On kernel mailing list behavior [LWN.net]

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 18, 2013 17:01 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465)
Parent article: On kernel mailing list behavior

I found the initial quoting in this article a bit too selective. Leaving out the parts of Ingo's and Linus's mails describing Greg (half-jokingly, but still) as physically intimidating in person leaves out the context that makes Sarah's mail seem reasonable. That quoting, followed by the sentence

>Whether these messages constitute "advocating for physical intimidation and violence" or even "advocating for verbal abuse" will be left for the reader to decide.

really bothered me, as though the article was intentionally trying to make Sarah's mail seem absurd.

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On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 18, 2013 19:38 UTC (Thu) by mylogic (guest, #75038) [Link] (19 responses)

Whether the article "really bothered" you or "seemed absurd" will be left for you to decide. I think they were just quoting her claims and restating the argument for the reader.

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 18, 2013 22:26 UTC (Thu) by price (guest, #59790) [Link] (18 responses)

The point is that the article purports to quote her claims and restate the argument, but it leaves out a crucial part that makes Sarah's complaint look just unmoored from the reality she's responding to. When the article explicitly invites the reader to decide how well her complaint matches reality, that's not a fair thing to do.

I'm sure the omission is unintentional. I hope our esteemed editor will correct it.

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 18, 2013 22:49 UTC (Thu) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (16 responses)

I'll not make substantive changes to the published article, no. That is not, IMO, the right way to do things, even if I thought changes were warranted. We don't try to hide our mistakes.

As you might imagine, I spent a lot of time on this article, trying to make it as fair and correct as I could. One thing I could not do was take Linus's joke about Greg's size seriously, and I cannot believe anybody else would either. Do you honestly believe anybody was suggesting that Greg should go and physically attack people? I restricted the quotes to what the people involved were actually advocating for.

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 19, 2013 15:46 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't think Linus was seriously advocating *violence*, but joking aside, he was most certainly drawing a parallel between the effects of being physically intimidating and being verbally intimidating. Remember that the whole point that kicked off the thread was telling Greg to be harsher so people would send him less mail and not try to get fixes into stable that should go into later -rc kernels.

Or, in other words, yell and rant more so people don't see you as friendly. Be intimidating.

I have the same reaction to that notion that Sarah did: seriously, is *that* how we're going to put it?

Now, the problem the original thread wanted to solve made sense: patches shouldn't go into stable in preference to later -rc kernels. However, that doesn't seem like a problem best solved via ranting and raving.

So, while I didn't take Linus's joke about Greg's size as anything but a joke, in the long-standing tradition of "ha ha only serious", I do think the parallel between physical intimidation and verbal/written intimidation was entirely serious, and I think *that's* what made Sarah's mail reasonable.

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 19, 2013 17:26 UTC (Fri) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (1 responses)

"Now, the problem the original thread wanted to solve made sense: patches shouldn't go into stable in preference to later -rc kernels. However, that doesn't seem like a problem best solved via ranting and raving."

and yet that same thread illustrate that Linux does not have the same problem than Greg, and an offender even explicitly said why: Linus would shout him down if he tried. Whereas Greg would not...
So 'that' does seems indeed to be quite effective to achieve the desired result.

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 22, 2013 14:47 UTC (Mon) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link]

The problem wasn't that Greg didn't "rant and rave" before, but rather (as far as I can tell) that he didn't say anything at all.

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 19, 2013 15:57 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

> I'll not make substantive changes to the published article, no. That is not, IMO, the right way to do things, even if I thought changes were warranted. We don't try to hide our mistakes.

As an aside, regardless of my comments about the article, I *do* agree entirely with this policy, and I applaud you for not hiding mistakes. Apart from typos, I don't generally think published articles should be changed without very visible indications of the change.

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 19, 2013 18:19 UTC (Fri) by jonabbey (guest, #2736) [Link]

I noticed the delay in your posting this article, and I appreciate the thought and effort that went into it, Jon. I was pretty peeved by the coverage over at Ars Technica, and was looking forward to your take.

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 19, 2013 18:44 UTC (Fri) by price (guest, #59790) [Link] (10 responses)

Certainly I don't think you should hide your mistakes. But that's not what a correction is -- it's the opposite. You fix the mistake and say explicitly that you've done so. You could even add it in brackets without modifying the existing text, so that everyone can see exactly what the original version was.

As for the substance of this particular mistake, I think josh's detailed sibling comment explains it well. I think Linus was clearly joking too, but there's a difference between "complained about a joke" and "invented talk of physical violence that just wasn't there". You've invited readers to infer that Sarah did the latter (and several comments show that readers have), and that's not accurate or fair.

Even if you disagree on the substance here, I hope you'll consider correcting mistakes (transparently, of course!) in the future.

Thanks again for this article and LWN's excellent coverage in general.

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 22, 2013 22:10 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (6 responses)

> As for the substance of this particular mistake, I think josh's detailed sibling comment explains it well. I think Linus was clearly joking too, but there's a difference between "complained about a joke" and "invented talk of physical violence that just wasn't there". You've invited readers to infer that Sarah did the latter (and several comments show that readers have), and that's not accurate or fair.

For the record, Price, I drew that inference, and it was from the clear text of the message, not because anyone invited me to.

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 22, 2013 22:50 UTC (Mon) by price (guest, #59790) [Link] (5 responses)

Well, let's be clear here. As I wrote, the article invited readers to infer that Sarah invented talk of physical violence. I.e., that she imagined that there had been some such talk when there hadn't been.

But, in fact, she quoted Linus saying that Greg "*should* scare [people]", because he is "a freakish giant" who "might squish you". Now, I think this is clearly a joke, and you might argue any number of other claims to the effect that it is obviously a joke, or all in good fun, or the violence it jokes about is relatively mild, or that the other messages in the thread were strictly about words, etc. But no matter how you feel about jokes about physical violence, it doesn't make them not about physical violence.

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 22, 2013 23:17 UTC (Mon) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (2 responses)

That's exactly the issue. And the non-joking point of Linus's mail was precisely to draw a parallel between physical intimidation and mailing-list intimidation, by arguing that Greg should flame people to make himself more intimidating, less approachable, and less of a "doormat". That non-joking point kicked off this whole discussion.

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 23, 2013 16:10 UTC (Tue) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, no. See, at this point, I have to dismiss you as not living in a world where the sky color is blue.

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 27, 2013 21:56 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

FWIW, I agree with him.

(But then the sky outside my window isn't blue. It's black.)

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 22, 2013 23:45 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh, sure.

But the continuum above and below "reasonable threat" is so well established that it's established *in US Law*: "assault" is what happens when someone makes a threat against you which a reasonable man would construe as a valid threat.

If that midget who punched people's crotches on Scrubs threatened Arnold Schwarzenegger, that wouldn't be an assault, legally. The reverse would. It's what the Russians call "objective circumstances".

A "reasonable person" as the law defines that, and as case law from judges and juries illustrates it, would not construe the comments made about Greg KH as reasonable threats, even in the abstract (as opposed to their being aimed at a particular person *by* Greg), absent a pretty clear indication that Greg has a violent nature and is prone to go about "squishing" people.

So, out here in the Real World, no, it is not in fact reasonable to construe that entire conversation as violence, discussions of or incitement to violence, or anything near it, and the law -- and the reasonable man -- will construe you as a crank if you do.

If Greg KH *said that to Sarah*, *as a total stranger*, it would of course be a completely different situation. But the situation which pertains here would, I think, get an DA yelled at for even filing it, assuming her boss would allow her to. (See, there's no way in English for me to make the boss female too, to complete my point.)

Finally: by going off on a rant about this particular issue in this particular context, Ms Sharp is doing no favors to the people who *are* on the reasonable-person side of the divide; viz all the convention-harassment issues that are presently big topics for discussion on the Net.

Alas, I fear, this conversation -- the whole page of it -- will ultimately prove mostly fruitless as -- as with so many such arguments -- the two sides can't even agree on what the topic is.

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 23, 2013 4:42 UTC (Tue) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

We're not talking about "what would rise to the level of a prosecutable threat"; that's a strawman, and nobody in this entire discussion would begin to think *that* of any mail in this LKML discussion.

We're talking about the suggestion that a kernel developer should flame people more to become more intimidating, by analogy with physical intimidation. *That's* what kicked this whole thing off.

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 22, 2013 22:11 UTC (Mon) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link] (2 responses)

If you would like to see the article that invites the reader to misjudge what's going on here, that's the one that drew my attention to the issue, Bob mcMillan's piece in Wired today:

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/07/sarah_sharp/

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 23, 2013 15:27 UTC (Tue) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (1 responses)

"I also got some really awful hate mail that tried to drag my gender in. But I don’t think this is a gendered topic..."
" I think that my perspective is somewhat colored by both my gender and my age. A lot of the kernel maintainers came into Linux at the very beginning when there weren’t a lot of women in there."
"So I think they picked up a little bit of the brogrammer culture"

I find it fascinating how some people seems to be perfectly able to apply logic when they write code, and yet seemingly oblivious to it in their real life...

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 27, 2013 21:57 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Her comments all seem perfectly reasonable to *me*. But then we know from your past behaviour on any thread on LWN mentioning women in any way that you are an old-school misogynist, so I'm not surprised you can't figure out the point she's driving at.

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 19, 2013 15:30 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

> The point is that the article purports to quote her claims and restate the argument, but it leaves out a crucial part that makes Sarah's complaint look just unmoored from the reality she's responding to. When the article explicitly invites the reader to decide how well her complaint matches reality, that's not a fair thing to do.

Thank you, that's exactly the point I was getting at.

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 18, 2013 20:00 UTC (Thu) by dpquigl (guest, #52852) [Link]

If you're going to complain about that you should also complain about the portion of Linus' email where he jokingly refers to Greg as a giant who might squish you accidentally without noticing which seemed very tongue in cheek to me. I don't see how that statement could be construed as Linus advocating physical violence.

On kernel mailing list behavior

Posted Jul 18, 2013 22:45 UTC (Thu) by Tobu (subscriber, #24111) [Link]

The linked email really is a bit absurd, extra lines don't change that:

On Fri, 12 Jul 2013 18:17:08 +0200, Ingo Molnar <mingo@kernel.org> wrote:
> * Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 8:47 AM, Steven Rostedt <rostedt@goodmis.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> I tend to hold things off after -rc4 because you scare me more than Greg
>>> does ;-)
>>
>> Have you guys *seen* Greg? The guy is a freakish giant. He *should*
>> scare you. He might squish you without ever even noticing.
> 
> Greg might be a giant and he might squish people without ever even 
> noticing, but that's just a grave, deadly physical threat no real kernel 
> hacker ever feels threatened by. (Not much can hurt us deep in our dark 
> basements after all, except maybe earthquakes, gamma ray eruptions and Mom 
> trying to clean up around the computers.)
> 
> So Greg, if you want it all to change, create some _real_ threat: be frank 
> with contributors and sometimes swear a bit. That will cut your mailqueue 
> in half, promise!

On Fri, 12 Jul 2013 08:22:27 -0700, Linus wrote:
> Greg, the reason you get a lot of stable patches seems to be that you
> make it easy to act as a door-mat. Clearly at least some people say "I
> know this patch isn't important enough to send to Linus, but I know Greg
> will silently accept it after the fact, so I'll just wait and mark it
> for stable".
>
> You may need to learn to shout at people.

Seriously, guys?  Is this what we need in order to get improve -stable?
Linus Torvalds is advocating for physical intimidation and violence.
Ingo Molnar and Linus are advocating for verbal abuse.

Not *fucking* cool.  Violence, whether it be physical intimidation,
verbal threats or verbal abuse is not acceptable.  Keep it professional
on the mailing lists.

If you're worried about fair representation, you should consider that her starting point, “Linus is advocating for physical intimidation and violence”, is a rather extreme misrepresentation. Really the most sympathetic thing to do is to gloss over it and refrain from making any hypothesis on how someone could, in a single bound, leap to such an unfair, distorting, and insulting characterisation.

LKML people are forgiving and didn't make the discussion about that, and so does the interesting LWN article. Some other outlets did rise to the bait and give anxiogenic outrage-generating caricatures rather than space for discussion.