Sick indeed

Posted Oct 14, 2014 8:15 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by corbet
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

This is very hard to articulate for me and I hope it comes across. The problem is that our esteemed editor, a well-mannered, educated, white person finds no problems in the LKML community while engaging in uncontroversial projects, and 99% of the time there are no problems. But what drives people away is the 1% of jerky reactions, and they are more visible if they come from the top (i.e. Linus). I've seen healthy dev communities and this is not one of them.

It is not surprising that the cadre of LKML regulars (or Linus lieutenants) don't find issue in the community, but I think they are not looking hard enough. Until they have the guts to tell Linus: "Hey boss, this is not a nice way of dealing with people", or do the same with any other devs that are not polite to people, it will continue to be a community of bros with a dominant male and a cadre of lieutenants (which I fear is what they want it to be). There, I said it.

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Sick indeed

Posted Oct 14, 2014 9:26 UTC (Tue) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (1 responses)

It is the leaders of a community who very often set the tone for the rest. If a community leader comes across as an arrogant asshole, this tells other people in the community that (a) it is OK to be an arrogant asshole in that community and (b) this is what the leader does so if you want to be more like him or her then try to emulate that. Conversely, if the leaders emphatically aren't arrogant assholes then that gives the community the required leverage to tell any other arrogant assholes to cut it out.

The problem is that, especially in free-software projects, if the project leaders foster a culture of arrogant assholery it is very difficult for others in the community to tell them to tone it down, since (a) they're usually the ones who first came up with the project and do most of the work, and (b) since they're arrogant assholes they generally don't like to be told how to behave, especially by incompetent wimps who are too stupid to see how the leaders walk on water, and ought to get out of the kitchen if they can't stand the heat. Often the community contains a crowd of sub-assholes who, simply to show off their own prowess at being arrogant assholes, will gang up on and incinerate anyone putting forward the concept that perhaps it might be bad to be an arrogant asshole. This drives away the more reasonable people and thus makes the problem self-reinforcing.

Sick indeed

Posted Oct 14, 2014 10:09 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

Yes, I suppose that it could be said as simply as "leaders lead", but your analysis is much more interesting.

Also, people with status in a community tend to like it that way. In turn this means that they don't see any glaring problems (at least glaring to the rest of the world), even people who emphatically are _not_ assholes, such as our esteemed editor. They tend to rationalize abuse, sometimes as in this case as being something uncommon and due to extraordinary circumstances. But again, this behavior should _not_ be acceptable, even once a month.

Sick indeed

Posted Oct 14, 2014 21:33 UTC (Tue) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (4 responses)

> Until they have the guts to tell Linus: "Hey boss, this is not a nice way of dealing with people"

Quite a number of people have said that to him in a variety of ways. He appears to be impervious.

Just don't invite him to conferences and don't send your patches to him.

Sick indeed

Posted Oct 17, 2014 0:20 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

From what I gather, when Linus does behave like an a....., two things are almost invariably true.

1) He's dealing with one of his own lieutenants, who he knows well.
2) His lieutenant is being somewhat of an idiot.

If they aren't true, then he's dealing with someone who has a massively puffed up sense of his own importance. It was put quite well somewhere - if you are a manager in a company, you will have about 10 direct reports. Any more and you're overloaded. Linus has THOUSANDS (okay I exaggerate a little :-) of people who would *like* to be direct reports. And I believe he is on record as saying that he has found in the past it is often useless to ask these people politely to p*** o**. Blunt, cruel language is often his tool of choice because it's the only tool that works. The alternative is the kill-file. And if the guy is a good guy naively trying to short-circuit channels, then the kill-file is the wrong choice ...

Cheers,
Wol

Sick indeed

Posted Oct 17, 2014 4:02 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I think that you are probably right about the assertion that most of the time when Linus is incandescent it is with someone he knows personally, maybe any problem is the public nature of the performance. If he dressed down his lieutenants in private maybe the mailing list would have more civility and there wouldn't be the concerns that are being expressed now.

Sick indeed

Posted Oct 17, 2014 23:53 UTC (Fri) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (1 responses)

> From what I gather, when Linus does behave like an a....., two things are almost invariably true.
>
> 1) He's dealing with one of his own lieutenants, who he knows well.
> 2) His lieutenant is being somewhat of an idiot.

Can you provide a single example when this is the case?

Also "being ... an idiot" is a somewhat pejorative term and quite unlikely for so-called "lieutenants". "Mistaken", "Misinformed", "Careless" are all quite likely. Whether such behaviour deserves such treatment is, I guess, a matter of opinion.

The most recent example cringe-worthy behaviour from Linus that I have seen was his first line in

https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/9/29/824

That is certainly not a aggressive as some, but it made be cringe, was not aimed at a "Lieutenant" (as I would use the word) and was not a case of idiocy on the developer's part.

Sick indeed

Posted Oct 18, 2014 0:18 UTC (Sat) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

That is certainly not a aggressive as some, but it made be cringe, was not aimed at a "Lieutenant" (as I would use the word) and was not a case of idiocy on the developer's part.

It's also an example of the “I'm right, you're wrong, go away“ attitude so often ascribed to Lennart Poettering.

Sick indeed

Posted Nov 2, 2014 1:52 UTC (Sun) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link] (2 responses)

> The problem is that our esteemed editor, a well-mannered, educated, white person

What in the world does his skin color have to do with anything? Why is it in vogue to make everything an issue of skin color? Skin color was less of an issue 20 years ago than it is today! Racism won't die because people won't let it!

Sick indeed

Posted Nov 2, 2014 12:16 UTC (Sun) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (1 responses)

The skin color here matters because while Corbet may see little to no issue (according to man_ls at least), those who have grown up with society already having the deck stacked against them through casual racism, sexism, etc. (nothing usually so overt as the KKK, but, for example, arrest statistics, salary statistics, etc., say *something* is skewed here even though we may not agree on the root causes) may not accept abuse in a venue such as LKML.

Sick indeed

Posted Nov 3, 2014 23:23 UTC (Mon) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link]

... What? What you just said makes no sense and has nothing to do with Jon Corbet's skin color. You're just furthering racism. Skin color is completely irrelevant here. Stop trying to make everything an issue of skin color!