Exactly the point. IMHO the one and only thing that made Linux successful as a project is Linus' strong leadership - which has been criticized ad-nauseam over the years; yet it's the only thing that yields results.
So in the specific instances (like this one) where he's not decisively, unequivocally, and even harshly saying "yes" or "no" to something, the community shows a very clear incapability of reaching a decision.
Reminds me of a similar scenario that happened years ago with GVR stepping down as BDFL for Python - just after a tiresome and wasteful fight with the community's opinions.
"Community" is just a very naive ideal for me. There's a finite number of people that can do the job, and even a more finite number of people that can make a decision and stand by it.
What an absolutely awful statement about one of the most successful community projects ever. Direction usually comes from the community and the maintainers just steer it. Little in the kernel comes from maintainers saying "let's do X" and community members implementing it
Almost two decades later, for unexplicable reasons, every new client not piggybacking on an eatablished toolkit or a new toolkit/compositor struggles with clipboard support, I shit you not.
> IMHO the one and only thing that made Linux successful as a project is Linus' strong leadership - which has been criticized ad-nauseam over the years; yet it's the only thing that yields results.
I wear garlic every day and have yet to be attacked by a vampire; clearly this is due to the garlic!
Tang/ballpoint pens/velcro never would have been invented if it weren't for the Apollo program.
> IMHO the one and only thing that made Linux successful as a project is Linus' strong leadership
Naah, I don't think that's the only thing that did it. It was that, and the fact that people dared rely on it -- dared trust it to stick around, and to stay a single thing in stead of splintering up. And the thing that made it Open Source that stays Open Source -- that made it, in fact, Free Software -- is the license.
The two things that made Linux successful as a project are Linus' strong leadership and the GPL.
Just look at BSD: It had the backing of a whole darn university near Silicon Valley, not a single student somewhere North of The Wall. It had a head start by several years. And it had name recognition far beyond its home country[1]. And look where it is now: There are (at least?) three of them, and even together they're a marginal phenomenon among operating systems. I think that's because of the too-permissive BSD license.
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[1]: The first I heard of "Open Systems" was well before I got into working with computers for a living, as a student at another university in the Frozen North in the late 1980s. My fiend and neighbour, a computer student, raved about how cool Unix was: "And you can even get it for free! It's called BSD!"
Some of Linus's past messages came across as needlessly aggressive and insulting. There really was no practical reason for that and just served to alienate contributors, and it came across as unprofessional.
You can be a strong, opinionated leader and still be kind (or at least neutral) to the people you're working with.
A good leader is someone who can deliver hard messages while still keeping your team inspired. It doesn't do any good if the people working under you feel like trash.
It's the difference between telling a contributor "you're an f**ing idiot" vs "this code isn't up to standards, try again". Same message, but completely different impact on your team.
> A good leader is someone who can deliver hard messages while still keeping your team inspired.
Do you have examples of this? The only "good" leaders that are strong and opinionated I can think of always comes across as leans towards being an asshole.
> Same message, but completely different impact on your team.
Let's change it from "you're a fucking idiot" to "this code is fucking trash". It's not insulting to the specific person, but it definitely gets the point across that the code is no good and much less ambiguous to "it's not up to standards".
A few public ones off the top of my head: Satya Nadella (Microsoft) and Ed Catmull (Pixar) are both folks who I consider to be strongly opinionated and effective leaders but who don't come across as jerks.
I'm not sure how "this code is not up to standards, try again" is ambiguous? That seems pretty direct to me.
Ultimately it's about showing empathy. Especially when you're dealing with employees who are struggling with anxiety, impostor syndrome, or burnout - all of which seem to be overrepresented in tech.
Using business-approved language doesn't actually make your message more friendly.
It's not line Linus was prone to using flowery prose against random novices - the rant he's known for were mostly addressed at senior maintainers who really should have known better.
Bad faith arguments like this don't really belong on HN. Please represent the substance of your argument accurately rather than debating this inaccurate strawman argument.
Except you have no authority to call that out, and we're not forced by law to agree with you.
In my opinion Linus was never abusive or disrespectful - just blunt and direct.
Unfortunately, there seems to exist people (like me) that would prefer such individuals instead of nice empty words just in case someone gets offended.
Are you serious? Linus has a long history of being abusive, it is no secret. He has gotten better for sure in recent years, but especially in the earlier days he would fairly regularly insult people, tell them to kill themselves because it would make the world a better place, and more.
Seriously. And I say this because apparently every comment on this thread has to be on either side, with no actions being considered counterbalance whatsoever. So given that I have to pick a side, yep, seriously.
Can you explain in simple terms why a person cannot reply abusively (whatever that means) if he so desires? You're not obliged to interact with him, it's a free choice to join or to quit the lkml.
One of the main issues Torvalds says the kernel has is not being able to find maintainers. People don’t want to be abused while volunteering could be part of that.
Another possibility is that he gets paid over a million dollars a year by an employer, who will have some concerns over legal risks, reputation, etc.
Perhaps, but if Linus would rather see the mainline kernel development dwindle than compromise his way of managing people and code, he's still well within his rights.
As for his relationship with his employer — they both have the freedom to terminate it when their interests do not align anymore.
I genuinely struggle to understand where all the high expectations come from. Somehow people think that an open source project leader is obliged to be kind and polite and humble and understanding. None of these obligations exist as far as I can tell.
Do you genuinely think an employer ordering an employee "don't tell people to kill themselves" is "high expectations"?
This is tragedy of the commons stuff, everyone is sitting quietly on the commons in a shared space, respecting the other people, and you drive your modified pickup truck through the middle rolling coal and blaring dance music and jeering "if you don't like it you can always move to another city" as if toning it down a bit is unreasonable but telling people to uproot their entire lives is reasonable.
> "Somehow people think that an open source project leader is obliged to be kind and polite"
Everybody is obliged to be kind and polite[1], that's one of the foundational parts of society - saying please and
thank you, 'don't stare', consider the effect of your actions on other people - is kindergarten teachings; we all live in a shared space, and politeness is the grease that smoothes all the interactions between different peoples.
In any other situation, if a person has some power, authority or influence over people who can't leave or won't leave, and they immediately turn to abusing them just because they can, we would say that was bad. If a husband abuses a wife who can't leave, if a manager abuses employees who won't quit, if a religious leader abuses devotees, if a child abuses a pet, if a teacher abuses students, if a government mistreats illegal immigrants, we (society, possibly the legal system) would object quite strongly. Why does invoking the words "open source" excuse anyone from these expectations as if 'leading an open source project' makes someone above everyone else and outside the normal expected behaviours?
It is also a thing that you can't separate "don't scream abuse at people" with whining "why do I have to be polite?" as if those are the only two options, there's quite a range of rude responses which are not abusive - saying the code sucks, saying 'I wont read all that' - and there are polite responses which are blunt and not saccharine - saying 'I have the decision making authority and do not want to do it that way.', 'nope, PR rejected, do not try again', 'I am not taking PRs of any kind, I do not want to'.
Aside from that, as mentioned, this is not just any open source - he's a paid employee, this is not him sharing his work on his own server with the scope of him being rude or abusive limited to a few people; this is a hugely important worldwide system. The Linux Foundation is funded by companies who use Linux such as Amazon and Google. They employ people who work on the Linux kernel and have to be subscribed to lkml to do their jobs. The Linux Foundation benefits from the work they do and the changes they upstream. The companies donating money have shareholders and expectations of the companies they work with and charities they donate to. And presumably they have some ability to lean on their donations to ask for favours. All this happens under US employment laws and regulations on several sides. This presenting it as a trivial "if you don't like it, leave" is a deliberate and bad-faith oversimplification. It's the race to "person who cares less wins, and I'm a cynical nihilist so I care about nothing, hah!".
I'm sorry, but I just can't make any sense out of this.
> This presenting it as a trivial "if you don't like it, leave" is a deliberate and bad-faith oversimplification
This is not an oversimplification, this is a fact that you don't like and prefer to ignore. It doesn't disappear when you close your eyes though.
A grumpy person made an open source project that by chance became successful. He didn't force all these people and corporations to use it and fund it, it was a free choice on their part.
What is he supposed to do now, change his personality to please random people on the internet? Why? How do you even see this happening? Or you think grumpy people should have been prohibited from writing code in the first place?
Furthermore he does not hold anyone hostage as you try to present this. Linux is not Linux Foundation. You can use and develop Linux without funding the Linux Foundation. It's just more convenient like that but again you are free to exchange patches outside of it.
People who walk in and say "nice project you have here, now you comply or we take it away from you" don't have my sympathy.
Yep, that happened. "Forced to apologize" essentially describes it.
A quick sweep through recent messages in LKML shows that there's a healthy return to form for him, maybe with less curse words, but as succinct and impactful as it should be nonetheless.
No, you get it backwards. Open source community folks despise any commands, the moment Linus orders free folks like you to do something will be the moment his leadership ends.
Exactly the point. IMHO the one and only thing that made Linux successful as a project is Linus' strong leadership - which has been criticized ad-nauseam over the years; yet it's the only thing that yields results.
So in the specific instances (like this one) where he's not decisively, unequivocally, and even harshly saying "yes" or "no" to something, the community shows a very clear incapability of reaching a decision.
Reminds me of a similar scenario that happened years ago with GVR stepping down as BDFL for Python - just after a tiresome and wasteful fight with the community's opinions.
"Community" is just a very naive ideal for me. There's a finite number of people that can do the job, and even a more finite number of people that can make a decision and stand by it.