On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 12:47 UTC (Thu) by timtas (guest, #2815)
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

Hopefully my last post on this subject:

It's so bleeding obvious why Lennart now comes out in a direct attack on Linus Torvalds: Back in April, Kay Sieverts was harshly told off at the kernel mailing list for refusing to fix a bug in systemd regarding the handling of the debug parameter that is used by the kernel. Since then, there seem to have been no further attempts to include kdbus into the kernel, so this must have really got on their backs.

And i an interview a few weeks ago, when questioned about systemd, Linus actually defended it, but claimed that the problem with systemd is mainly Kay's and Lennart's attitude towards criticism and bug reports.

So now, Lennart's hitting back. Very cheap and dull.

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On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 13:57 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (2 responses)

+1. And the Linus quote he chooses, about babies and nipples, is not even a flame on a kernel developer -- it is about some Debian script, whose writer is not even named. He blithely says "google for it" but if you do all you get is Lennart.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 15:50 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link] (1 responses)

timtasa nd rsidd... you both are so off-base with the notion that Lennart attacked Linus in his post... and completely in imaginary land with the idea that Lennart's comments about Linus were in retaliation for something related to systemd.

Please watch this video... starting around 14:37:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PmHRSeA2c8

I can tell you I wasn't happy with Linus' answer and quite a few people within the Debian community weren't (I'm in Fedora land just for clarification). Of course Jon gave a lot more background (that unfortunately Linus didn't go into in his response) so I understand better. Linus wasn't wrong in his goal for telling the guy off... but the way he did it left a bit to be desired and it is certainly worthy of criticism. At the very least Lennart isn't the only person bringing this up and in no way making it up... just because you can't seem to find it in a search.

Regarding Lennart's approach to disagreeing with people... I think the vast majority of his comments are technical in nature... and it is just a human flaw that he throws in a snarky comment every once in a while. I myself have a sense of humor that is often misunderstood... I say something trying to make a joke and lighten something up... and sometimes it works but sometimes it comes off completely the opposite way. I think that is sometimes what Lennart is doing when he is snarky. Unfortunately language barriers sometimes add to the miscommunication.

I don't excuse bad behavior and I think there has been quite a bit of that on all sides. The main point here is that if you disagree with the argument methodology (name calling, being disrespectful, whatever) you don't use the same methodology in response.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 15:52 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link]

Opps, right as I hit the publish / post button... this came to me.

You don't fight fire-with-fire and expect good results. You fight fire with a fire extinguisher... and like... put out the fire. Those who think an eye for an eye or whatever are just going to increase the size of the fail.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 16:11 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

This attribution of cause and effect is like trying to use the tropes of fiction to explain matters in the real world. In fiction every action is significant to a cause and effect chain which flows through the story, in real life that is not the case but it is easy to overlay real events with the mechanisms of story telling to create a narrative flow that is completely fictional but not obviously so.

I highly doubt these events listed are related in any way.

On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 20:22 UTC (Thu) by mrshiny (guest, #4266) [Link]

Yes, I'm sure Lennart is upset that kdbus isn't in the kernel, so he probably staged the whole "hire a hitman" thing.