On the sickness of our community

Posted Oct 9, 2014 13:57 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by timtas
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

+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.

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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.