Sick indeed

Posted Oct 14, 2014 21:33 UTC (Tue) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359)
In reply to: Sick indeed by man_ls
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

> 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.

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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.