An oldie, but a goodie
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
1478 points (91.8% liked)
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It's disgusting that this post has not been removed, has a 96% postive vote ratio, has over 1K upvotes and is sitting at the top of All after almost a day.
This isn't a Linux meme. It's a celebration of abuse, abusive behaviour and abusive people.
All the people ITT condoning or making even the slightest accommodations for this behaviour ought to be ashamed and need to take a good, long look in a mirror.
What are the moderators of this community thinking? Are you reading this stuff? Do some of you agree with any of it?
Of all the things to celebrate about Linus and Linux this is not one of them.
There is no value in leaving this post up. There is nothing to be learned or gained by revealing just how gross some supposed Linux supporters may be.
Does anyone ITT seriously think this is how Linus or Linux developers want to be remembered and celebrated for their dedication and decades of toil?
Do you think anyone that's been on the receiving end of this kind of abuse on the job or in the home wants to jump onto Lemmy today to see this celebration of abusive and awful behaviour.
There are no excuses to be made. It doesn't matter that this happened many years ago and that Linus has managed to overcome behaving like this. The post itself is now the issue.
The many comments that have made even the slightest excuse for this kind of behaviour are awful and damaging to the reputations of Linus, Linux and the Linux community.
I don't read it as celebrating abuse. clearly there are better ways to correct peoples mistakes. As adults I think we all recognize that. I assumed the upvotes were because Linus is setting the high expectation that we don't see from Paid OS and Paid software. He is defending the philosophy of the next kernel should not destroy all the downstream work people put in. I'm currently working at a place that sells 3rd party software. It is an expensive product and touted as backward compatibility for 40+ years, and their newer versions have taken a F@©k Y0U approach to users. People with decades of files are now getting screwed and the software company turns down regression and bug reports and wants them submitted as feature enhancements. LOL WTF. I wish I could share this letter with their developers and management.
The point
While Linus went overboard (as he has a history of doing, and as has also caused negativity to the community), this post is still very well liked because it appears to be a strong example of someone calling out the BS that a lot of developers like to throw around. No one's going to join in a circle celebrating Linus picking on some first time contributor who didn't know any better, but that's how it sounds like you're interpreting the post.
To add some context, there's a toxic superiority complex that many developers have where they jump to blame others for issues that actually relate to their code. You can see this anywhere from developers who immediately blame users without investigating to software developers within companies who are quick to pass off issues as not their team's problem.
So, in this example Linus is actually calling one of these developers out, which is why the post is very well-received.
Well put
Alert! The point is being contested!
Is it team Shitter-Reddit again?
Don't worry, they are so incompetent, that they can't read more than one line of text.
You mean the light isn't properly aligned?
Wat? I mean the point was written in easy to ubderstand way. It is picture of point from TF2.
I still do not understand how Dustbowl's point has anything to do with conveying that meaning but whatever I do not care.
I don't think it's necessarily a celebration of abuse. I agree that he's obviously way out of line sending this email.
I think Linus is (was) a complete asshole who lacks interpersonal skills, and this email exemplifies his character. To me, this post shows the mentality of some developers (and leadership) in FOSS and why some folks find it difficult to contribute to open-source software. This post opens up the discussion on that.
FWIW, I've received zero reports on this post itself. But I've received reports on abusive comments in this post, which I've promptly removed. This community is more/less self-moderating and if the post receives a significant positive vote ratio, I don't think it should be removed by me. It brings an important discussion to the table regarding acceptable behavior in software development.
I've never had a negative experience contributing to open source.
I've also been to scrums where everyone is equal, and we have to be very PC, about explaining "processes" and "best practices" to people that break the build pipeline every single day. Eventually I just coded error handling and guard clauses into everything so no one could screw anything up by not following the documentation being a cowboy. That is a best practice, sure, but you'd be surprised by how people break things even after being warned not to do a very specific thing.
A cowboy that fixes things always 24/7 can be a maverick and talk shit.
But in todays PC world you can also be a cowboy that breaks everything always and spends weeks fixing something they themselves broke...
I wish I could say the things Linus said instead of just putting people on a performance improvement plan.
Sometimes being angry is appropriate. When I am I step back and try to figure out solution where the fuck up can't happen again and no one gets hurt.
I've seen people be VERY angry and even hands on working in jobs where fucking up can kill people.
I'd rather see anger than people dying. Did Linus go too far here? Probably, but there is a time and place for anger and being direct.
I respectfully, and fully disagree with you.
I'll copy and paste what I wrote elsewhere:
To add context:
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.
And I'll add: This is the internet. There is no "taking down" of this. In fact, you're getting angry over a screenshot of the original. Once it's out there, it's never getting removed.
The first point of your comment I completely disagree with; the second point acknowledges why the the first point is bullshit to begin with. Yes, someone can be incompetent and require corrective action. This was not it and completely, grossly unacceptable. That he had to adjust his behavior is an acknowledgement to this. We are all flawed humans; but some are more flawed than others. That being said, if it's true he has reflected and taken corrective action on his own negative behaviors, kudos to him.
Well, yeah. Gaslighting is kinda abusive. Don't worry, after Linus' explaination Mauro understood it.
Mauro does. Here's proof:
So, actual locker room talk then?
I couldn't disagree more with you, and I truly feel that the lack of being direct is why we have an overwhelming amount of mediocrity in the "professional" corporate world. When everyone is just nice and we go the passive aggressive route, or have constructive feedback in the vein of "I can see you worked sooooo hard on this", we get garbage.
If you want people to do their minimums, "act your wage" and all that shit, put your efforts accordingly. If you're trying to be a part of something excellent and eschew mediocrity, then give your best or fuck off.
Well there's a difference between "it's not good enough" and " fuck you you fucking code fart". Being direct doesn't equate to being an asshole. You can be direct while also being respectable and polite. But it's still funny watching people lose this shit.
Linus didn't call Mauro anything at all, much less a code fart. If anything, then an idiot (indirectly, by saying "I don't want to hear that kind of garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again".
How many of the people complaining about the mail being abusive or whatnot actually read it.
No, that was just an example. I just meant it comes off as aggressive as all. Especially the Stfu part
I would say I did read not only this email, but whole chain, but I did not complain to say that.
Most people would agree middle ground is better, but lots of people see the raw anger as refreshing and real
Sounds more like "it's not good enough".
No Mauro obviously didn't which is the fucking problem.
If you don't want to use swear words fine, but usually the tone police doesn't just want to tone down valuable emphasis, they also want to mess with the semantics of the message until it is insulting by means of assuming that the recipient is a toddler and completely ignores the actual issue, which is that Mauro has a role and responsibility and he failed in it.
On a construction site, if a foreman catches a worker not securing some area that they're responsible for securing, you can bet your ass that some choice words are going to be heard. That not only saves people's lives it also protects the worker from going to prison for negligent manslaughter or such. To do that, to have the necessary impact on the worker, yes it's going to feel bad.
Absolutely, and rightfully so. When you fail to account for good craftsman ship, you deliver a shitty build or people get killed at worst.
This isn't constructive, but reflects what people usually asking for.
Dude, thank you, totally agree. Anyone with skin thin enough to be hurt by this kind of corrective force shouldn't even be in the conversation. Not sure why people are offended by this on here but when you engineer critical systems you damn well should know better by now.
I think you hit the nail in the head with this. This is probably one of the main reasons why everything is garbage in recent years. Post-modernism reigns supreme, every idea is now a "good idea".
It's useful to note that there exists Lemmy servers where down votes are not processed. So the high up vote to down vote ratio isn't necessarily a reflection of people not down voting, it's potentially a reflection of the servers that allow down votes along with all other servers (generally they all allow up votes).
Didn't know Lemmy has this "feature". I know mastodon does not support downvotes.
I'm nitpicking here, sorry in advanced.
You put "quotes" around "feature" as though it is a bug. My instance (the user you are responding to is also a member of Blahaj) does not support downvotes and it is one of the reasons I signed up for it. So, I do feel it is a feature and not a bug.
Here's a long explanation about why I feel that way:
I think people should be allowed to be wrong on the internet without having a huge negative number hovering over their head. If they're wrong, people should go to the comments and say why. People absolutely care about that dumb number, and to pretend they won't or shouldn't is just not how humans work.
If a comment is controversial, it's upvote/downvote will be neutral and it'll get lost. Controversial comments should be read so discussion can form around it.
If the post should be downvoted to oblivion because it's toxic or offtopic, it should be removed instead.
I feel that downvotes are only useful if the community needs to collectively use it to moderate (I'd argue it had a purpose on Youtube, before they removed it. It could be abused, but it was useful to fight misinformation or product marketing disguised as content).
Some instances allow to sort by contraversy.
Isn't showing only upvotes is default in Jerboa?
We're ultimately talking about which order comments should appear on a post. I don't think controversial sort should be default, and I don't want to read the most controversial comments all the time. I think the comments that generate the best discussion and/or are the most valuable should float to the top naturally. Ignoring down votes does this, with the added benefits of removing the possible toxic effects of down votes.
Dunno, I don't use it. Don't need to, my instance doesn't allow downvotes. If I needed to move from Blahaj for some reason, I might look into it, might not.
History must be shared so it's not repeated. The email is dated 2012 so there's context of this being some old school bullying. Asking people to Not share the past because it's ugly is like asking people to not talk about slavery cause it'll make white people feel bad that they thought it was okay to own people. Small minds will remain small and less you expand their visibility.
Honestly, whether or not we agree with the approach of Linus, these kind of disagreements happen in the real world. Tensions run high. Recently I've been on calls where things need to be implemented this month, during a time where most of our resources(engineers) will be on vacation. These kind of conversations can be important to have to make sure this doesn't happen again. The project management team got their ass handed to them for kneeling to the LOBs' ridiculous timeline expectations. And they were told to hold the L if things don't work on the go-live date, there will be no post implementation support until mid January if something doesn't work.
E:og of my reply was way too hostile
i think the post is useful in order to highlight the inappropriate behaviour by linus, but the amount of lunatics who champion that email for its "directness" is disturbing
I think what you've said is brilliantly put.
Most of the top comments are negative about the post. You upvote to bring something bad to attention, not because you agree with it.
If I didn't know anything else about him my takeaway from this post would be "Linus Torvalds is an abusive asshole"
I'm glad we don't work together
Even those responding to you and trying to justify this, he sets a high bar yeesh. I don't care who the person is saying it, I don't care how much the guy he's responding to deserves it, this is worst boss behavior that I would nope so far away from.
Damn, I really hate social snowflakes such as you. Linus was right and he got his point across quickly and without bulshit. The Kernel Maintainer should have known better. Why exactly is this "abuse", because he used a few "naughty" words? Grow up. If you want censorship go back to reddit.