#x27;s feelings) in pursuit of a goal. Abuse is just one tool among others. Almost certainly Linus didn&#x27;t write his rants in order to gain some sort of sadistic pleasure (certainly to relieve his own frustration, however!) but he truly believed it was for the greater good and, if we&#x27;re to believe him, he wasn&#x27;t actually aware of how much his words could hurt. I guess what would be called abusive by many was merely a &quot;stern talking-to&quot; to Linus.

Bull. His rants were meant to make people work harder. Nothing more. Nothing less.

People can be ruthless without being abusive. Linus had effectively ultimate power over the kernel for quite some time, so he could have said things like:&quot;I disagree with this patch and I&#x27;m not going to merge it. It does these things wrong, and this line of reasoning makes no sense. Change these things and explain the reasoning behind this and I&#x27;ll look at it again.&quot;Most of his rants that I&#x27;ve read could have been summarized by that without including any personal attacks.

I don&#x27;t know if it is worth it, but history is filled with people who treated others around them badly but achieved outsized success that much of humans can only dream of - including art (Picasso was terrible to others), military (Genghis Khan was ruthless to his own army), business etc.

I&#x27;d be interested to know your thoughts in more detail, because I have a different perspective and have a hard time trying to see things from your point of view.From my perspective, people react to social condemnation of their actions. When someone does something incompetent, and they are gently corrected, that sends a certain message. When someone does something incompetent and they are lambasted, that sends the message not only that their work was of low quality but also that doing low-quality work is socially unacceptable. Since social acceptance is a much higher driving force for humans than merely being thought of as technically proficient, that would seem to be more effective.

I kind of feel that he wasn’t successful just because he was abusive, but it was probably a factor in terms of how he was able to run his businesses the way he did.

Why do you feel that way? Because it seems &quot;right&quot;?Being ruthless, manipulative and dishonest is highly effective, that&#x27;s how Con Men get to be so successful. It takes a sociopath to pull it off and it doesn&#x27;t work out well in the long term, but people only live so long anyway.

Jobs was direct, opinionated, and willing to move mountains to see his vision through. I imagine that these attributes and his abusiveness shared a common ancestor in his personality, not that one was dependent on the other.

I feel like Jobs was successful despite being abusive, not because of it.

I see this as two fold. If you hold a high bar with a stick, you might attain your goal of having a high bar—but you&#x27;ll largely fail to inspire others to keep the bar held high after you leave. If you hold a high bar with carrots (read: empathy, professionalism, understanding), you&#x27;ll impress your standards (and your values!) on the rest of your organization. Organizations that are led by the latter sorts of leaders last longer and tend to be more successful.That&#x27;s not to say that there&#x27;s no room for being firm—and OSS politics could drive the pope to violence at times—but LT&#x27;s behavior has crossed the line many times over. I very much look forward to a more approachable kernel leadership approach.

see also: Steve JobsMr Jobs was an entrepreneur who ran a company - a very influential one, I&#x27;ll grant you. Mr Torvalds created something that turned out to be quite important and gave it away and encouraged others to help him improve it.When I consider &quot;ends justify the means&quot;, I like to start with which ends might be important 8)

A certain sort of ruthlessness and lack of empathy, accompanied by having an extraordinarily driven personality, certainly seems to often make things happen (see also: Steve Jobs). The ages-old question is – is it worth it? Do ends justify the means?

That doesn&#x27;t sound plausible to me. Tech has been &quot;grown up&quot; in terms of professionalism for a long time. What didn&#x27;t catch up was emotional intelligence and workplace ethos. What is new is that people aren&#x27;t going to tolerate Linus ranting at them and their colleagues and cussing them out anymore like in the old days. And I&#x27;m sticking to my guns, thinking that a lot of this has to do with a more diverse workplace (and the pressure doesn&#x27;t have to come from the LKML, but from the larger software engineering ethos).Linus is a very smart guy, and I&#x27;m glad he&#x27;s accepted that he needs to change. He should be lauded for that.

Tech has been a profession longer than you or I have been alive.

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.

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&#x27;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.

Hey, I agree totally. I wasn&#x27;t suggesting that respect and empathy are only for women, they&#x27;re for everybody.

Men deserve to be treated with respect too. I&#x27;m a man, and I would absolutely quit any job where someone talked to me the way LBT did in his emails. I&#x27;m sure someone reading this thinks that makes me a snowflake.

&gt; is the increasing presence of women in technology.you have statistics on that? if anything it has been declining during the entirety of Linux&#x27;s existence <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.huffingtonpost.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;27&#x2F;women-in-tech_n_6955940.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.huffingtonpost.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;03&#x2F;27&#x2F;women-in-tech_n_69...</a>

I didn&#x27;t intend that. What I&#x27;m implying is that &quot;men taking the heat&quot; and having supposedly thicker skin was the excuse used to justify the lack of empathy and sociopathic behaviour in the culture.

&gt; when engineering was almost totally male-dominated, you were expected to be able to bear harsh criticism and vituperationI 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.

&gt; It just doesn&#x27;t work very well when they aren&#x27;t teenage hackers anymore, but have gone mainstreamWhat has gone mainstream is in my opinion something very different than what the original hacker ethos was about. See for example <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aeon.co&#x2F;essays&#x2F;how-yuppies-hacked-the-original-hacker-ethos" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aeon.co&#x2F;essays&#x2F;how-yuppies-hacked-the-original-hacke...</a>

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&#x27; roots in a youth-dominated hacker subculture. It just doesn&#x27;t work very well when they aren&#x27;t teenage hackers anymore, but have gone mainstream and are working at it in a professional capacity.

&gt; 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 &quot;whoever wrote this should be retroactively aborted&quot;, which is going waaaaaay too far and is going to make someone feel bad, period.

Men and women express aggression in different ways. While they can both be toxic, female aggression is more acceptable at this time.Linus was forceful at times, but his focus was on the work, not on trying to make people feel bad.Be critical all you want, but his achievement is amazing.

&gt; 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 talentI do not believe that the density of challenged. What has changed is that modern programming languages&#x2F;technologies&#x2F;... 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.

&gt; [...]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.

I don&#x27;t think it has anything to do with PC and has a lot to do with being C. There&#x27;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&#x27;t the world we work in anymore. Everything has been done and if it&#x27;s being done again it&#x27;s because the subtle mistakes and approximations of the past aren&#x27;t good enough. Linus&#x27; complaints about the scheduler are the best example of what I&#x27;m talking about. A scheduler is a super hard problem now and there&#x27;s a lot of complexity to wrestle with that simply didn&#x27;t exist in 2001.Anyway, the kernel is still open and discussion is still happening so I don&#x27;t think we&#x27;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.

I agree. While I think it&#x27;s good that he&#x27;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&#x27;s much less acceptable to be abrasive. As an abrasive person myself, who&#x27;s easily frustrated, but has a thick skin when it comes to other people being abrasive with me, I don&#x27;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.

I don&#x27;t know much about Linus&#x27;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&#x27;s culture. I have wondered if he somehow had similar early exposure.It&#x27;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), &quot;There is the right way, the wrong way, and the Navy way&quot; 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&#x27;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 &quot;polite&quot; and &quot;diplomatic&quot; 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...

&gt; This guy [...] was making fun of my contributionThat isn&#x27;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&#x27;d probably perceive that as condescending. He could instead ignore you. That wouldn&#x27;t be nice, either.If you were Linus, how would you handle your not-quite-contribution?

Linking it to &quot;PC&quot; or &quot;women&quot; 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&#x27;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&#x2F;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&#x2F;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t know..) over the years that have basically managed their own forks with various patches (Con Kolivas&#x27; scheduler stuff stands out to me) because for whatever reasons they couldn&#x27;t or wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;t want it or won&#x27;t take it.Not sure what caused Linus to recognize it this time but I hope things improve, it&#x27;s better for everyone.

False. &quot;The percentage of CS-degree holders who were women peaked in the 1980s at 34% and has been on a downward trend ever since&quot; [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.[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;newsroom.ucla.edu&#x2F;stories&#x2F;cracking-the-code%3A-why-aren-t-more-women-majoring-in-computer-science" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;newsroom.ucla.edu&#x2F;stories&#x2F;cracking-the-code%3A-why-ar...</a>

As someone familiar with LBT&#x27;s mailing list rhetoric since the early days, I&#x27;m guessing a big part of what&#x27;s happening here is that LBT hasn&#x27;t changed the way he communicates but the rest of the world has moved on. And let&#x27;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&#x27;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.

People change over time. If you are the same person today as 10 years ago you&#x27;re doing something wrong. Good for him

Yeah maybe I took it from when he said he had been attending a conference for 20 years and was hoping he didn&#x27;t have to.He does say he loves the project and wants to continue and compared it to when he developed git

He specifically said he wasn&#x27;t burned out. I agree that he does sound frustrated, though maybe with himself more than with any particular folks.

I got the feeling reading that, that Torvald is burned out and frustrated.I know as a kid helping father with a project, sometimes he could be a bit frustrated, maybe I wasn&#x27;t grabbing the correct size tool, or holding the flashlight in the right place. Maybe Linus feels like that?

The git thing is what I admire about Linus... He saw that existing version control tools don&#x27;t do what he wanted, so he just sat down and wrote the best (ok, one of the best :) version control tool on the market, from scratch. Just like that. OK, I know I&#x27;m simplifying, but still. If he does something like that again, I&#x27;ll start to think maybe he was sent to us from the future to help us.

&gt; This is more like the time I got out of kernel development for a while because I needed to write a little tool called &quot;git&quot;. I need to take a break to get help on how to behave differently and fix some issues in my tooling and workflow.Oh nice, so he&#x27;s going to write another ground-breaking piece of software that will change how we do software. :)Kidding aside, I think his comment is well-thought and I wish him all the best. Btw. I don&#x27;t think his (sometimes heavily criticized) way of communication is that bad, it&#x27;s more a clash of different kinds of culture - he is Finnish and used to a very direct way of communication and confrontation (which can be good and bad). That doesn&#x27;t excuse some of his (admittedly uncalled for) rants, but I don&#x27;t think he wants to sound as harsh as he often comes across ...

&#x27;The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now.&#x27;

when the heat of &quot;the moment&quot; lasts 20 years, the least we can say is it&#x27;s about time.

I wonder what that discussion was like. It&#x27;s not as if no one ever mentioned the subject to him before.

I may be odd-man out here, but I really didn&#x27;t see any part of his mind that needed to be changed. What did you disagree with?

More importantly, many thanks and congratulations to the folks who finally changed his mind.

&gt; The key is to realize it, apologize and do better.Apologies are begging for redemption after a failure. This misses the point, and often any apology becomes a magical panacea for any fault.The key is to never fail the same way twice, and to do better in the future, so you do not need to apologize for this, ever again.

Way to go Linus... this is a great lesson for all of us!It&#x27;s easy to get caught-up in the heat of the moment and say and do things that we regret. We&#x27;ve all done it. It&#x27;s part of being human. The key is to realize it, apologize and do better.

Linus and I draw our paychecks from the same place: The Linux Foundation. I&#x27;ve only been there three and a half years, but the &quot;no brilliant assholes&quot; line in the hiring process has always rung hollow.Glad to see this is being addressed.

I feel people confuse being blunt with being rude.&quot;This patch is crap. Stupid this silly that, and how many times have I said you can&#x27;t break userland.&quot;vs.&quot;I won&#x27;t accept this patch as-is, or possibly at all. It has the following problems [...] and I don&#x27;t feel you respect userland stability enough.&quot;I really don&#x27;t see how the second version compromises on the clarity or kernel quality.

I remember criticizing Linus&#x27; sarcastic comments on here some time ago. I was surprised by the number of people that defended him saying stuff like &quot;Linus is just Linus&quot; or &quot;he needs to be like that to keep Linux moving forward&quot;. I personally think his brilliance would be even more appreciated if he were a bit less sarcastic.

Sorry, I wasn&#x27;t defending Linus at all, and I would not behave as he did. I was just saying that him changing his behavior doesn&#x27;t prove anything about successful management techniques. Of course I&#x27;m not pro assholes :)

If you can’t create something without hurting people then don’t create it.I wish the world were that simple.If you accomplish anything, someone is going to be jealous or insulted or angry for some reason or another. And if you do nothing, the world goes to hell in a hand basket because no problems are solved.I&#x27;m glad the guy is taking some time off. I have nothing but respect for his conclusion here and how he is handling it.But the reality is that if accomplish anything whatsoever in the world, someone will come up with some reason to hate on you for it.

You might not like it, but it might be true; we don&#x27;t actually know for sure. What we do know, is that someone with Linus&#x27; personality and character traits is the person who did get this monumental thing accomplished for the betterment of the world.Until Jimmy-never-says-anything-mean does the same, we won&#x27;t have a useful counterexample to shift the evidence toward your preference.

I don’t like the whole “to make an omelette you have to break some eggs” excuse.If you can’t create something without hurting people then don’t create it.Yes everyone calling out LT being an asshat has been right, from day 1.

We should also keep in mind that the fact that he&#x27;s trying to change his behavior does not mean that it has been counterproductive overall for Linux over the last three decades. It might not be optimal now for leading kernel development, or it might not be optimal for him as a person. However, this introspection really does not mean that Linux would have been more successful if he&#x27;d been nicer in the past. Maybe yes, maybe not -- but some commenters seem to imply that this email is somehow a proof that people calling Linus out in the past were somehow right.

Still waiting for all the people that go around with a smile plastered all over their behavior to apologize.

Good on him for doing what&#x27;s right for his community. It takes a lot to own up to a mistake and work on doing better. It takes more to do that when there&#x27;s a pile of them.

Hence writing it down explicitly to establish a common understanding.

This is why a governing body codifies their interpretation of the matter into rules that everyone who wants to be part of the community has to abide by.

Apparently that just didn&#x27;t occur to Chris Mason, Olof Johansson, Dan Williams, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Steven Rostedt, and Linus Torvalds.

I don&#x27;t think the language of the Contributor Covenant [1] contains anything really objectionable by anyone, even people who wouldn&#x27;t consider themselves left-leaning. &quot;Trolling, insulting&#x2F;derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks&quot; is arguably the only ambiguous part. That said, I am a bit skeptical of the CC creators&#x27; motives and goals.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.contributor-covenant.org&#x2F;version&#x2F;1&#x2F;4&#x2F;code-of-conduct" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.contributor-covenant.org&#x2F;version&#x2F;1&#x2F;4&#x2F;code-of-con...</a>

This is the really interesting part of introducing a code of conduct to me: that it flushes a particular type of person out of the woodwork. They are forced to reveal themselves. Forced. It&#x27;s like you&#x27;re playing one of those hidden role games, and suddenly you do something that means people have to reveal their concealed cards. It&#x27;s almost magical.

Attacking ideas is fine.Attacking people is not.There are fine gradations that are open for interpretation.

&gt; It just means not letting things turn heated or hateful, and treating people well.Different people have very different beliefs what is to be considered &quot;heated&quot;, &quot;hateful&quot; and &quot;treating well&quot; or not.

why write tests? why improve ux or ui? why help with documentation?&gt; I mean if you can&#x27;t contribute code why simply mess around with things like the Code of Conduct.there are many more parts to a community, even a community of developers, than just contributing code.

The Contributor Covenant is basically just a lot of publicity grabbing faux FOSS addition. I mean if you can&#x27;t contribute code why simply mess around with things like the Code of Conduct.

&gt; What CoC enforcement eventually becomes is a prohibition on project contributors professing political opinions that the CoC enforcers find reprehensible.To quote a comment I made elsewhere in the thread (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18001722" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18001722</a>):If you want to argue about the level of taxation, the right size of government, regulations on business, whether public or private is the most efficient way to accomplish a goal, or myriad other areas of policy like those, go right ahead. Those kinds of things are absolutely reasonable subjects for healthy and reasonable debate. (They&#x27;re rarely on-topic for a software project, but in some types of communities, or in companies, or in random side conversations, sometimes they are.) Those are almost never the kinds of political opinions that people have in mind when they&#x27;re suggesting that &quot;political opinions&quot; should be an explicitly protected category, though.It&#x27;s funny how the people worried most about whether they&#x27;ll feel unwelcome for their political opinions are often those whose political opinions revolve around making others unwelcome, or hurting others, or questioning (or asking with superficial politeness about) others&#x27; right to exist. Those kind of &quot;political opinions&quot; do not and should not get any protections, in a code of conduct or anywhere else. You&#x27;re legally allowed to say them, but you should not expect to do so without any consequence.&gt; You don&#x27;t need a CoC to get civil behavior.If you&#x27;re lucky enough to have a community that all has a common understanding of how to behave well and treat others well, perhaps. But even then, writing that common understanding down helps others in the future.Usually, when we have undocumented information that people need to know, we call it &quot;tribal knowledge&quot;, and we try to fix that by documenting it.

These things have nothing to do with civility etc. They are at their core as you said, mechanisms to try to force out political beliefs. Sounds like the culture wars have claimed another...and the community will not be better for it.

Adopting a code of conduct for Linux is a worrisome move. Any code of conduct that purports to police what contributors do outside the context of the project is a totalitarian infringement on individual autonomy, especially since enforcers of codes of conduct tend to take an expansive view of their remit.What CoC enforcement eventually becomes is a prohibition on project contributors professing political opinions that the CoC enforcers find reprehensible. You don&#x27;t need a CoC to get civil behavior.

Who has been lynched because of a Contributor Covenant, or other similar open-source code of conduct?edit: You assert that &quot;morality should come from within&quot;, though I&#x27;m assuming you&#x27;re OK with projects and teams not reinventing things like PEP8 or language&#x2F;framework best practices.But then you complain about manifestos &quot;mutating&quot;. Isn&#x27;t mutation a consequence -- many would describe it a desired feature, i.e. iteration -- when a community decides to develop a rule framework from within?(and I would argue that a community adopting something like the Contributor Covenant is quite clearly a decision made by that community)

&gt; Contributor CovenantThe Contributor Covenant is horrific and harks back to the days of the Catholic Church(Or insert religion here) and morality and it&#x27;s enforcement. It&#x27;s a power trip that will end badly.Morality should come from within, a learned and practiced behaviour, personally and within communities, not prescribed.Manifesto&#x27;s are purely implemented to bully people, they allow for the lynching and harm to others without remorse.They also very quickly mutate once they take hold, they are evil at its worst.

Every good thing must come to an end. Sounds like linux is going to go down this path and the industry and innovation will suffer as a result of this. They&#x27;ve been gunning for Linus for a long time. My guess is that they got some dirt on him.

Was there a public discussion that led to this change? The &#x27;Contributor Covenant&#x27; contains this line:&gt; Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional settingwhich is essentially a carte blanche for any actions based on &#x27;violation of the code of conduct&#x27;, especially with the inclusion of public spaces in it&#x27;s scope. We&#x27;ve seen it being (ab)used many times recently in open-source projects.Most recently it&#x27;s been considered legally binding, and the wide net it casts seems to be a huge liability for contributors (not a lawyer, so feel free to school me on this one).

There&#x27;s a large overlap between hurtful people and rules lawyers. Writing down samples of bad behavior is helpful; treating it as an exhaustive list is an open invitation to come up with creative new ways to hurt people that aren&#x27;t on the list.Keep in mind that this is all based on the enforcement done by the project maintainers. If you&#x27;re inclined to do things the project maintainers will consider unacceptable behavior, you&#x27;re already going to have a problem. This just documents that.

It&#x27;s a good practice to have some concrete guidelines regarding work environment. But this particular code of conduct is pure and utter garbage. I&#x27;m really not sure how Linus could ever willingly accept this.&gt; Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional settingThis statement here from the CoC is pretty much an open invitation to send whoever you don&#x27;t agree with to the gulag&#x2F;camp&#x2F;whatever. What concrete definition is there of &quot;reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting&quot;? These change across cultures and countries. Linux is a global effort. Not everyone on the planet follows the silicon valley, American or any single culture.You either have fixed and clear guidelines on what is acceptable or not, or have no guidelines at all. Something open ended like this is nothing more than a potential witch hunt in the making.

The other huge news here, both for Linux and for numerous other communities trying to make similar changes:The most recent commit, right before the release, deletes Linux&#x27;s &quot;Code of Conflict&quot; and replaces it with a real Code of Conduct, the Contributor Covenant.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.kernel.org&#x2F;pub&#x2F;scm&#x2F;linux&#x2F;kernel&#x2F;git&#x2F;torvalds&#x2F;linux.git&#x2F;commit&#x2F;?id=8a104f8b5867c682d994ffa7a74093c54469c11f" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.kernel.org&#x2F;pub&#x2F;scm&#x2F;linux&#x2F;kernel&#x2F;git&#x2F;torvalds&#x2F;lin...</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kernel.org&#x2F;doc&#x2F;html&#x2F;latest&#x2F;process&#x2F;code-of-conduct.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kernel.org&#x2F;doc&#x2F;html&#x2F;latest&#x2F;process&#x2F;code-of-condu...</a>Quoting the commit message:&gt; Explicit guidelines have demonstrated success in other projects and other areas of the kernel.&gt; Here is a Code of Conduct statement for the wider kernel. It is based on the Contributor Covenant as described at www.contributor-covenant.org&gt; From this point forward, we should abide by these rules in order to help make the kernel community a welcoming environment to participate in.Something worth emphasizing here: adopting a code of conduct, and choosing to be welcoming and inclusive, does not mean a project and its developers avoid disagreement, or avoid feeling passionate about their work, or avoid discussing and fixing issues. It just means not letting things turn heated or hateful, and treating people well.

It was not necessary, it was not helpful.

I don&#x27;t think anyone, not even Linus himself, really knows whether his abrasive attitude was necessary or not, and whether it was helpful or not. Will be interesting to see what happens.

Wow. I can&#x27;t count how many times people have tried to excuse Linus&#x27;s outbursts by saying he doesn&#x27;t mean them personally, but here he is explicitly admitting that he has done just that. Then he goes on to say that his behavior needs to change and that he will seek help doing so. Good for him. These are hard things to admit, and he&#x27;s setting a great example.&gt; In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me.
&gt; I know now this was not OKThere are so many people in tech who need to read that a hundred times. Including a couple of his top lieutenants.

Out of interest, what changes could happen if Linus disappears tomorrow?

He&#x27;s tired. He&#x27;s older. He mentioned several times how he&#x27;s been developing this for decades. Maybe he is making a balance, maybe he thinks that the Kernel does not really need him so badly now, and he can take a time out.

Maybe he realized that his behavior would be against the new CoC.Maybe he had a good conversation with people he respects, where they confronted him with his behavior, and he was finally able to view his behavior through the lens of an outsider.Maybe he finally found and realized the &quot;bugs&quot; in his social interaction code and needs some time of to improve his mental tools.

While I am glad this happened, I am surprised. I truly would not have expected Linus to ever write something like this. I am curious how this can happen so suddenly. Have people not tried to convince him that he can be critical without being insulting many times before? What was different this time?

A good book about how to be direct without being abusive is Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg.

Nice apology. As someone who hasn&#x27;t been following can someone give a bit of a background. What was the bad behavior exactly?And why is he needed at every summit? That sounds like a bus factor.

&gt; ”I&#x27;ll take an asshole over a pushover any day“This is a false dichotomy. There’s no need to be an asshole to not be a pushover.

&gt;In a culture where the Overton window has shrunk considerablyHow do you figure? Genuinely curious. I think you have to take into account where in the world you&#x27;re talking about. Perhaps in metropolitan parts of the world this is true, but for other large swaths of the world, especially in politics not just individuals, the opposite is happening with authoritarianism prevailing. It&#x27;s a pretty stark contrast between cultural mores these days.

Reality is more important than one&#x27;s feelings which is why he has been effective in making linux what it is today. Throwing that out the window and caving to the postmodernist &quot;feels&quot; will not bode well for the project as a whole... and in the end the activists will try to find another reason to push him out of the project he founded even if he completely capitulates to them.

&quot;A man who says a spade is a spade is only fit to wield one&quot; - I can&#x27;t recall who this quote is from but it had a profound impact on my how I conduct myself.Or: &quot;A hammer is no more or less honest than a scalpel.&quot;I had the same sense of reality as Linus is having now, fortunately I was only 26 when it was brought to my attention.Previously I took pride in calling a spade a spade. I was abrupt, people actually praised me in this behavior before I realised it was holding me back. To be specific, some close friends who were in Senior positions to me gave me a reality check.My behavior was not genetic, it was nurture and not nature. The Finish brash is not too far from the Northern English brashness.I&#x27;ve had my ego checked on a few occasions and I&#x27;ve changed my tact accordingly when I realised it wasn&#x27;t a win&#x2F;lose or a zero sum game. It&#x27;s about working together. I shouldn&#x27;t escalate to a combative state so eagerly. The above quote resonated with me when it highlighted I need to better at communicating. &#x27;Disagree and commit&#x27; is one such method that I&#x27;ve been trying to practice. AnotheI&#x27;m glad he&#x27;s been given a reality check, though I hope it doesn&#x27;t take anything away from his matter of fact way of speaking. He doesn&#x27;t need to sink to ab hominem based attacks to get his point accross.

Same. Linus always called a spade a spade, and I always respected that. In a culture where the Overton window has shrunk considerably and people habitually hide their thoughts, I think this kind of attitude is more important, not less. People give up ability to say certain things in the name of inclusion, and then lose ability to think those things in the first place.I&#x27;ll take an asshole over a pushover any day, and most of us are pushovers.

ignoring your emotions and the emotions of others and seeing all of life as an exercise of pure rationalism is not emotional maturity, it&#x27;s emotional cowardice.

&gt; I wish people would grow thicker skins and get more emotionally mature, and be able to tolerate harsh words without taking them personallyThis is the &quot;rock polisher&quot; thesis of life, which I&#x27;ve also called the &quot;bully thesis.&quot; I grew up swapping between different parts of America that approached &quot;how to generate a functional adult&quot; differentally. Some places, it was &quot;love and care for your fellow man. Work together to make a better world.&quot; Other places it was &quot;we believe the world is harsh and unforgiving, therefore we&#x27;re gonna beat you to get you ready for it.&quot;What I&#x27;ve learned is that society is exactly how you make it. If you allow kids to bully and beat the shit out of each other in the playground, you&#x27;re gonna get a society of Biggest Fist Wins. If you go the other direction, you&#x27;ll get one where people work together and work to see the best in each other.Once you&#x27;ve been raised one way though, the other way seems a weakness, so I generally don&#x27;t have hope of doing anything other than preach to the choir.In your example - what&#x27;s the point of thicker skin if people simply don&#x27;t say mean things to each other?

Yes, agree also.&gt; be able to tolerate harsh words without taking them personallyThis is an essential life skill.

That would be fine. In the unlikely event I was ever the target of one I would frame it and add it to the bottom of my resume.The problem isn&#x27;t that Linus is legendary in his abrasiveness.The problem is that other people (mostly young) imitate his behavior, starting with the belief that it&#x27;s okay to be a jerk as long as you&#x27;re right.

See my other comment; if you had been the receiver you&#x27;d probably have a totally different attitude. Especially if you felt it was totally unjustified.

I agree. I liked his rants, I found them entertaining, and I wish I was the target of one! (I would probably need to work on my coding skills first.) I wish people would grow thicker skins and get more emotionally mature, and be able to tolerate harsh words without taking them personally.

&gt; The sooner folks are forced to deal with it, the better off the organization ends up in the long run.If Linux gets measurably worse after this, then would you support sending Linus to a second therapist to make him more of an asshole again?

&gt; One thing that is true in all successful organizations over time is that for any given person, no amount of genius will make up for being an asshole.Wouldn&#x27;t Steve Jobs be a counterexample to this? And possibly Bill Gates?

It depends on how you define arsehole I guess. When it comes to how well an organisation works I&#x27;ve found there are only two things that matter. The first is how good the people there are at their jobs. (If most people are competent, there has been some pretty ruthless pruning going on which is not pleasant when it happens.)The second is what people are working for - which is to say themselves or the firm. My definition of an &quot;arsehole&quot; is someone who fights to get themselves up the corporate ladder, treating the exercise as a zero sum game. So if they see someone above them occupying a desirable spot, they will back stab, white ant them in an effort to dislodge them from the spot so they can take it.All this has very little to do with their demeanour. Some people are good at communicating. Some are bloody hopeless. It&#x27;s nice to deal with people that area really good at handling others of course, but you can&#x27;t be an expert at everything and if someone is really good at a particular thing it&#x27;s often because they have a passion for it, focusing a great deal of their time on it. If that area happens to be technical that means they have spent effort on it rather than most other on learning how to interact with others.Sadly, people who devote most of their efforts at shaking the corporate tree do others fall off it are usually very good at interacting with others. Being effective at manipulating others sort of requires it. The worse of them, psychopaths, are well known for their superficial charm.Time cures most things and in the end smart people learn the easiest path through life despite their obsession with other things. When it comes to interacting with others, that means learning to use words that engender cooperation rather than conflict. It appears Linus has reached this point. That he did is testament to just how good he is. Most of us can learn these things by watching our superiors over time. (If these people are good at their job, they will both be very good a getting people to work together and instilling it others.) Linus didn&#x27;t have a corporate ethos he could learn from. He&#x27;s had to invent it himself.So we end up at the curious juncture were some introvert who spends all their time playing with things rather than people is likely to be a good asset to the organisation and if given time (decades) will learn how to interact well with others to. A psychopath on the other hand who is focused on human interactions and is really good at it, but if the firm is to survive should be excised at the earliest opportunity.

&gt; One thing that is true in all successful organizations over time is that for any given person, no amount of genius will make up for being an asshole. It may take time, etc, but eventually, it ends up a significant net negative for the organization.I dunno, Steve Jobs sure managed for a long time. I think they quite often end up being a net negative for the people who work there, but I don&#x27;t think it necessarily hurts the organization (though maybe it should sometimes).

&gt;One thing that is true in all successful organizations over time is that for any given person, no amount of genius will make up for being an asshole.That&#x27;s why Linux usage and contributions have collapsed over the last 30 years.

&gt; One thing that is true in all successful organizations over time is that for any given person, no amount of genius will make up for being an asshole.Like Apple?

&gt; One thing that is true in all successful organizations over time is that for any given person, no amount of genius will make up for being an asshole.All successful organizations? Really? Definitely not hyperbole.Even here it&#x27;s clear that Linus hasn&#x27;t been a net negative, not even close.Only a Sith deals in absolutes.Personally I take the anti-jerk sentiment with a grain of salt. People like you were probably just manhandled by one like ten years ago and still haven&#x27;t let it go.

&quot;in other words : his technical brilliance, in my own opinion, was a far larger boon than the problems stemming from having to deal with his knife-like personality.&quot;One thing that is true in all successful organizations over time is that for any given person, no amount of genius will make up for being an asshole.It may take time, etc, but eventually, it ends up a significant net negative for the organization.The sooner folks are forced to deal with it, the better off the organization ends up in the long run.It also turns out you can be effective at dealing with people and still be brilliant, and it usually doesn&#x27;t take a lot more than spending more energy in being self aware and trying to see the perspectives of others.

Reading this demonstrates perfectly well why &quot;direct&quot; and &quot;brutal&quot; are not at all synonymous. Direct communication wouldn&#x27;t have required Popov to &quot;extract the technical complaints from them&quot;.

Take a look at <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;SubscriberLink&#x2F;764325&#x2F;09702eb949176f55&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;SubscriberLink&#x2F;764325&#x2F;09702eb949176f55&#x2F;</a> for the most recent one of many examples of the kinds of problems that this type of behavior led to in the past.&gt; Popov said that all of that &quot;kills my motivation&quot; to work on Linux.

In this thought experiment, which one of us is correct (technically)?If he&#x27;s correct: I&#x27;d be upset at being wrong about something, but hopefully i&#x27;d have willpower to sober up to the fact that I may in fact be wrong once in awhile.If I&#x27;m correct: I&#x27;d be upset because a person I respect is technically wrong about something, and then decided to rant about it.Choice C: What if the question is non-technical? Answer : Don&#x27;t ask Torvalds. He&#x27;s not an expert in that domain.(truthful answer: I&#x27;ve been a member of a project criticized by him. It felt terrible, but not because of some personal sleight; he just happened to be correct about the inappropriate-ness of what was being used, and being wrong is a tough pill to swallow when you&#x27;re young and cocky.)

Yes, he has always seemed like a kind and empathic guy, but prone to angry rants and sometimes uncalled for insults. I can handle such people just fine in real life so I do not think I would have any issue with being called out on a mailing list when I fucked up.Should he cut down a bit on the angry rants? Sure, but in general he seems like a really nice guy and I do not think they are a big deal.

Would you have enjoyed it if you were the object of one of his rants?

he&#x27;s almost always right... so yeah I enjoy his rants.

Did you ever get called out?Total aside, I&#x27;m a spoken word poet and performer. The original Poetry Slam started in Chicago and it&#x27;s still run by the original guy; a dude who is kinda a dick and encourages the audience to be rude and boo people off stage who are bad.I use to think this was kinda neat; you know where you stand right? I went up on the open mic several week and did really well. I saw some people get booed off stage that were really terrible, but a few that I really enjoyed -- they typically got booed off due to people not liking the content.Then I eventually did a narrative about a prostitute in LA. I almost changed what I was going to do since I realized it was an x-mas show and maybe I should do something brighter&#x2F;happier. But I&#x27;ve had other experiences where changing last minute was a bad idea, so I stuck to my guns and got booed off stage.I was told I went too long, but people were already hissing at me for all the parts about the prostitute growing up on the streets.I&#x27;ve gotten good feedback every other time I&#x27;ve done this story. I misread the audience, theme and time of the year.I thought the booing was a good thing, until it happened to me. I&#x27;ve literally done shows in Dublin, Edinburgh, Melbourne, Denver, Vegas and I&#x27;ve never seen any other venue do anything remotely similar at their open mics. Some have a timer and go are pushed off stage if you go over, but the audience is never encouraged or praised for being rude.In the comedy circuit, we stopped heckling and booing people off stage years ago. You can push the edge of jokes, but you don&#x27;t disrespect people on stage .. unless they go over time.The guy who runs the Chicago scene is the first and the original in this concept of Spoken Word, and the scene is crusty and old just like him. I know a number of performers who hate going there and I think I&#x27;m included too.I still think the master&#x2F;slave thing with Redis was&#x2F;is dumb. But with Torvalds .. I am glad that he said this, in the way he did. I think he could benefit from the basic rules on StackOverflow. You can simply say, &quot;I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s going to work because of x, y, z. Look at commit x and try doing a, b and c instead and resubmit,&quot; compared to the yelling we&#x27;ve often seen.I&#x27;ve generally been against code of conducts, maybe because I&#x27;ve only seen them misused or people get pushed out for non-clean&#x2F;arbitrary reasons. But maybe we&#x27;re moving into a new era? Who knows, but I hope we find a balance in the middle.And I still don&#x27;t think the Redis guy should have made that change; but asked the issue requester to submit a patch with all the changes if they wanted them.I think there is a balance in the middle.

It&#x27;s easy to enjoy a spectacle like that from the stands but if you had a boss like that you&#x27;d be a nervous wreck. Linus realizes that his behavior&#x27;s far from optimal, though changing isn&#x27;t easy as we all know.

There&#x27;s a whole lot of people who don&#x27;t have the luxury of just being able to assume a baseline level of trust, because they feel out of place for whatever reason. Think about what groups of people that might be, in the kernel context.

You&#x27;re definitely not alone, it&#x27;s just that people who agree with you are less likely to speak out because of chilling effects.

I too appreciated his style of candor at times.  I hope that he is able to find a way to keep being Linus while also not resorting to personal attacks, and I applaud him for reflecting on his actions.

I&#x27;m probably going to be alone in saying so, but I always enjoyed Linus and his attitude.(to me) it made him appear honest and dedicated to (his own) goals, and I always felt like that was respectable. (mostly) whenever he was proven technically wrong about how to do something he would concede to the technically better solution, and if he didn&#x27;t do so he gave reasons for his conclusion.in other words : his technical brilliance, in my own opinion, was a far larger boon than the problems stemming from having to deal with his knife-like personality.

Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off