|
|
Log in / Subscribe / Register

Sharp: Closing a door

[Posted October 5, 2015 by corbet]

Sarah Sharp has made official her departure from the kernel development community. "I didn’t take the decision to step down lightly. I felt guilty, for a long time, for stepping down. However, I finally realized that I could no longer contribute to a community where I was technically respected, but I could not ask for personal respect. I could not work with people who helpfully encouraged newcomers to send patches, and then argued that maintainers should be allowed to spew whatever vile words they needed to in order to maintain radical emotional honesty. I did not want to work professionally with people who were allowed to get away with subtle sexist or homophobic jokes. I feel powerless in a community that had a 'Code of Conflict' without a specific list of behaviors to avoid and a community with no teeth to enforce it."
to post comments

A request

Posted Oct 5, 2015 14:32 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (28 responses)

Please: this seems like an especially good opportunity for the comments to show our community in its best light, not its worst. Let's be constructive and respectful with what we post here.

A request

Posted Oct 5, 2015 14:46 UTC (Mon) by richmoore (guest, #53133) [Link] (11 responses)

The fact you felt the need to make that comment simply reinforces the message that she is quite correct.

A request

Posted Oct 5, 2015 15:03 UTC (Mon) by welinder (guest, #4699) [Link]

Lwn is far wider than the kernel community so I don't think you can draw any conclusion in that direction and lwn has been known to suffer the occasional troll. I am not fully convinced that corbet's request will make any difference with that particular clientele, though.

A request

Posted Oct 5, 2015 15:48 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

Greg K-H's quote-of-the-week a couple of weeks back seems very appropriate here ...

Thing is, different people are different, and it sounds to me like there are certain people who just can't respect other peoples' differences. Men and women are different emotionally, East and West are different culturally, and the stereotypical USian seems to think "everybody should be USian". Not a good recipe for an international community.

(Apropos Linus, and moderation, there seems to be a strong correlation between his harshness, and how well he knows the person. Maybe the best rule is "if you don't know the person, treat them with kid gloves. If you do know them, then you know what is acceptable".)

Cheers,
Wol

A request

Posted Oct 5, 2015 16:35 UTC (Mon) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (1 responses)

> if you don't know the person, treat them with kid gloves. If you do know them, then you know what is acceptable

While that's a good rule in general, when you're talking on a public mailing list, you're not just talking to that one person; you're setting an example for an entire community.

A request

Posted Oct 5, 2015 20:15 UTC (Mon) by emunson (subscriber, #44357) [Link]

And I think many people will see the harsh reply without knowing of the personal connection and generalize that behavior as acceptable in the community.

A request

Posted Oct 5, 2015 23:54 UTC (Mon) by gwolf (subscriber, #14632) [Link] (6 responses)

Thing is, she is perfectly correct. We as the free software developer community are particularly bad towards welcoming different people — Be their difference gender, race, or whatever. Look at any tech conference, and you will see only white guys like myself or, most likely, as yourself.

In some communities, we have had serious advance in our tolerance and welcoming of others. Say, I am involved in Debian — I was present at the (in?)famous presentation in 2003 about the ftp-master suite of tools that had a female swimsuit model in each slide, and prompted the creation of the debian-women project in 2004. And our community has become way, way more open.

But, yes, white-male participation is still >90% of the project. Yes, the project feels much more mature and welcoming... But have we really made a change, even a slight one? With the demographics we still sustain... I'm not confident to say our "change" has had enough repercution.

A request

Posted Oct 8, 2015 19:29 UTC (Thu) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (5 responses)

The thing is, I haven't seen anything sexist in the kernel community, at least not in the last 7 years. In Seattle, I sat through a talk about how to interact with the community, and it was basically a subtle bash against Linus. Personally, I felt that the presenter was more insulting to Linus than Linus is to others. Now, there are some examples where Linus said things he probably shouldn't, but that's more the exception than the norm with him. We all have bad days, but when Linus does, it makes the news.

A request

Posted Oct 9, 2015 13:41 UTC (Fri) by jubal (guest, #67202) [Link] (4 responses)

People who are not the target of sexist behaviour usually don't notice it unless they pay extra attention.

A request

Posted Oct 9, 2015 16:34 UTC (Fri) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (3 responses)

I actually try to look for sexist comments, but as you said, as I'm not a women. I may indeed miss some. But please, by all means, show me an example of one in the last few years that was made on LKML by a kernel developer (I don't count random emails from unknowns that sometimes get into the mailing list. LKML is a public channel and anyone can post. I'm limiting it to only those that actually do contribute to the kernel source).

A request

Posted Oct 9, 2015 18:18 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (2 responses)

Is "deep-throating Microsoft" sexist? Either way, it's disgusting communication. Completely unacceptable in any context.

A request

Posted Oct 9, 2015 18:40 UTC (Fri) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link]

I wouldn't call that "sexist" but I would agree that wasn't appropriate, and he should have used better terminology on that one. He's human, and it's not easy when every single word you say is scrutinized. I'm sure he learned not to say something similar to that again. That was what? 2 and a half years ago.

A request

Posted Oct 14, 2015 17:13 UTC (Wed) by davidstrauss (guest, #85867) [Link]

It's only sexist if you're heteronormative first.

A request

Posted Oct 6, 2015 0:57 UTC (Tue) by realnc (guest, #60393) [Link] (15 responses)

IMO, this request already made things worse. You just made it a gender issue, rather than it being about a kernel developer stepping back due to LKML toxicity. You already implied that this case is "special" because the kernel developer in question is female :-/

A request

Posted Oct 6, 2015 1:15 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

No. Sorry. Corbet has requested commentators to be polite for topics which typically have been controversial. This does not imply a gender issue at all.

A request

Posted Oct 6, 2015 10:33 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Hmm...I don't believe I said anything about gender? I made a very similar request on this article; was that a gender issue too?

A request

Posted Oct 6, 2015 11:01 UTC (Tue) by HIGHGuY (subscriber, #62277) [Link] (12 responses)

And your comment highlights that there's always at least one person who misreads/misinterprets or otherwise misunderstands a message, regardless of its formulation, intent or ambiguity level.

I honestly think that some of the toxicity is also perceived rather than real. A jerk stays a jerk no matter how you twist it (and they should be dealt with appropriately), but many people write well-meant text only to find out later that someone took offense. With written media, this is a fact of life. Unfortunately, this is first-hand experience written down here. And this doesn't just happen with (perceived) toxic e-mails. Try having an internet discussion on any non-technical subject.
You can't make a statement without someone reading it the wrong way and calling you an idiot for it or, at best, completely side-tracking the topic.

So, does this mean that the medium (i.e. e-mails on a public list) needs improvement? Should the FOSS community find new ways of (transparently) communicating through new tools and media? Is the blame just human language (with all of it's ambiguity)?

In short: what tools are there to raise the bar on what is perceived toxic, to the point where in any group a majority would be unanimously in agreement about what is or isn't toxic.

This is very much the same discussion as: "we need more blue on our streets to increase our feelings of safety". But in this case, it's reincarnated in the form where we need to be better equipped to deal with perceived toxicity such that everyone feels a bit more welcome. It still doesn't fix real crime (ever saw a cop actually get the bad guy *wink*?).

PS: For all intents and purposes: I'm just trying to disambiguate between wrongfully perceived toxicity and real toxicity. In no way am I trying to hide or otherwise favor real toxicity. These problems exist and should be dealt with. This is also in no way a judgement of Sarah's decision. Just trying to be constructive by throwing in my $0.02.
PS2: I'll be waiting for the first person to say he's offended by the remark about cops never catching the bad guys ;)
PS3: It's funny that I feel like I need to preemptively add disclaimers about my intent to the bottom of this post.
PS4: See what sort of meta-discussion and self-fulfilling thing this is becoming?
PS5: I'll stop here.

A request

Posted Oct 6, 2015 20:29 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (7 responses)

> I honestly think that some of the toxicity is also perceived rather than real. A jerk stays a jerk no matter how you twist it (and they should be dealt with appropriately), but many people write well-meant text only to find out later that someone took offense. With written media, this is a fact of life. Unfortunately, this is first-hand experience written down here. And this doesn't just happen with (perceived) toxic e-mails. Try having an internet discussion on any non-technical subject.

And even within the English-speaking community, it's easy to give offense because I speak English and you speak American ... there's the classic Churchill/Roosevelt situation when Churchill wanted to table something or other. In English, that means put it ON the table for discussion. In American, it means put it UNDER the table to be forgotten.

I gave up talking about race on Groklaw - in English, not only is the word "black" acceptable, it's about the only usable word. But in American, it was offensive enough to get my posts instantly censored ...

Throw in all the other variants of English, such as Strine, and it's incredibly easy for someone to take offense :-( - Firefox is taking offense at my use of the word "offense" :-)

Cheers,
Wol

A request

Posted Oct 8, 2015 5:34 UTC (Thu) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (6 responses)

> But in American, it was offensive enough to get my posts instantly censored.

Well, there is tradition and there is stupidity. I was working for some time with Eugene Rivers of the Azusa Christian Community in Boston, Ma. (Google him, he is certainly not shy to speak up his mind), who is very careful to talk about himself as a black man. I had a very nice chat with him about it, and he was adamant that "black" is the right word, because all issues of racism are about the color of his skin, nobody cares where is ancestors came from (besides, my another friend, who was Kenya had a long and passionate fight with somebody from the Black Boston neighborhood arguing who of them is the true African-American ;)).

Encouraged by Mr. Rivers I always use the word "black" and if anybody has a problem (and that happens very rarely; I guess most people who disagree with the word ascribe it to my English as a second language) then I explain myself. If you were censored just because of the B* word, then the community is probably not worthy to be participate in it.

A request

Posted Oct 8, 2015 19:33 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (5 responses)

I'm going to attempt a quick explanation... The United States has tried multiple times to adopt more nuanced and sensitive terms than 'black'. All of them ended up getting used in overt racist discrimination: 'negro water fountain', 'colored playground', etc, presumably because they were supposed to sound more acceptable.

Now all the sensitive words are absolutely polluted with loaded meaning. Calling someone colored is discriminatory and revolting. The only term we're left with is black, saved perhaps because it was too coarse to be posted in hotel lobbies and restaurants.

(just found this, explains it even better: http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/30999175/warning-wh... )

It's an absolute embarrassment that all this happened so recently in my country. I can't understand it.

And, you're right, calling someone African-American is like calling someone Oriental. You sure you know their blood lines that well?

A request

Posted Oct 8, 2015 19:41 UTC (Thu) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (3 responses)

Yes, African-American has so many problems ... I was asked by somebody in the States what is the capital of Africa (I know most Americans end with their geography studies in the sixth grade or so). So, yes, “Oriental” is a good parallel.

A request

Posted Oct 8, 2015 19:53 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

"African-American" also has the problem that they want it to exclude whole categories of people who are American and came from Africa. I've heard of some Authors who decided to make a stink about being excluded from "African-American Safe Spaces" at a conference because their ancestors further back came from Europe

A request

Posted Oct 9, 2015 16:32 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

I've said this before ... I'm "British of WHITE Caribbean descent" - a second-generation Caribbean Brit. But the word "Caribbean" implies *black*. Although, not surprisingly, I'm not culturally Caribbean at all.

The other little problem with all this is that blackness is actually a genetic adaptation to living on or near the equator. I've not met that many, but I've certainly met some Indians (that's India, not America) who, at first glance, you would take as being black. Okay, they have other racial characteristics that show them up as sub-continentals, but that's beside the point.

(Plus, there was an article on the radio recently, I just caught the gist of it, but although it's well accepted that pretty much all non-Africans are descended from a small group of humans that crossed the African-Asian landbridge, apparently there was a relatively large REVERSE migration of Eurasians into Africa about 3000 years ago (they were farmers, as opposed to the indigenous African hunter-gathers) and most African tribal genetics have been well contaminated with Eurasian genes.)

Cheers,
Wol

A request

Posted Oct 11, 2015 16:27 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

More precisely, non-black skin is a genetic adaptation to *not* living in the tropics. (Our ancestors all had black skin once, after all.)

It's probably the need for vitamin D in less sunny climes that's the ultimate cause of melanin reduction.

A request

Posted Oct 15, 2015 8:26 UTC (Thu) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link]

The only term we're left with is black, saved perhaps because it was too coarse to be posted in hotel lobbies and restaurants.
"too coarse"? I mean, the appropriateness is not a property of "black". If there was a sign "No blondes" in a lobby, it would be offensive. Not because "blonde" is offensive but because it is offensive to discriminate according to epidermis coloration as if it carried any inherent meaning.

If you are looking for a more politically correct way of saying "No blondes", you are making a mockery of sensitivities.

If you put up a sign "Black patrons are welcome like all our other customers" in a country where such a sign is sadly not redundant, will you get the political correctness police breathing up your neck? Maybe.

A request

Posted Oct 8, 2015 19:36 UTC (Thu) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (3 responses)

Nicely written. I've worked in private industry for 10 years before doing open source programming. I've been in meetings and even email threads that would make Linus's rants look like child's play. But that's a great comment about social media. So many times have I seen innocent comments taken with great offense. Now how do you go about criticizing someones code with a guarantee to not offend someone.

A request

Posted Oct 9, 2015 18:26 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

Now how do you go about criticizing someones code with a guarantee to not offend someone.

There are no guarantees, but you can make a genuine effort.

I do this all the time in my job. I say things like: "This code will fail under these conditions: [example]" or "This code will take time O(2^N) and needs to be redesigned" or "The function names in this code are insufficiently clear; please give them more descriptive names such as [example]" or "This piece of code is idiomatic C, but Perl has its own idioms for doing this such as [example]"

And that gets results. I've owned Roaring Penguin since 1999 and employed developers since 2002 and I have never, not even once, had to call someone's code "stupid" or say to someone "learn how to program" or anything like that.

I also don't try to cushion code criticism by saying "It's improving since last time" or "you're making progress" or any other corporate platitude because people can tell when you're feeding them a line. And when I do say to someone "Wow, that's a beautiful piece of code" they know I mean it and they appreciate it.

A request

Posted Oct 9, 2015 18:55 UTC (Fri) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link]

And believe it or not, that sounds like 99% of the communication style on LKML. But that 1% is what gets the headlines.

Now, you said you employ people that you make these comments to. I'm sure you don't hire just anyone. You vet them out via interviews and such. You look at their previous work, and other such methods to make sure you hire a decent employee. In such an environment, I would hope that you would never need to be uncivil in your approach.

The fact is, Linux gets patches from *anyone*. Anyone can post patches to LKML and to the maintainers. There is no vetting process except for the review of the code. And sometimes, the civil responses to people just doesn't cut it, and it takes a stronger voice.

Now to be honest. I've been working in the Linux kernel community since 2003. Only once in that period did I have to insult someone, but that was after months of trying to explain why what they were doing didn't work.

I try very hard to be civil and "nice" in my replies. But sometimes, I'm a bit blunt in my review, just because I need to stress the way the code should not be changed. And saying something too nice where the developer doesn't understand my thoughts on it, may cause that developer to waste time in doing it. The term I used was "I hate this code here". "hate" was a strong word, but I really wanted to let that developer know not to continue with the approach they were heading. I pointed out the way I wanted it done, and they were fine with it. I'm sure some people may have been offended by my "hating" some of their code (Note, this wasn't the insult I was talking about above).

A request

Posted Oct 12, 2015 18:27 UTC (Mon) by mcpierce (guest, #69508) [Link]

I think, at least in part, the problem is that Linus has a reputation and feels comfortable living up (or down) to that reputation.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 14:46 UTC (Mon) by andrewsh (subscriber, #71043) [Link] (7 responses)

It was two days ago I talked about this sort of behaviour that turns women away from open source development in general, and this was an example I given. I haven't heard for some time how this issue have been developing, and it's very sad for me that the only way left to resolve this situation was for Sarah to leave. I really hope that the outcome of this conflict will provoke some changes in the way Linux kernel is developed, and that more people will be welcomed on LKML, including Sarah.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 15:16 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (6 responses)

Given the way this *has* developed, that happy outcome seems most unlikely to me :(

It's a real shame Sarah's given up: a knight in shining armour for civil behaviour has been defeated.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 23:19 UTC (Mon) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (4 responses)

Knights for this cause frequently are. It's rather exhausting fighting for this constantly and being on edge for attacks from every direction. I don't fault her for wanting to remove stress from her life.

It's just a simple fact that no matter how passionate you are about something and no matter how much you enjoy working on something if there is someone(s) making your life hell you will eventually decide the fun isn't worth the crap you have to put up with.

I'm just surprised that more of the companies that are employees of the main developers haven't stepped up and tried to fix this, if for no other reason than protecting their own backsides from legal action.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 8:34 UTC (Tue) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] (3 responses)

> I'm just surprised that more of the companies that are employees of the main developers haven't stepped up and tried to fix this

Given the substance of large chunks of the speech given by the founder of Red Hat at LCA this year, I'm not.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 13:12 UTC (Tue) by jonnor (guest, #76768) [Link] (2 responses)

Got any reference or details for us who were not there?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 13:18 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Here's our report from the talk in question, but I'm not sure what the comment is referring to in particular.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 7:27 UTC (Wed) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]

Bob made the point several times about missing the good old days when people could rip into each other even more than they do now.

(The LWN report doesn't mention it, but then it also doesn't mention his long, weird, and frankly rather derogatory descriptions of his mother.)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 6:37 UTC (Tue) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> It's a real shame Sarah's given up: a knight in shining armour for civil behaviour has been defeated.

Nec Hercules contra plures.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 14:47 UTC (Mon) by emunson (subscriber, #44357) [Link]

I am sad to see Sarah leave, I always looked up to her for taking on the unenviable of trying to get people to be nicer to each other without softening the technical discussions. It is a big challenge and one that still needs a lot of work from our community.

Thanks for all your hard work Sarah. I hope the future is productive and fulfilling for you.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 15:08 UTC (Mon) by phil42 (guest, #5175) [Link]

it is great to see that Sarah has kept her sense of humor

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 5, 2015 15:16 UTC (Mon) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (25 responses)

It has been mentioned a few times that the style of discussion among Linux kernel developers is rather harsh. But what are the examples of projects that do a better job? Perhaps LWN readers could nominate the development communities that manage to combine rigorous technical review and high standards with a welcoming attitude towards newcomers and a respectful style of discourse. I could point to the perl5-porters code of conduct. That is a lightly moderated list; does moderation make a difference? I can't imagine any moderator having the guts to tell Linus to tone it down, but for projects it may be a workable option.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 5, 2015 15:45 UTC (Mon) by JoeBuck (guest, #2330) [Link]

GCC does a better job, in my opinion, at combining technical excellence and treating people with respect.

(Full disclosure: I used to be on the GCC steering committee, gave it up because of lack of time as my work took me in a different direction).

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 5, 2015 15:57 UTC (Mon) by troy.unrau (guest, #73654) [Link] (3 responses)

It's been a while since I was actively contributing, but in my experience: KDE. They actively work to extend their community to the wider world and be inclusive of all of its diversity. This extends both towards the relevant gender and sexuality conversations, but also to economic or social circumstances.

The KDE e.V. (the nonprofit body) has spent a lot of time and effort promoting these values, however membership in the e.V. is ultimately made up of contributors to KDE, so it reflects the will of the membership.

From their Code of Conduct https://www.kde.org/code-of-conduct/

> In order for the KDE community to stay healthy its members must feel comfortable and accepted. Treating one another with respect is absolutely necessary for this. In a disagreement, in the first instance assume that people mean well.

> We do not tolerate personal attacks, racism, sexism or any other form of discrimination. Disagreement is inevitable, from time to time, but respect for the views of others will go a long way to winning respect for your own view. Respecting other people, their work, their contributions and assuming well-meaning motivation will make community members feel comfortable and safe and will result in motivation and productivity.

Looking back, the thing I miss the most about KDE is the community. I don't think that people who have left kernel development would say the same.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 5, 2015 18:27 UTC (Mon) by einar (guest, #98134) [Link]

> It's been a while since I was actively contributing, but in my experience: KDE.

As a current contributor, I don't know. I don't claim I can read other people's minds, so this is just "anecdata", but there are a few occasions where my line of thinking doesn't align with the one of other KDE contributors, but I prefer to stay quiet rather than just comment, because on the Internet (and outside of it, unfortunately), people are getting quite rabid if you mention issues that are dear to them.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 11:28 UTC (Tue) by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742) [Link]

Same here, KDE is usually very friendly and welcoming.

The harsh tone of the kernel list would not be accepted uncommented there.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 21:48 UTC (Tue) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link]

It's been a while since I was actively contributing, but in my experience: KDE.
Well, this Qt talk is in German but the speaker spends an inordinate amount of time trash-talking women, in particular his girlfriend.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 5, 2015 16:35 UTC (Mon) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (1 responses)

I've been deeply impressed with the welcoming nature of the Rust community.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 5:57 UTC (Tue) by edomaur (subscriber, #14520) [Link]

Yes, totally agreed.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 5, 2015 16:39 UTC (Mon) by leoc (guest, #39773) [Link]

The Rust community has a code of conduct that extends even to their subreddit.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 5, 2015 21:09 UTC (Mon) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] (3 responses)

I am not a postgresql dev, so I can't comment on what goes on in backchannel discussions, but I follow most of the mailing lists as a postgresql user, and they have an excellent community. Very helpful and positive.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 3:25 UTC (Tue) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link] (2 responses)

We have/had our share of ugly fights, on public lists. Luckily that doesn't happen continuously. But if you'd scale the development community by two/three orders of magnitude, or wherever Linux is, that'd likely also be different.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 8:38 UTC (Tue) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] (1 responses)

You think so? Part of what has impressed me is that people will show up with... pretty flame-baity sounding questions on the user mailing lists ("I've been trying to migrate from mysql to pg, why is it so slow?" type of things) and they generally get very high-road responses ("tell me a bit more about your use case and the tuning you've done so far"), often from well-known individuals like Greg Smith.

Enough of the leading figures seem committed to good behaviour I suspect that even as teh community grows they take ther cue from the positive examples.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 10:12 UTC (Tue) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link]

> You think so? Part of what has impressed me is that people will show up with... pretty flame-baity sounding questions on the user mailing lists ("I've been trying to migrate from mysql to pg, why is it so slow?" type of things) and they generally get very high-road responses ("tell me a bit more about your use case and the tuning you've done so far"), often from well-known individuals like Greg Smith.

I don't think you can really compare lists geared towards new or irregular users (where people don't know each other, don't have their pet feuds, etc), with a development list like lkml. Don't get me wrong - I think postgres has some great resources in such lists and e.g. the IRC channel. I just don't see it being comparable.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 5, 2015 22:03 UTC (Mon) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link] (8 responses)

Mozilla's not perfect, but the harsh language Linus uses would not be acceptable coming from a Mozilla module owner/reviewer.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 0:31 UTC (Tue) by rhekman (guest, #102114) [Link] (7 responses)

"Mozilla's not perfect, but the harsh language Linus uses would not be acceptable coming from a Mozilla module owner/reviewer."

I'm not a member of the Mozilla developer community, so I can't speak to the quality of day to day discourse. However the public campaign against Brendan Eich was an example of how ugly it can get in a popular project when a vocal minority decides that unrelated personal beliefs are more important than technical matters.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 0:40 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

I don't recall any Mozilla employee being anything close to harsh in any such discussions. So that seems to be a poor counter example.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 7:56 UTC (Tue) by MarcB (subscriber, #101804) [Link] (3 responses)

Some employees asked him to step back in public (Twitter). That's about the harshest thing one can do, even if using the nicest words.

Those employees where a tiny minority, but that doesn't really help in the beautiful new world of social media outrage.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 16:16 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

We are talking about different things, I think. One is a disagreement of leadership position and it is ok to state that out loud publicly regardless of your rationale as long as you specify it clearly. The other thing is to engage in name calling and so on.

In other words, it is ok to say, this patch is broken, can you fix it by doing foo and bar? It is unnecessarily harsh to say, you have a lousy patch and you are brain dead. Even if you are doing that to someone you know very well, it is a public list and potential contributors are lurking.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 7, 2015 15:06 UTC (Wed) by jubal (guest, #67202) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, it's pretty much the same – if you ignore all facts.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 7, 2015 15:08 UTC (Wed) by MarcB (subscriber, #101804) [Link]

Could you elaborate on those facts?

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 1:27 UTC (Tue) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

That was not coming from Mozilla module owners or reviewers.

In any reasonably large and open project, jerks are going to show up from time to time, cause trouble, and be abusive. Some of them may be useful contributors, though in Mozilla that's been rare. You can expel them, and we do, but they still cause pain. So any large open-source project will have examples of bad behavior in the community, and you can't eliminate that. Your leaders and mainstays, however, do reflect on the project.

The Brendan situation was different again, though, in that the vast majority of the venom came from people who weren't associated with the project in any way, for whom we were just collateral damage in the culture wars.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 8:40 UTC (Tue) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]

I'm not sure how a pushback on the idea of appointing a CEO who actively opposes the rights of a chunk of the people participating in the project seems unreasonable to you, unless you think anti-gay campaigners should get a pass that anti-semites, for example, wouldn't.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 8:23 UTC (Tue) by Jezze (guest, #38900) [Link] (1 responses)

The Dolphin community needs a shout out here. It is both friendly and diverse and super productive.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 7, 2015 13:37 UTC (Wed) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

Their monthly reports are a ton of fun to read. If that tone permeates their community, they must be having a great time.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 11:46 UTC (Tue) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link]

I could point to the perl5-porters code of conduct.

I actually prefer the Perl6 code of conduct over the perl5 one.

Examples of where it's done right

Posted Oct 6, 2015 14:43 UTC (Tue) by dunlapg (guest, #57764) [Link]

It's a good question, but there's a problem with self-selection. Every time this topic comes up, people who are actually on the LKML all pretty much agree that they're fine and there's not really a problem. And the reason they all agree it's fine is that everyone who is not fine with it has left (or don't bother saying anything because they know they're in the minority).

Similarly, I see in this list, "I like the perl community" and "I like the gcc community" and so on -- but for the most part the LKML people like the LKML community too.

I like the Xen community -- I think we have a culture of being direct but respectful. We don't have a formal code of conduct, but as a community we actively value respect and try to maintain that. But how can I tell if that's just because it happens to match my personality, the way LKML matches Linus's?

The fish rots from the head

Posted Oct 5, 2015 15:19 UTC (Mon) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

I have nothing more to add.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 15:42 UTC (Mon) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link] (200 responses)

What that means is they are privileging the emotional needs of other Linux kernel developers (to release their frustrations on others, to be blunt, rude, or curse to blow off steam) over my own emotional needs (the need to be respected as a person, to not receive verbal or emotional abuse). There’s an awful power dynamic there that favors the established maintainer over basic human decency.

As a Linux kernel user, I want the highest quality software possible. The emotional needs of the people who make it are only relevant to me insofar as they affect the quality of the end product.

The communication style on LKML attracts some developers and repels others. Changing it would do likewise. If somebody can make a compelling case that a change will result in a higher quality end product, then as I user that's something relevant to my interests. Otherwise, it simply isn't.

In other words, will the people who are not contributing now because of the existing policy produce superior coding results than the people who will leave if the existing policy changes? In the end, only the code matters.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 15:56 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (173 responses)

I'm sorry, but not "only the code matters." I'd go so far as to say "only people matter". Treating people as disposable resources in the pursuit of some holy grail of code quality is simply unethical. It's no different from a closed-source company abusing underpaid foreigners in sweatshops... sure, they produce lots of cheap code, but at what human cost?

It's also a false dichotomy. You can have excellent code produced by teams of developers who communicate respectfully while still managing to get their opinions across clearly.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 17:01 UTC (Mon) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link] (167 responses)

I'm sorry, but not "only the code matters." I'd go so far as to say "only people matter". Treating people as disposable resources in the pursuit of some holy grail of code quality is simply unethical. It's no different from a closed-source company abusing underpaid foreigners in sweatshops... sure, they produce lots of cheap code, but at what human cost?

I'm not sure you understood the point of my post so I'll try again.

The author of the linked post described the ways in her preferences have not been achieved with regards to Linux development. There is nothing wrong with this - she's trying to maximize the achievement of her preferences just like every other living human.

Just like her, I also have preferences. If anyone ever wants to convince me to help them achieve their preferences, all they need to do is convince me that doing so will help me achieve mine and then I will help them.

This is the definition of cooperation: a combined effort that results in mutual benefit.

By stating my preference for the highest-quality kernel achievable, I've told everyone reading this thread exactly what they need to know in order to obtain my cooperation regarding issues surrounding the kernel. Convince me that if I take an action (which can be as simple as lending social support to a particular position) that I'll get a superior kernel out of it.

If you're unable or unwilling to do this, then you'll have to work on achieving your preferences without my help, and possibly while I am helping people who are trying to achieve an opposite preference because they did make a convincing case.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 17:26 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (92 responses)

If you're unable or unwilling to do this, then you'll have to work on achieving your preferences without my help, and possibly while I am helping people who are trying to achieve an opposite preference because they did make a convincing case.

I would go so far as to say that's an immoral position. It's not as if you're balancing off one boring technical tradeoff against another. What you are saying, essentially, is: "I don't care how people treat each other unless they can convince me that treating other people decently improves the quality of the kernel." Showing such disregard for people's feelings in relation to some selfish goal is something I'd expect from a sociopath or a psychopath. I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but there it is.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 17:38 UTC (Mon) by scali23 (guest, #104768) [Link] (15 responses)

> Showing such disregard for people's feelings in relation to some selfish goal is something I'd expect from a sociopath or a psychopath.

Are you wearing a pair of trousers? Or maybe using a smartphone / PC? Do you happen to know the suffering that went into that shiny piece of technology / cloth? Did you when you were deciding to buy it?
Far for me saying that every choice has the same ethical implications (on the contrary), but addressing someone as psychopath/sociopath might be a step too far.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 7:00 UTC (Tue) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (7 responses)

> Far for me saying that every choice has the same ethical implications (on the contrary), but addressing someone as psychopath/sociopath might be a step too far.

Actually, my though was exactly like dskoll's. "I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but there it is.", too. It *does* match the pattern.

> Are you wearing a pair of trousers? Or maybe using a smartphone / PC? Do you happen to know the suffering that went into that shiny piece of technology / cloth? Did you when you were deciding to buy it?

The ethical ramifications of our consumerist culture is whole another Pandora's box, but I would say that most of the people buying clothes and electronics are simply not aware of the abuse of workers (and environment) that enables our enjoyment of low prices - it's not [usually] willful ignorance or explicit neo-Darwinian, orthodox-Capitalist, mechanistical approach to other people(s) ("they're weak so they deserve to be oppressed by the strong", "it's just the market forces at work", etc.). I don't think anyone can say at this point that they're not aware of these issues in the kernel community.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 15:29 UTC (Fri) by aristeu (subscriber, #35826) [Link] (6 responses)

> Actually, my though was exactly like dskoll's. "I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but there it is.", too. It *does* match the pattern.

Someone does something technically stupid and a developer replies classifying said work as "idiotic" which also "does match the pattern" of what "idiotic" means and that's horrible and unacceptable.

But, since it's now trendy and socially acceptable (by some) classifying people as "psychopath", "sociopath", "misogynist", "racist" and whatever to as quickly as possible label someone as something that is known bad as form of winning the discussion, that's ok to perform a psychological evaluation based in a comment or two. It's like Godwin's law, but you look smarter too.

But hey, that's ok, "I'm sorry if this sounds harsh" was used before it.

In your culture doing something "idiotic" is way more offensive than being pointed as "psychopath" in a public forum. Did you ever consider if the person on the other side shares the same standard?

I for one see the Linux kernel as a project where I'm not there to make friends (if I do, great!), but to contribute. A refuge where true meritocracy (or as close we can get) exists and doesn't matter who you are, who you know or where you're from. In such a place, people try to understand where's the technical point behind whatever form of expression, broken english, understanding that people come from different cultures, backgrounds and their main reason behind patches are, you know, code. Thanks to that, people that agree with Sarah will still have their patches accepted if they're technically correct, despite Linus or anybody else disagreeing with these people's personal views. If enjoying being part of Linux kernel development as is and enjoying the fruits of meritocracy "does match the pattern" and makes you think I'm a "psychopath/sociopath" too, well, have fun.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 12, 2015 20:38 UTC (Mon) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link] (5 responses)

More generally, any argument resting on a faux-psychiatric[0] characterization of the opponent is a piss-poor argument. At most such a thing could be made as an act of petulance, or tacit admission of defeat. Yet `dskoll' went on for a while before finally claiming to have only been pretending the idiot.

As usual, the Linux community is far too reluctant to just say "oh fuck that shit, and fuck you too". And so you get played for sport, your efforts wasted in arguments with the west-coast touchy-feely tar-pit. Even the classic move of turning the discussion from being about a topic external to all participants, to being about one of the participants themselves[1], seems to have moved no-one.

[0] unless actual, degreed and licensed professional physicians are now giving unsolicited statements over the Internet -- and eschewing any chance of payment, too!
[1] for example, by speculating about their motives and then instead of justifying that speculation, passing judgement on the person[2].
[2] in this case, a variation of "you're so selfish (to not obey at once)", with a couple of freshman-tier power words tacked on because (and I speculate) that's what the other cool kids do, too.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 13, 2015 14:02 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (4 responses)

Please note that I did not psychoanalyze anyone. I merely said: The following behavior is what I'd expect from a psychopath: The pursuit of selfish goals above all else including other people's feelings.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 13, 2015 14:39 UTC (Tue) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link] (3 responses)

Yes, deny an accusation that wasn't made, and that would be at most peripheral to the argument. Because that sure changes everything.

Good day.

Second request

Posted Oct 13, 2015 14:44 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (2 responses)

Please...let's bring this to an end. The useful part of the discussion is past, and I'd just as soon do without any more of this kind of stuff.

Second request

Posted Oct 18, 2015 12:01 UTC (Sun) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link] (1 responses)

Yo. Yo!

Which part of "good day", to you, doesn't indicate that the branch of discussion is at an end? That I'm dropping the mic, tapping out, refusing to keep wrestling the pig?

More pertinently, where were you when the kindergarten-tier arguments of "that's what a sociopath would say" were ringing out, seemingly for as long as it need go? Does this just-about-readiness to close the discussion only come out when it moves out of the designated circlejerk? When the new political class gets told? When an Incontrovertible Holy Minority of Antioch requests assistance over private channels? But I repeat myself.

Articles concerning touchie-feelie topics always have a great big shitstorm in the comment section, with seemingly limitless catty abuse hurled at those who would refuse an emotional argument, or worse still, argue from evidence and reason to any conclusion besides the pre-chewed one we're expected to swallow. This is true also of articles concerning systemd; we've seen your comment section's finest politruks drive away technologists just for being "on the wrong side". What's your plan concerning this phenomenon, beyond an instinctive supplication to the best passive-aggressives that good-boy points can hire?

Is it truly the beardies alone who're at fault, here? It's certainly so if one asks the opponent: they do have naught but hatred for wrongthink, after all. "Listen And Believe", as they say: there never was any "Unix Philosophy", basic human rights as recognized by the UN are subordinate to the self-stated need of Sacred Minorities and their Not At All Chauvinist Spokespersons, and we've always been at war with Toxic Rape Apologists. Or what?

Though I could be wrong here, certainly. You could be addressing the rest of the thread by posting at one of its tails, and not my comment in particular. If that's the case then do forgive me for reading your comment as it was posted; I had no idea.

Second request

Posted Oct 18, 2015 13:39 UTC (Sun) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Which part? Maybe the part where you have to get the last word in no matter what?

Look, my desire was to close down the conversation as a whole, I said as much; I was not speaking to any single specific person.

That said, I am now speaking to you. This comment was aggressive, the one attacking Matthew Garrett rather more so. You have moved quite firmly into the realm of personal attacks, and you need to stop now.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 14:24 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (4 responses)

Are you wearing a pair of trousers?

Well, a skirt actually, but your point is taken. A lot of our consumer goods are produced under appalling conditions and the only reason we ignore that is that the companies producing the goods go to enormous lengths to insulate us from what's going on. This distancing is the only way to get us to continue our behavior because it blunts our natural empathy.

And I would say that the system of exploitation that gives us ultra-cheap consumer goods at the expense of people's lives is in fact sociopathic. And just because we all participate in this system, it doesn't mean it's acceptable to allow nasty behavior on a mailing list. Just because we can't fix all of the problems in the world doesn't mean we have no responsibility for fixing any of them.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 17:48 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

A lot of our consumer goods are produced under appalling conditions and the only reason we ignore that is that the companies producing the goods go to enormous lengths to insulate us from what's going on.

It's also extremely difficult to avoid because almost all manufacturers are participating to one extent or another. Just try finding modern consumer goods- or commercially produced foods- that weren't produced by exploiting vulnerable workers. Unless you're willing to more-or-less drop out of modern society, you're benefiting from exploitation.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 6:25 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

> Just try finding modern consumer goods- or commercially produced foods- that weren't produced by exploiting vulnerable workers. Unless you're willing to more-or-less drop out of modern society, you're benefiting from exploitation.

Actually it is no longer that bad in many areas. The main issues are becoming aware of the problem (and one can be aware of some aspects without being conscious of others), finding out where to get said products and learning to accept the price premium that often but not always goes with it. Though I think computer products are still a lot harder to do ethically than food and clothing.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 18:38 UTC (Wed) by dashesy (guest, #74652) [Link] (1 responses)

Just because we can't fix all of the problems in the world doesn't mean we have no responsibility for fixing any of them.
So is it fair to start with the easiest target?
Yes, there are people enslaved to give me this shiny phone but no one will listen to my rants. So lets rally against this genius who gave the world Linux because he acts like a grumpy grand dad on mailing lists, or the other genius (who is a noble prize winner) just to make a point. It does not matter that this technology has empowered many of the poor all over the world, has real impact on global economy, and has made the world a better place for billions of people. They are easy targets because they are decent and respectful human beings, while attacking hard targets (with real human rights violations) will result in soaring oil prices which is inconvenient.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 10, 2015 7:37 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> So is it fair to start with the easiest target?

It's called bikeshedding BTW. Looking at the length of this page...

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 11:28 UTC (Wed) by jwakely (guest, #60262) [Link]

I agree the sociopath/psychopath suggestion is a bit over the top, but I agree with dskoll that "I only care about the quality of the end product" is an immoral position. I don't need a tangible benefit to me to want other people to be treated fairly, and I put my money where my mouth is by buying products like https://www.fairphone.com/ and http://subscribe.adbusters.org/products/blackspot (which are certainly not the highest quality goods available, but they are definitely good enough and they are produced more fairly).

Make a difference with your choices. You don't just have to accept products that are made at other people's expense, and I certainly can't agree with people who actively choose products that cause suffering just because the end result is a bit shinier.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 15:08 UTC (Wed) by jubal (guest, #67202) [Link]

You might want to look up the phrase non sequitur.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 18:29 UTC (Mon) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link] (3 responses)

Showing such disregard for people's feelings in relation to some selfish goal is something I'd expect from a sociopath or a psychopath. I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but there it is.

The author's desire to participate in Linux kernel development is a selfish goal.

My desire to have the best quality kernel possible is a selfish goal.

Neither goal is objectively better or worse than another - they are both matters of personal preference and nobody's personal preferences are binding on other people.

Nor is it the job of any person to manage the feelings of another person. The person who feels something is the owner of that feeling and managing it is their responsibility.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 19:01 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

The author's desire to participate in Linux kernel development is a selfish goal. My desire to have the best quality kernel possible is a selfish goal.

No, sorry. A developer giving of his or her time is not objectively as selfish as someone who just wants the fruits of their labor.

Neither goal is objectively better or worse than another - they are both matters of personal preference and nobody's personal preferences are binding on other people.

That is a strawman. You are bringing up competing goals, but competing goals are not the issue. I said that justifying or permitting bad behavior purely on the basis of a selfish goal is unethical.

Nor is it the job of any person to manage the feelings of another person.

No, it is not, and there certainly are cases where people take offense unreasonably and are hyper-sensitive. However, that doesn't give others the right to be sexist, rude, homophobic, etc. and then get a free pass by saying "don't be so sensitive!". You have to measure whether or not a reasonable person could justifiably find something offensive and use that as the basis of any decision.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 9:48 UTC (Tue) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link]

> Neither goal is objectively better or worse than another

Well, there are unselfish goals. They're definitely objectively better.

Being able to set aside my own preferences to help other people. Putting myself in their shoes and having consideration for their state. Not behaving like a little tin god at the centre of my own universe. That sort of thing...

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 14:52 UTC (Tue) by dunlapg (guest, #57764) [Link]

You don't seem to know what the word "selfish" means. It's not selfish either to want to participate in the kernel process, or to want a good kernel. It's selfish to want that regardless of its effects on other people.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 13:44 UTC (Wed) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (61 responses)

If you're looking for validation and warm fuzzies, there are, quite literally, millions of places you can get them.

There's only one Linux kernel, and its impact on the world is hard to overstate. A loss of code quality to make a few people feel better would be an enormous loss to the world.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 14:14 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (21 responses)

There is no contradiction between being civil and insisting on code quality.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 17:26 UTC (Fri) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (10 responses)

In a perfect would I would agree. But there are times that people just don't get it. Pretty much every time Linus blew up and it made headlines, was due to this. After lots of civil communication, the point is not getting across. People (especially Linus) will then exert a bit of nastiness. Amazingly, people usually will take a step back and look at the bigger picture when that happens. Linus's rant about ARM is a perfect example of things getting done afterward.

Motivation is driven by emotion. The more passionate you are about something, the more you work at it. Fear of being yelled at can also motivate. There was a time that I wasn't listening to a major maintainer about something and he totally ripped into me (it wasn't Linus). It took several times at being yelled at for me to get a clue. As a result, I now have probably the best personal self made test suite that I run on my code before posting any patch to linux-next. I didn't make this because of civil conversation. I made it because I was terrified of being yelled at again.

Private vs public

Posted Oct 10, 2015 8:39 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (8 responses)

> There was a time that I wasn't listening to a major maintainer about something and he totally ripped into me (it wasn't Linus). It took several times at being yelled at for me to get a clue.

Thanks for sharing this, which - as has been said many times - isn't a usual type of events yet always gets reported.

I think it's possible to mitigate even these rare events: simply by switching to private communication. I know that private emails are "just bad" the vast majority of the time, but all good rules have exceptions and IMHO this is one. I mean: when everyone gets it but the person too passionate (or else) to listen, why keep in public the (lack of) dialogue? Yelling "Now will you at last listen to me?" at someone in public is orders of magnitude more embarrassing and problematic than the same thing in private, and not just because the former is archived forever.

I've heard and seen more than one manager practice: "praise publicly, criticize privately". While it does not completely apply in this context there's still a lesson to take from it.

BTW there's often reference to the higher value given to respect in Asian vs Western cultures but it's always about public contexts; curious about private exchanges.

Now of course there's the risk the tone raises up a bit higher in a private communication. It typically still feels much better than being scolded in public. And wait: who said private communication has to be email, which *everyone* knows to be flame-prone? What happened to the good old telephone? The Internet star killed it? A lot of this entire debate actually comes down to just "email sucks" for all the well known reasons - mainly lack of oxytocin: https://youtu.be/ReRcHdeUG9Y?t=2149

Private vs public

Posted Oct 10, 2015 14:06 UTC (Sat) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (7 responses)

Actually, there is a lot of criticism in the private. We just don't see it because, well, it's private.

But private criticism may not work as well either. When you are in a private forum, you can make claims that just wont hold up water. But doing that in a public setting has a bigger impact and both sides really need to have the facts straight before they post. Otherwise, if you yell at someone and are incorrect yourself, you can have others yell at you. This has happened, and kept the one that was yelling in check.

Escalating to public shaming really should be the last resort, but should still be on the table. Everyone that posts code to the Linux kernel should be a little nervous about it. That nervousness keeps one in check. Once you can post code without any anxiety then you can easily post low quality code. I've been submitting code to the Linux kernel for over 10 years, and I'm still nervous with every patch I send out. That drives me to make sure my patch can stand on its own, and keeps me from doing something stupid. If you can't handle that, and want to be able to send out "no worries" patches, where if you totally screw up, nobody will criticize you, I'm sorry, you are not fit to submit to a project as serious as the Linux kernel.

Private vs public

Posted Oct 10, 2015 14:09 UTC (Sat) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (2 responses)

BTW, when I said "you" at the end, I don't mean you :-) That was just a generalization. I like German because it has a separate word for that "man", which doesn't mean the English "man".

Private vs public

Posted Oct 10, 2015 15:51 UTC (Sat) by cebewee (guest, #94775) [Link]

I should be able to use "one" in (most of) those case.

Private vs public

Posted Oct 15, 2015 8:02 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

You can use "one" as a general abstract pronoun for people, as a contraction of 'someone', in conjunction with "they", "them" to reference that abstract person, etc., e.g.:

"If someone can't handle that, and they want to be able to send out "no worries" patches, where if they totally screw up, nobody will criticize them, I'm sorry, they are not fit to submit to a project as serious as the Linux kernel."

"one" just happened not to fit easily in there, but often used in "One might think", "If one wants to avoid criticism". Note that "one" can come across as a bit stilted, just using "someone" usually sounds better IMO. "someone" is pretty much the same as the germanic "jemand" / "iemand".

Private vs public

Posted Oct 11, 2015 16:38 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

> If you can't handle that, and want to be able to send out "no worries" patches, where if you totally screw up, nobody will criticize you, I'm sorry, you are not fit to submit to a project as serious as the Linux kernel.

That is tantamount to saying that most people from huge chunks of the Earth (where the culture militates against public criticism of people and where people will go to great lengths to avoid such criticism) are not fit to submit to "a project as serious as the Linux kernel".

There's nothing wrong with criticizing the *patches*. There's something wrong with criticizing the *person* -- and you claim above that criticizing the person is just fine. That's pretty horrendous (if you meant it, rather than being a sloppy way of phrasing "nobody will criticize your patches". Obviously if the code is crap, you should say so, but that's not the same thing. Everyone totally screws up now and again. This does not reflect on them except to prove that they are human, and attacking them for that is wrong.)

Private vs public

Posted Oct 11, 2015 19:43 UTC (Sun) by lsl (guest, #86508) [Link] (2 responses)

> There's nothing wrong with criticizing the *patches*. There's something wrong with criticizing the *person* -- and you claim above that criticizing the person is just fine,

I don't think criticizing a person is generally inappropriate. Sometimes the actual problem is not as much the patches but the mindset that lead to their existence. This is, I think, what Steven's saying.

If you go to great lengths to avoid it, but slip up anyway, well, that happens. The *patch* gets torn apart, you clean it up and everything's fine. But when submitters don't do their due diligence and send crap to the list where it's obvious that they didn't even bother to read the relevant docs, then that's a totally different situation. If you don't even get the most basic stuff right and send one broken patch after another, there's no point in criticizing the individual patches. Until that *person* understands that touching kernel code requires a more careful mindset, looking at the patches is just a waste of time.

So telling those submitters to stop until they change their approach to programming is not only appropriate, but desperately needed. There's more than one way to do that, of course, and no one said you're supposed to scar them for life. With a bit of empathy, you can probably do it without causing all too much pain.

Private vs public

Posted Oct 11, 2015 20:55 UTC (Sun) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (1 responses)

> ...where it's obvious that they didn't even bother to read the relevant docs....

It is *never* obvious what someone else has or hasn't done in private. "They didn't read the relevant docs" may be the simplest explanation that you can think of given your perspective and values.
But people are different and complex. And they change from moment to moment.

Maybe they didn't ready, maybe they read but misunderstood. Maybe they forgot. Maybe they were hasty and careless. Maybe they are having a bad day and they pushed the wrong branch.

That is why attacking the person is such a bad idea. What you are really attacking is your mental model of the person, which is probably quite different in many details to the actual person. You may know what they did publicly,. You never know for certain why. So only attach the actions (i.e the code) not the person.

> If you don't even get the most basic stuff right and send one broken patch after another, there's no point in criticizing the individual patches.

There certainly comes a point where criticizing the patches doesn't seem worth while. But that does not justify attacking the person.

"I'm sorry but I won't be reviewing your patches any more because doing so doesn't appear to help. If you stop posting patches here for at least one month I may then look at future patches you post. If they appear to address my previous review comments, then I may proceed with them"

This talks about what "I" will do, how I see the patches, and specific public actions that you may or may not perform. This is all safe territory. It does not say anything about "you" or the reasons for "your" behaviour. It just identifies the problem and outlines the rules for engagement.

> So telling those submitters to stop until they change their approach to programming

Make that "stop until their patches address the identified issues" and I'll agree with you.

Private vs public

Posted Oct 11, 2015 21:50 UTC (Sun) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

Just a quick addendum...
Modern technological cultures like ours claim to value science over superstition.

Science is about that which is observable and measurable.
Superstition is about whatever we suppose to be the case - untested by measurement.

I'm just suggestion that we should be scientific, not superstitious, in our responses to each other.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 11, 2015 16:43 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

>But there are times that people just don't get it. Pretty much every time Linus blew up and it made headlines, was due to this.

He didn't get on news for being critical but because of the way it is being expressed. Yes, he usually doesn't respond that way but the price of being a celebrity (even if you wear that hat uncomfortably) is that you have to that much more careful.

>Motivation is driven by emotion. The more passionate you are about something, the more you work at it. Fear of being yelled at can also motivate

True but studies have shown that intrinsic motivation is often more powerful compared to external pressure. If you are involved in development in a public way, you should be open to public criticism. That by itself isn't the problem. You do have to watch out for how you do it though. You can very easily drive off other contributors by doing it poorly.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 17:42 UTC (Fri) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (9 responses)

I will admit that not everyone can work in that type of environment. Sarah obviously has the talent for kernel development, but unfortunately, she is not one that can work in this environment.

There's talk about weighing "code quality" with "human wellness". I had this conversation with someone in Seattle, and at first I couldn't find a reply. Then later I was in a room where the presenter was talking about all the things that were using Linux to solve medical diseases, and such. Then it hit me. Quality of code is directly related to "human wellness". When the quality is not there, people can die. Whether directly or indirectly, Linux is used to save lives.

Try going into the medical field (several of my friends are). You think LKML is nasty? Residents are very much belittled in order for them to understand the full seriousness of their job. The more serious the project is, the harsher the environment.

The problem with Linux is that it is not a company. If someone is constantly sending in abysmal code, there's no performance review to correct that. Same goes to someone not following the standards. The only real tactic we have is to yell at someone. Otherwise you may waste days, weeks or months trying to be civil about it. As Linus always states, "in the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle".

Note, most of the time, civil conversation is all that is needed. The yelling is the exception and not the norm. Read LKML or even just Linus's emails. You'll find them mostly boring. It's only those rare occurrences that things had to escalate to set things straight again. Unfortunately news sites don't talk about the 1000's of boring "civil" emails. They only hone in on the one rant where civility didn't work.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 11, 2015 16:41 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (8 responses)

But Sarah was *not* sending in absymal code, so it seems unlikely she was getting too much criticism herself. What you're saying is that if you can't cope with the stress of watching others be publically belittled (and it *is* stressful), sod off, we don't want you no matter how good a developer you are?

I have to say, any company I've ever heard of that had that policy would have been sued into the ground by now by ex-employees, and rightly so.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 12, 2015 15:53 UTC (Mon) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link] (7 responses)

>But Sarah was *not* sending in absymal code, [...]

She was, though. A "simple, trivial" patch, rejected off-hand for being obviously broken, with a comment to the effect of "did you even compile this?".

Look it up. It concerns USB3, of course.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 12, 2015 22:34 UTC (Mon) by PaXTeam (guest, #24616) [Link] (6 responses)

> Asked for evidence, a concrete reference to the public communication by which the condemners formed their opinion, what do they answer? "Go search for it yourself."

the irony is just too rich.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 12, 2015 22:41 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (3 responses)

Ha, that is funny. The reference: https://lwn.net/Articles/660365/

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 12, 2015 22:42 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (2 responses)

Funny or not, it's looking to me like it might be about time to close the door on this discussion. I think the important stuff has been said at this point...

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 12, 2015 22:52 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

while I agree that the important stuff has probably been said, has this been open to non-subscribers? (today it would have come out of the escrow so I'm not sure)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 12, 2015 22:59 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

This wasn't a feature article, so it's been open to the world since it was first posted.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 18, 2015 11:14 UTC (Sun) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, you could've asked.

Sheesh.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 18, 2015 17:45 UTC (Sun) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Are you reading what you're writing? Obviously that applies to you too.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 15:01 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (38 responses)

You (and others) keep bringing up a false dichotomy. Behaving decently is not incompatible with producing an excellent kernel.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 15:09 UTC (Wed) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (4 responses)

We're not, though, in the sense that you're explicitly prioritizing people's feelings over every other consideration.

We can all feel wonderful about ourselves, and put out a worthless project.

The code comes first. If it doesn't, there's no point to writing it. There's nothing wrong with being polite, but by your loudly stated goals, it would be best to wreck the code if that resulted in more civil behavior.

That would be an extraordinarily bad idea. Design correctness and code quality are what matter most, and developers should be as polite as possible within that constraint.

Honestly, it's probably not that severe a constraint. But the code comes first. It has to. Your stated priorities are more than a little scary.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 16:50 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> We can all feel wonderful about ourselves, and put out a worthless project.

You can keep repeating that to yourself louder and louder but it still isn't true, being an a**hole to people does not bring the best work from people, or attract the most competent people, what brings quality is competent people who are invested in a goal, projects with a**holes operate in spite the productivity drain, drama and distraction from the goal they cause and not because of it. It is in fact possible to be highly critical and demand quality without either being an a**hole or being crippled with an inability to give feedback due to fear of other peoples egos, it's not being an a**hole to reject a patch due to it not meeting the quality standards or pointing out the problems with a design.

> But the code comes first. It has to.

You act as if there is some absolute quantifiable rank that every other consideration is subservient to, but that is not how anything in life works, there are always multiple competing factors and trade-offs to be made between them, and every priority is only the "first" priority to a point.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 18:00 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

No, I am not "explicitly prioritizing people's feelings over every other consideration". I cannot for the life of me see how you've read that into anything I'm saying. I did say that people are more important than code and I stand by that.

We can all feel wonderful about ourselves, and put out a worthless project.

Once again, the logical fallacy of false dichotomy. This is really getting tiresome. Using "the code must come first!" as an excuse for disgusting behavior is lame. It's simply a distraction scheme to get people to stop thinking about the pervasiveness of aggression and rudeness in some open-source development projects.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 23:15 UTC (Wed) by luto (subscriber, #39314) [Link]

> The code comes first. If it doesn't, there's no point to writing it. There's nothing wrong with being polite, but by your loudly stated goals, it would be best to wreck the code if that resulted in more civil behavior.

I've reviewed plenty of code that might be, in the words of some people, excrement of some sort. This includes a lot of code that I really don't want to see in the kernel as is. If I review code that I don't want to see in the kernel, I often speak up.

Nonetheless, I've tried to do my best not to personally insult the people who write such code. Some of them are great contributors who add a lot of direct value to the community and to the code base. All of them, without exception, are human beings who ought to be entitled to better treatment than being shat on, whether on a mailing list or otherwise. [1]

It's more than possible that I've still said things that I probably shouldn't have said. Once or twice, I've typed a nasty email, but I think I've done a pretty good job of letting those nasty emails languish in my drafts folder.

So, yes, code reviewers should speak up, but speaking up does not require opining that a piece of code was written by an [insert derogatory term here] or came out of some orifice or other.

[1] There's actually a robot that sends me patches on occasion. They tend to be of remarkably high quality, and the people who feed said robot should be commended. Nonetheless, if the robot were to send me a bad patch, I would try to avoid insulting its parents.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 19:04 UTC (Thu) by PaulMcKenney (✭ supporter ✭, #9624) [Link]

> The code comes first.

Instead of attempting to prioritize people against code, I suggest prioritizing groups of people against other groups of people. In the case of the Linux kernel, this might mean prioritizing the needs of the users of the code against those of the developers of that code.

This is not a simple tradeoff, and different communities are going to choose differently. For the tiny piece of the Linux kernel that I maintain, I try to meet the needs of both groups. Being human, I don't always succeed. But if someone forces me to make a choice, I must prioritize the needs of the users over those of the developers. Naturally, I expect to increasingly favor the users over the developers as the Linux kernel sees increasing usage in safety-critical systems. After all, although I don't feel good when my interactions with other developers falls short, I suspect that I would feel far worse if my code ended up killing someone.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 15:10 UTC (Wed) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (32 responses)

Also possibly worth pointing out: you're the one banging the drum about politeness, and then calling people sociopaths in the next breath.

You may not be the best spokesperson for the issue.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 16:57 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

Pointing out the truth, the comments by jack represented an anti-social worldview, is not impolite, but your comment represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what politeness means for people with conflicting ideas, politeness doesn't demand subservience to the loudest talker in a room just to avoid conflict.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 17:09 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> politeness doesn't demand subservience to the loudest talker in a room just to avoid conflict.

It may not require it, but that's the typical outcome nonetheless.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 18:01 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (29 responses)

I very politely called someone who prioritizes his or her own selfish interests above all other considerations a sociopath/psychopath. I believe I was merely repeating the dictionary definition.

Don't try to deflect the argument, please.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 22:04 UTC (Wed) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (28 responses)

> I very politely called someone [for reasons] a sociopath/psychopath.

Yeah, okay, whatever. I think you've just disqualified yourself from the discussion.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 22:39 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (26 responses)

Please don't bring selective edits to LWN. That's an awful way to discuss things.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 23:03 UTC (Wed) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (25 responses)

Eliding the dependent clause to highlight the main part of the sentence seems quite reasonable to me. I suppose I could have used HTML highlighting, but the original text is right there, and it's not exactly a long comment.

The upshot is that if you're calling someone a sociopath, particularly in a thread about politeness, you are way off the reservation. And failing to back down when it's pointed out, instead doubling down on the rudeness, strikes me as a total disqualifier from this particular conversation. If you cannot recognize the behavior in yourself, you shouldn't be throwing stones at others.

It's also, perhaps, worth pointing out that the target of the sociopath comment was expressing one of the most fundamental values of the free software community: he wants to scratch his own itch.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 2:00 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (21 responses)

The very definition of a sociopath or psychopath embraces someone who puts his or her own goals ahead of everything else and sublimates or ignores or indeed cannot even sense other people's feelings. That's what the person I was replying to was talking about.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 3:17 UTC (Thu) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

So, in other words, it's perfectly okay to call someone a sociopath, as long as you're really sure you're right?

You do realize that your exact argument applies to most of the negative interactions that you claim to hate so fervently? You are doing precisely, exactly what you say is bad behavior, but gosh, Wally, it's okay for me, because I'm right.

That's probably what's going through the mind of everyone being insulting online.... if they're even aware it's an insult, well, it's justified, because they're correct about how terrible a coder their target is, or how awful a behavior that was, or what a pile of wreckage their ethical standards must be.

It seems to me that if you're going to try to impose a code of behavior on others, the very first step needs to be holding yourself to at least that strict a standard, and preferably one much stricter.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 12:37 UTC (Thu) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (19 responses)

"That's what the person I was replying to was talking about."

"ahead of everything else ... ignores ... cannot sense ..."
No, you're exaggerating in order to silence him with some armchair psychiatry.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 13:06 UTC (Thu) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (18 responses)

So, it's okay to call people sociopaths when you don't agree with them?

In threads about civility??

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 13:09 UTC (Thu) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (1 responses)

(Sorry, that was a misthreaded reply to dskoll.)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 13:20 UTC (Thu) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

Ah, okay, that makes more sense.

Yeah, it's easy to get lost in the narrow indendation in LWN threads, but it makes them a lot more readable most of the time, so the occasional bit of confusion is probably worth it.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 13:51 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (15 responses)

What I wrote was this:

Showing such disregard for people's feelings in relation to some selfish goal is something I'd expect from a sociopath or a psychopath

and I stand by it.

Next, your creative little editing of my quote was the equivalent of this:

Original: "People who murder for fun and profit are evil."

Creatively quoted: "People who [do something] are evil."

So yeah... I stand by what I said and I think you are being disingenuous.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 13:59 UTC (Thu) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (14 responses)

Well, okay, you've tripled down on your abusive behavior, so I'll just leave it to the readers to judge.

This, folks, is the world he's championing: he gets to be abusive, because he's right, you see.... but other people don't.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 15:07 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (12 responses)

...he gets to be abusive, because he's right, you see.... but other people don't.

She, not he.

And no, I am not being abusive. You are simply being over-sensitive. I doubt jackb really is sociopathic. I'm sure he's a really nice person in real life as are most people who get involved in online discussions.

I was merely pointing out the logical consequences of the belief that only the code matters and that everything else should be subservient to code quality.

I'm done with this particular subthread because I doubt we'll ever see each other's point of view. Have a good day.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 17:14 UTC (Thu) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (4 responses)

"She, not he. "

Is it relevant to the discussion at hand ?

"You are simply being over-sensitive."

Is that a joke ? If it was the other way around you would be screaming bloody-murder, denouncing a 'blaming the victim' situation.

"I doubt we'll ever see each other's point of view"
Oh but we see it, do not worry.. you seems to be impervious to the fact that your position is asymmetric.
Everything you reproach to Linus, your are doing and more.. but of course in your case it is different.. because _you_ are right!

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 18:01 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (3 responses)

Is it (she vs. he) relevant to the discussion at hand ?

Not particularly, but I do strive for accuracy.

Is that a joke ? If it was the other way around you would be screaming bloody-murder, denouncing a 'blaming the victim' situation.

Congrats; you got it. It wasn't specifically a joke, but it was a pointed comment to make malor understand a little better.

Everything you reproach to Linus,

The remarks to which malor so strenuously objected were not aimed at Linus. I was simply saying that pursuing one's selfish interest above all others' feelings is the mark of a sociopath. I don't believe Linus does this nor actually anyone else on the LKML. I was just trying to point out the logical consequence of believing that the only thing that matters is code quality. I'm attacking that idea, not any specific person. I'm sorry if that hasn't been clear during this discussion.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 23:04 UTC (Thu) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (2 responses)

"Not particularly, but I do strive for accuracy. "
you strive for accuracy over irrelevant details ?
Beside this is the internet, for all I know you could be one of these reviled 'ex-young-geek-now-white-middle-man', or an 80 years old grandma from Indonesia, or a teenage transgender from Cameroon. The good news is that none of it matter nor has any bearing on the validity or lack there-thereof of your argument. But it beg the question... why do you feel compelled to insist on irrelevant alleged trivia ?

"Congrats; you got it."

no, do not get me wrong. Me pointing out that you should at the very least hold yourself to the standard that you aim to impose on others, does not in any way, shape or form imply that I accept such 'standard' as valid.
I find the whole 'right not be offended' meme whereas the lowest common denominator of all readers or imagined readers is the unimpeachable standard of what is 'acceptable', idiotic and impossible to apply.. as your foray in sociopatic behavior definition illustrated pointedly.

"The remarks to which malor so strenuously objected were not aimed at Linus"
of course it was not... When I said 'everything you reproach to Linux' I was referring to your style of discourse, and the justification for it is exactly the style you reproach to Linus - albeit with a more passive-aggressive tone, and contrary to Linux you do not own-up your discourse.

I do not care if you resort to name-calling, I bet malor does not really either..
What I care about, in this instance, is the hypocrisy, the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do attitude.... whereas Linus is not allowed to chose the tone he wants, and need to account for all sort of potentially offended peoples.. but _you_ are dispensed of such considerations.

I'll give you a US political analogy:

you can have whatever sexual lifestyle as you want, I do not care
you can preach all day long that some of these styles are a road to hell according to your favorite imaginary friend.. I do not care -- well, as long as you do not try to coerce me into sharing your delusions.
but when you do both at the same time... you will get called on it, even by people that do not care about either.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 23:34 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Wow, I guess you get offended really easily.

> why do you feel compelled to insist on irrelevant alleged trivia?

To correct a pronoun, obviously.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 12:11 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

why do you feel compelled to insist on irrelevant alleged trivia

OK, ma'am. I'll stop. shmget shows her focus on the topic by not caring which pronoun is used to refer to her.

Anyway, this really is going nowhere. You can't accept that I'm criticizing a philosophy, not a particular person. So we're done.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 17:14 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

> And no, I am not being abusive. You are simply being over-sensitive.

The point malor is making (I believe) is, that's exactly the same argument being made by many of the people defending the status quo on LKML.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 2:15 UTC (Fri) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (5 responses)

And no, I am not being abusive. You are simply being over-sensitive.

Are you even reading yourself?

I mean, you could be on LKML right now. You sound exactly like the people you profess to dislike. You're jumping up and down about protecting people's feelings, and then you post things like that.

Something seems quite amiss here. Are you trolling?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 5:13 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> You sound exactly like the people you profess to dislike.

Are you gaslighting or putting on a performance for the crowd of some schoolyard taunt, "I know you are but what am I", like a culture warrior behind a paper shield of false "both sides doitism". Maybe you have such cripplingly sensitive feelings as to make you incapable of engaging in an honest and open conversation about this topic, to the point where you consider dskoll's mild tone and criticisms to be abusive. I think I understand your point enough that I can't take your stated position that dskoll has abused you very seriously, it seems more likely that you in fact are trolling than the other way around.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 12:13 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

*sigh*. I guess no-one really got my "you are over-senstive" comment. Of course I was being ironic. Sheesh.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 18:30 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (2 responses)

I will remind you that your whole argument depends on selective editing. The sentence you've been harping on for ages (in its original form, obviously) might be overly harsh, but it isn't terribly offensive. It's certainly not worth all the effort you've put in.

If you're wondering who's trolling here, well, it might be you.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 20:23 UTC (Fri) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (1 responses)

"The sentence you've been harping on for ages (in its original form, obviously) might be overly harsh, but it isn't terribly offensive."

But the argument of dskull and few others is that you or anyone else is not allowed to determine _what_ is offensive.. if you do, you are accused of 'blaming the victim'. In their world, whomever complain is de facto right to complain, the complain is, ipso facto, proof positive that there _is_ a 'problem'... denying the premises make you part of _the_ problem and not part of _the_ solution (to the alleged problem)... and of course they have 'the solution' ready. And dare you not challenge it you sexist-middle-age-white-chauvinistic-privileged-sociopathic-pig....

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 21:02 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Please show me an actual person offended by dskoll's actual statement?

Gotta say, this has turned into a weird conversation. I disliked her statement, but I also dislike how you two have boiled up a sea of hypotheticals and implications around it. I don't get it. Probably time for me to tune out.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 17:18 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I don't see how this can be considered abusive, unless you consider any challenge to your ideas to be abuse. If you want to be in an environment where no one ever questions your thoughts then maybe LWN isn't the place you want to be?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 2:02 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

he wants to scratch his own itch

What? No. He wants others to scratch his itch for him, no matter how badly they're treated. You are completely taking things out of context. Please go back and read the article that elicited my initial response.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 3:27 UTC (Thu) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (1 responses)

>What? No. He wants others to scratch his itch for him, no matter how badly they're treated. You are completely taking things out of context. Please go back and read the article that elicited my initial response.

Well, the specific quote that you pulled out, and called him a sociopath for, was this:

>If you're unable or unwilling to do this, then you'll have to work on achieving your preferences without my help, and possibly while I am helping people who are trying to achieve an opposite preference because they did make a convincing case.

What he's saying is this: he wants good quality code. That's his itch. If you convince him that your approach results in better code, he'll lend whatever help he has to offer. (he will help you scratch your itch because it helps him scratch his.) If someone else convinces him that their approach will produce better code, he'll help that person. (he'll scratch their itch because it helps him scratch his.)

This is one of the most fundamental parts of open source. People see a problem and want to solve it, and team up with other people who want to achieve similar goals. If he's a sociopath, then most of open source is, as well.

As far as I can see, not only are you way out of bounds on polite behavior, but also incorrect in your accusation. All he's saying is: "I want a good product. I'll support whoever convinces me their approach does that better."

And instead of trying to convince him, which is what he's asking you to do, you call him a sociopath.

In a thread about toxic behavior, no less.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 16:58 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> And instead of trying to convince him, which is what he's asking you to do, you call him a sociopath.

OK, so did I miss something? He was never called a sociopath. This seems to be the quote this whole thread spawned from:

> Showing such disregard for people's feelings in relation to some selfish goal is something I'd expect from a sociopath or a psychopath.

There's nothing here about a *person* being a sociopath, but *behaviors* being sociopathic in nature. One may have behaviors which indicate all kinds of mental afflictions or other problems without actually having the problem itself (e.g., nervous ticks can be *indicators* of OCD, but are not a diagnosis[1]).

Is there some other comment I missed here?

[1]Actual OCD can be *debilitating* whereas what is called OCD in common terms is usually nothing of the sort. Dislike of light switches not being "all the same way" is not the same as severe anxiety attacks about them not having been turned off "right" while you're out shopping.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 17:10 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> > I very politely called someone [for reasons] a sociopath/psychopath.

> Yeah, okay, whatever. I think you've just disqualified yourself from the discussion.

Excluding someone for telling a truth (however unpleasant) rather disqualifies the discussion from having a point, don't you think?

There are polite and nasty ways of saying things, but I think dskoll was putting it politely. And if you can't accept unpleasant facts, politely put, then you shouldn't be discussing that sort of thing ...

Cheers,
Wol

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 15:45 UTC (Thu) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (9 responses)

I personally find the attitude extremely realistic and liberating, even if it's explained a bit poorly. It's akin to being asked elide your person entirely, and just focus yourself to become a machine that best performs a given job. It's a rational position, not an immoral one.

Few people are impacted if the feelings of some random developer are hurt, but a very large number benefit if the product is good. In the end, that code may live a decade or longer, and benefit literally billions over its time span, whereas such personal feelings come and go and largely are irrelevant in comparison. This problem is, I think, in similar category to the ethics of making one person suffer more so that million more people can be a bit happier on average -- from an utilitarian point of view even a minor improvement in the lives of the multitude outweigh even large displeasure heaped on a single person.

So anyway, I feel this is a bit tangential to the discussion, but I do think that the code is way more important than the people because of how much larger impact it has, and how many more lives it affects.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 20:15 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (8 responses)

But ultimately, you're agreeing with me that the code is only important because of the good that it brings to people. If you had absolutely beautiful code that didn't benefit any people, then you'd agree with me that the code wasn't worth very much except maybe as an aesthetic object.

Now, the thing is that you can have beautiful code that benefits millions of people and whose development hurts "some random developer". But wouldn't it be better to have beautiful code that benefits millions of people and whose development is less hurtful to "random developers"?

In a slightly more subtle way, you yet again appeal to the same false dichotomy as others attempting to justify bad behavior: That we can have either good code or good behavior but not both.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 21:19 UTC (Thu) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (7 responses)

"others attempting to justify bad behavior:"

I think what you are persistently missing is that we are not in agreement wrt what constitute 'bad behaviour'.
You assume that 'your' views on the topic are universal.. that we all would be happier in an hypocritical, repressed environment, were conflict is left to fester and handled via backstabbing, rumor mills, and other passive-aggressive, superficially polite ways.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 21:32 UTC (Thu) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (3 responses)

Ms. Sharp has made a followup posting, some of which may be interpreted as her assessment of "bad behavior". It includes references to "microaggressions" and "known harassers" and "code of conduct" and "leadership ... at least 30% new voices" and "spectrum of privilege" and "cultural change" and of course many variants of "diversity".

http://sarah.thesharps.us/2015/10/06/what-makes-a-good-co...

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 21:42 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

Her list sounds horrible to me, because it requires kicking your experience, enthusiastic, productive people out periodically to make room for 'new' people (both in development and in 'leadership')

The Linux Kernel community hits most things in most categories of her list, but there are also a lot of things that are subjective.

She then seems to say that unless every item in every category is met, she deems the whole category and effort a failure.

She's welcome to try and organize and run a project per her criteria, but I don't think I would want to operate under those rules.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 17:34 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> Her list sounds horrible to me, because it requires kicking your experience, enthusiastic, productive people out periodically to make room for 'new' people (both in development and in 'leadership')

Unfortunately, here in the real world, all the evidence is that having someone in the same position of leadership for a long time results in that person becoming a real problem :-( There is a REASON that most democracies limit the amount of time a person can be President or whatever for. I used to be a fan of Margaret Thatcher. Until she developed Maggielomania. MOST leaders get to the point where they like power, and will hang on to it come hell or high water.

How long has Linus headed the Linux project? He seems to have kept himself remarkably grounded, but he's been around a heck of a long time. Too long? I don't know, but all the stats say yes, too long. ESR has burnt himself out, he's no longer that respected. RMS seems to be shooting himself in the foot far too often today :-( I hate to say it, but I think more and more long-time luminaries can no longer see the wood for the trees :-(

As a chemist, one historic example I like is Dalton. As a student and a young man, he was a remarkable scientist. As a respected elder sage, he was one big unmitigated disaster, holding back Chemistry for ages.

A possible counter-example is Churchill, but he regularly swung between power and political wilderness - that was probably a great help in keeping his feet on the ground.

Cheers,
Wol

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 17:52 UTC (Fri) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link]

The reason I believe that Linus is still around and doesn't look anywhere close to burning out, is because he never micromanages. He gives maintainers lots of room to run their subsystems the way they seem fit. When there's in-fights within a subsystem, or competing systems, he doesn't get involved unless one side is totally off the mark and isn't changing. He's stated before that he doesn't want to get involved in those controversies, and wants the subsystems to figure things out themselves.

His biggest pet peeve (and he restated it again in Dublin), is breaking backward compatibility with user space. The majority of his rants that make headlines has mostly been due to maintainers thinking they could break a user application in the next release for whatever reason. Push that too much, and you will suffer the wrath of Linus. And usually for good reason too.

Linus has been very consistent in his leadership. I don't see him stepping down any time soon.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 22:20 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (2 responses)

Your reply calls to mind the old adage "If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem". The people pointing to a problem, of whom Sharp is just one recent example, most certainly are aware that their criteria for bad behaviour are not shared universally. If there were universal agreement, there would not be a problem.

Nor is it likely that the people pointing to a problem believe that any single standard or code of behaviour will make everyone happy. But "you can't please everyone" is a very weak defense for a status quo where many people are unhappy, or where many people who perceive that they would be unhappy if they joined choose to stay away altogether.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 23:07 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

by the same argument, there are a lot of people who are happy with the current situation and who have said they would be very unhappy with the proposed rules

so for them, the people annoying them about changes that they don't want are the problem.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 15, 2015 8:45 UTC (Thu) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link]

The people pointing to a problem, of whom Sharp is just one recent example, most certainly are aware that their criteria for bad behaviour are not shared universally. If there were universal agreement, there would not be a problem.
Oh, they are pretty much shared universally. It's just that some misshapen person cult tends to glorify some "hero's" bad traits along with the rest until he as well as others relish in considering them a mark of quality.

It's like greed and selfishness being glorified because you admire the effects of being rich.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 18:48 UTC (Mon) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link] (66 responses)

If you want the highest quality achievable in the kernel, you want a large group of people working efficiently on improving the kernel. You do not want to limit yourself to only people with very thick skin, or people that doesn't care that they offend and induce fear into others rather than giving them constructive feedback. Fear doesn't improve productivity, especially not in creative work.

If highly qualified people leave or never even enters the community of contributing kernel developers - because they perceive the kernel community as lacking in personal respect - the overall quality of the kernel will be less than if the community included those people.

As a side note, I'd like to point out that quality is a collective measure of many separate quality attributes. It isn't far fetched to consider interpersonal behaviour between developers and general community attitude as quality attributes among others - just like efficiency, hardware support, serviceability, etc. If you want to score high on overall quality, you want to score high on all individual attributes including civility.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 18:57 UTC (Mon) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link] (65 responses)

If you want the highest quality achievable in the kernel, you want a large group of people working efficiently on improving the kernel. You do not want to limit yourself to only people with very thick skin, or people that doesn't care that they offend and induce fear into others rather than giving them constructive feedback. Fear doesn't improve productivity, especially not in creative work.

If highly qualified people leave or never even enters the community of contributing kernel developers - because they perceive the kernel community as lacking in personal respect - the overall quality of the kernel will be less than if the community included those people.

This is a perfectly valid hypothesis.

Do you have any evidence that your hypothesis is true?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 19:19 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (40 responses)

Common sense? The extraordinary hypothesis demanding proof here is surely that having extra-thick skin or being pointlessly offensive makes you a better kernel hacker than anyone without those attributes (or even than most people without them).

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 19:51 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (32 responses)

Having a thick skin makes you better able to deal with pretty much every human interaction, not just kernel hacking.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 20:55 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (23 responses)

Not necessarily. It might be make you more tone deaf or less sympathetic when people complain about the development environment and even turn against the person raising the issue as opposed to changing the environment to be more suitable for everyone involved.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 22:21 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (22 responses)

> Not necessarily. It might be make you more tone deaf or less sympathetic when people complain about the development environment and even turn against the person raising the issue as opposed to changing the environment to be more suitable for everyone involved.

I hate to say it, but the ones seeking to impose a change bear the burden of demonstrating that said change would be worthwhile. (Or forcing said change, in extreme cases).

(See, that's the problem with sociology as a field of study; there are laws that prevent performing directed, controlled experiments so all you can do is analyze uncontrolled environments after the fact)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 0:36 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (17 responses)

>I hate to say it, but the ones seeking to impose a change bear the burden of demonstrating that said change would be worthwhile.

That would be true if this was a new issue. The question of poor tone in LKML has been brought up multiple times by several kernel developers and several people have said that they have either left or not joined kernel development because of said environment or they are working on it despite it and not because of it.

Projects that are generally less abrasive welcome and sustain more diverse contributions. That has been demonstrated many times. Rust and KDE were mentioned as examples in this thread but one could easily cite more projects that do it very well.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 3:09 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (16 responses)

>>I hate to say it, but the ones seeking to impose a change bear the burden of demonstrating that said change would be worthwhile.
> That would be true if this was a new issue. The question of poor tone in LKML has been brought up multiple times by several kernel developers and several people have said that they have either left or not joined kernel development because of said environment or they are working on it despite it and not because of it.

Be that as it may, would said change actually be *worthwhile* to the Kernel as a whole?

> Projects that are generally less abrasive welcome and sustain more diverse contributions. That has been demonstrated many times. Rust and KDE were mentioned as examples in this thread but one could easily cite more projects that do it very well.

I don't deny that a less abrasive environment would be be better for specific individuals, which in turn could indirectly lead to "more diverse contributions", but would said contributions actually result in an objectively better kernel?

...It's a legitimate question (and if we're being honest, an unanswerable one)

I generally take the position that diversity is a GoodThing(tm) -- But it's foolish to assume that "change this one thing" won't have additional side-effects beyond the ones you're looking for.

Personally, I don't find the LKML environment appealing -- not because of the occasional flaming (I've been the indirect recipient of it twice, incidentally) but because it's a frantic, high-pressure environment, and much like Ms. Sharp, I don't need that sort of stress in my life. Unfortunately, I'm of the growing opinion that these hostile environments are endemic to the profession of software development. In the past fifteen years I've been doing this, I've only seen it get worse and I look forward to the day when I can leave it all behind.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 3:42 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

>Be that as it may, would said change actually be *worthwhile* to the Kernel as a whole?

Very likely, yes. We have several specific examples of talented kernel developers leaving the kernel because of the tone in the kernel development community. Just avoiding that would have already resulted in a better project. We can also demonstrate that similar approaches in other open source projects has been positive. We can't demonstrate that it would beneficial to the kernel specifically without making the change. That is true of any changes. Even technical ones. For example: can you demonstrate that testing would result in better software for any given new software without any tests? Very likely, yes but no guarantee. Now social changes are harder than technical changes but the same underlying principles apply.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 15:59 UTC (Thu) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (1 responses)

> Just avoiding that would have already resulted in a better project.

Provided no other adverse outcomes occurred as a result of how this was achieved. It is unlikely that we could e.g. institute a code of conduct on LKML, and a "police force" which can enforce it without also impacting it negatively somehow, e.g. each time this police force steps in and enforces a CoC, it might apply quite mindless set of criteria to determine if CoC is violated followed by a process of escalation that eventually would remove anyone from the kernel development community, up to Linus himself. This is sort of bureaucracy and enforced niceness is always stifling in some sense even if its intentions are good.

> For example: can you demonstrate that testing would result in better software for any given new software without any tests?

Possibly, but writing the tests takes time that would be removed from other development. Maybe the quality is better, but functionality is less.

There is no free lunch. I think these repeated discussions about tone of the LKML are also a harm per se because they are also likely to scare off any new developers because they now expect to be flamed and have their mother and pet dog insulted, regardless of whether this actually would happen to them.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 16:36 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

>There is no free lunch. I think these repeated discussions about tone of the LKML are also a harm per se

If you say pollute a river, the harm is because of the pollution and not because a news outlet publishes the story.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 9:43 UTC (Tue) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

I feel we're a at this point now : what if we made LKML a better place for nothing ?

(stealing from http://www.gocomics.com/joelpett/2009/12/13/)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 18:23 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (11 responses)

Be that as it may, would said change actually be *worthwhile* to the Kernel as a whole?

That is the wrong question. If the Kernel is the ultimate good against which all other goods are subordinate, then we've lost. If that were the case, it would be possible to justify any sort of behavior up to and including genocide as long as it improved the Kernel.

What we need to realize is that people are more important than anything else and sometimes changes are needed because they're the right thing to do, and not because they can be proven to improve the Kernel.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 19:58 UTC (Tue) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (10 responses)

" sometimes changes are needed because they're the right thing to do, "

But that is not the case here.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 20:21 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (9 responses)

>it is obviously _not_ better for _everyone_ involved.

>But that is not the case here.

and so on. It would help to explain your perspective rather than just assert.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 21:12 UTC (Tue) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (8 responses)

" It would help to explain your perspective rather than just assert. "

a story about pots and kettles come to mind... the point here was to counter the often asserted claim of 'right thing'

but if you want more details.. Linus already expressed thing quite adequately
in a thread already posted here.

http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=137392506516022&...

fell free to navigate in the thread in question, most of the point and counter point have been made there already....

If that did not give a hint that what some people here claim is 'The Right Thing(tm)', may not be that a slam dunk, I do not think I can convince you otherwise.

If you care about the more fundamental rooting of my position. In this topic it boils down to my strongly held belief that 'the right not to be offended' is a moronic, impossible to apply concept.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 23:51 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

>If that did not give a hint that what some people here claim is 'The Right Thing(tm)', may not be that a slam dunk, I do not think I can convince you otherwise.

Yes because Linus approach is precisely what some people here disagree with. Pointing to him is not going to convince them.

>In this topic it boils down to my strongly held belief that 'the right not to be offended' is a moronic, impossible to apply concept.

True but irrelevant since noone here has claimed otherwise.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 8:02 UTC (Wed) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (1 responses)

"Yes because Linus approach is precisely what some people here disagree with. Pointing to him is not going to convince them."

Sure, you can decide to ignore the argument, but then you cannot complain that such argument is not given.

I certainly read that 'some people' disagree with it, that does not means that it is not correct, or that the opposing view is ipso facto the 'Right Thing(tm)'

"True but irrelevant since noone here has claimed otherwise."
Of course that has been claimed, many, many times in this debate. It is the core foundation of the argument that speech mush be judged by each and every witness to the speech... not only the one it is addressed too but also real or hypothetical bystander. and that judgement must be based on the level of offense claimed by each and every one of them.
and merely 'feeling uncomfortable' is standing enough to have a cause of action.... iow a 'right not to be offended'
you can tip-toe around the wording as much as you like, but it is still what it is.

An analogy to this ludicrous thing is these people that leave the city to get a house in farmland, and then sue for nuisance the neighboring farmers, because their cows block the road, the roster sing at dawn, the stench in the autumn when the farmer spread manure in the fields, etc... you knew or should have known that this was the reality of farmland...

If you really love so much the hypocritical, passive-aggressive political correctness of Corporate America.. good for you... you already have a huge playing field... stay there and do not try to ruin it for the rest of us.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 12:02 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I am not ignoring it but letting you know why it is not convincing to point to linus when asked your perspective.

Also you are setting up a strawman. I will stick to the points in this thread.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 2:51 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (4 responses)

There is no right not to be offended. Such a "right" would itself be offensive because it would stifle free speech.

That does not mean it's OK to be crude and offensive. It would not be tolerated in a work environment---a perpetrator would justifiably be fired for creating a toxic workplace---and it should not be tolerated in an open-source development environment. Especially when there's a power imbalance, aggressive behavior can cause real damage.

It's far too convenient for people to behave disgustingly and then say "well, you're the one getting offended so it's your problem." Nope, I don't buy it and neither do most civilized people.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 17:48 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

> There is no right not to be offended. Such a "right" would itself be offensive because it would stifle free speech.

I hate all this stuff about "rights". Your "rights" probably infringe my "rights".

Far better - it is your DUTY as civilised person, not to be offensive. As a CONSEQUENCE, you are unlikely to be offended.

I don't like "do as you would be done by" - the obvious problem with this is that lkml, and lwn, and places like that are mostly an "old boys club" and us men are only too happy to treat everyone else here as a bloke - then we wonder why people like Ms Sharp and dskoll find the place very hostile and uninviting ... :-(

At the end of the day, it boils down to respect. And sadly, it seems far too many people have no respect for other people. And yes, that does prove dskoll's point - as I understand, what she has been saying all along is "your behaviour fits the dictionary definition of a sociopath". That's not calling some ONE a sociopath - that's calling someone's BEHAVIOUR sociopathic, and imho she's right on the button. THAT is what needs to be addressed. And that's not a personal attack, that's a technical assault on a problem ...

And, of course, unfortunately we do have a "blame the victim" mentality - we have the thread elsewhere of the "wannabee developer" - HIS behaviour is sociopathic, and when some poor kernel guy blows his top and swears, HE's the guy who gets picked on for bad behaviour :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 19:50 UTC (Fri) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (2 responses)

"what she has been saying all along is "your behaviour fits the dictionary definition of a sociopath". That's not calling some ONE a sociopath - that's calling someone's BEHAVIOUR sociopathic, and imho she's right on the button."

No, just no.

She's inflating the degree of stated "I care only about code" to ridiculous extremes (as needed for a clinical diagnosis), instead of assuming reasonableness. She proceeds to label the behaviour with mental illness. (It is sophistry to claim only a behaviour and not the person is being labelled.)

If the deflection was going to be ... "oh, it's only consistent with $illness, not necessarily $illness", hold up. Conflict is "consistent with" genocide too, but it would be manipulative and dishonest to use the extreme term.

So, no. Someone who says they "care only about code" is not meaning literally that. Don't pretend to believe they do. Don't label them mentally ill.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 20:27 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Someone who says they "care only about code" is not meaning literally that.

Exactly, and that's my point. Saying that is ridiculous. We all care about other things.

The only points of contention are (1) the relative merits of good code vs. good behavior and (2) the extent (if any) to which bad behavior is necessary to produce good code. But saying you "only" care about code is shutting down the discussion. People can legitimately have different viewpoints about (1) and (2), but the extremes (only caring about code or only caring about feelings) are ridiculous.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 20:49 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

> Someone who says they "care only about code" is not meaning literally that.

So everyone agrees that someone who cares only about code does not actually exist.

According to Wol, that leaves nobody to get offended. According to fuhchee, if we paint with a wider brush, we can find lots of people to get offended. Both positions seem valid.

That said, a person claiming they 'care only about code' seems just as guilty of sophistry as the person labelling that behavior sociopathic. Both sides are overstating their positions and looking for a reaction.

So why not roll your eyes, give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and move on to a less hypothetical offense?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 8:49 UTC (Tue) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] (3 responses)

> I hate to say it, but the ones seeking to impose a change bear the burden of demonstrating that said change would be worthwhile. (Or forcing said change, in extreme cases).

Given the constant whining from the kernel community about the broken whole architecture trees are (because people don't want the hassle of committing upstream), or that the kernel just lost the only person who stepped up to make sure we got USB3 support, I would say there's plenty of support things are broken.

This fine publication has reported that one third of embedded developers don't upstream because of fear of rejection noting that "Kernel subsystem maintainers tend to be strict and terse with contributors [...] If a contributor gets a reputation for submitting bad patches and wasting maintainer time, their life will get worse."

If a third of developers would rather, in essence, throw aay their code than have to work with the upstream kernel developers, things are broken.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 23:04 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (2 responses)

We might suppose that the Microsoft corporation, which won't even let you commit a fix that contains swear words or has anything less than complimentary to say about key partner brands, is a "friendlier" organisation to do business with in this rather limited sense.

A few seconds confirms that Microsoft's products do not have one third more upstreamed third party stuff. Quite the contrary, far more so than in Linux, everything is kept in-house and/ or thrown over the fence as unmaintainable binaries.

Laziness wins. Not every time, but overwhelmingly the true answer is "I couldn't be bothered" and what you can find out with a survey is "My currently favoured excuse for why I couldn't be bothered, PS I am goofing off to fill out this survey too".

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 7:17 UTC (Wed) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] (1 responses)

I fail to see any point attempting a constructive conversation with someone whose response to evidence is to claim everyone is lying.

So, have fun ignoring what people are telling you and making up little fairy tales. It won't fix them problem, of course, but I guess getting to treat people like shit it more important than working code.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 19:37 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

So, Microsoft do have all this stuff? They're so friendly, surely they'd be falling over non-scared developers who, we've established have plenty of spare time and are extremely enthusiastic about handing this stuff over, they're just _terrified_ of upstreaming in Linux. No?

People lie in surveys. They lie in an anonymous psychology study. They lie in a corporate satisfaction survey. A properly conducted census actually has to be post-processed to compensate for this, or it won't reflect reality. Surveys aren't useless, but you should take them with a large dose of salt.

We have an actual data point from the real world, and it doesn't match what we might think we should learn from the survey. That doesn't automatically mean the survey is wrong, but it means we should be far more cautious than it seems you're willing to be. It isn't my goal to "treat people like shit" even the inevitable LWN guests who don't have a dime to pay for a subscription but do want to put in their tuppence about how Linux ought to be run. However I do care about working code. So show me the code.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 21:42 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Again: data really seriously missing. Generally, jerks who insult people at whim do rather badly in society.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 21:46 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (4 responses)

Having a thick skin makes you better able to deal with pretty much every human interaction, not just kernel hacking.

I don't buy it. Having a thick skin may help you be on the receiving end when somebody is nasty, but it has two disadvantages:

  • It generally means that you're less sensitive to subtle interactions. If your skin is thick enough to shrug off slings and arrows, it's usually incapable of sensing a gentle touch. That can mean you ignore points people are trying to make, which also hampers communications.
  • There's a natural tendency for people to assume that others have their own sensitivity, so that the people with the thickest skin are also often unsubtle in what they say. That means they're more likely to offend sensitive people without realizing it

I suspect that this combination is what has led to the unfortunate state of kernel development. When you put a bunch of people with thick skin in charge, you wind up with an environment where only people with thick skin can thrive.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 22:16 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (3 responses)

>> Having a thick skin makes you better able to deal with pretty much every human interaction, not just kernel hacking.
> I don't buy it. Having a thick skin may help you be on the receiving end when somebody is nasty, but it has two disadvantages:

No, there's no question about that --- having a thick skin helps you when you're on the receiving end of any sort of adversity. That doesn't give you license to be an asshole, nor does it mean you should necessarily put up with said adversity.

But back to the subject at hand. Given a choice, I'll choose to work with thicker-skinned folks; not because it means I get to be a total clod, but because it results in a far, far more productive team. In my experience, etc etc etc.

Yes, there are situations where a thick skin may put you at a disadvantage. So it's a good thing that we have a diversity of different personality types, eh?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 9:45 UTC (Tue) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (2 responses)

Here you claim that working with thicker-skinned folkes gives you a far, far more productive team, while just a couple postings above you are looking forward to leaving the industry, because of the hostile environments, you yourself choose to be in.

Doesn't this contradiction strike you as glaringly obvious? Have you considered, that maybe working with more sensitive people would create less hostile environments, that you and others could actually enjoy working in?

From personal experience, I can tell you, that software development can be a field that's fun and rewarding. And yes, that's true even if done as a profession in a corporate environment. It is quite possible to keep very high quality standards in code reviews without ever attacking the person and quite contrary, while being appreciative of a person's efforts. All it takes really is good examples. We don't have to teach newcomers on the team how to do that. They just pick it up.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 12:58 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Doesn't this contradiction strike you as glaringly obvious? Have you considered, that maybe working with more sensitive people would create less hostile environments, that you and others could actually enjoy working in?

Not at all, because having thick skin does not mean that you're an asshole or somehow difficult to work with.

It's no different than the truism for network programming -- be as liberal as possible in what you accept, but be as conservative as possible in what you put out.

> From personal experience, I can tell you, that software development can be a field that's fun and rewarding.

My experience agrees that it *can be* fun and rewarding. But poor management will ruin anything.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 7:46 UTC (Wed) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> It's no different than the truism for network programming -- be as liberal as possible in what you accept, but be as conservative as possible in what you put out.

Which is kind of bad analogy because this truism for network programming proved itself to be a recipe for a network made of crappy devices where problems are never fixed. Or maybe it's actually really good analogy... If you're liberal in accepting crap from others, they will never improve and the environment will remain toxic. So yes, I agree with you, but that not in the way you anticipated :)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 22:09 UTC (Mon) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

Many long-time Mozilla developers have developed thick skins due to years of weathering attacks from jerks (from "give up, IE6 has won, ha ha ha" until now). I don't think this is a good thing; it makes it harder to accept valid criticism.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 9:38 UTC (Tue) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

I would instead says it makes you better at _not_ dealing with human interaction.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 14:58 UTC (Tue) by dunlapg (guest, #57764) [Link] (1 responses)

Google "Assholes are killing your project". There are dozens of versions of this talk, but the one that I saw had a couple of graphs. The one that stayed with me was a graph of rate of contributions to glibc over time. It had to big "jumps". The first was when they switched to git; the second was when Ulrich Drepper stepped down as project lead. Drepper was technically very good; but there is no way that he as a single individual could make up for the development output of all the people that he drove away.

Also read "The No-Asshole Rule", by Robert I. Sutton -- that's more general, but has lots of evidence as well.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 20:44 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Look at gentoo ... I don't really follow the development of the distro, despite using it, but I get the impression it's in a slow downward spiral ...

Because a couple of jerks drove away maybe half the developers, and when those that were left finally kicked the jerks out, the damage was almost irreversible ...

I *hope* things are looking up, I'm not sure. I don't want to have to find another distro :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 22:02 UTC (Tue) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link] (4 responses)

The extraordinary hypothesis demanding proof here is surely that having extra-thick skin or being pointlessly offensive makes you a better kernel hacker than anyone without those attributes (or even than most people without them).
Well, if you take extra-thick skin and being pointlessly offensive to its ultimate conclusion, you'll have just Linus Torvalds and Lennart Poettering remaining on LKML.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 13:13 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't think you'll still have Lennart ...

From what I know he's a nice person. He's had to *become* thick-skinned because of all the jerks around him, but he'd much rather ditch that and be a generally nice guy.

The problem is he doesn't suffer fools gladly - if his program breaks because your program doesn't honour the contract that *IT* offered him, well of course he's going to be upset about it!

Oh - and can I give another example of a community that seems to manage to be very civil and works well - LibreOffice. No small thanks to Michael Meeks for that. He gets the best out of people, not the worst - oh and I think he's a brit by the way :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 13:33 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> I don't think you'll still have Lennart ...

Well, I've seen many of his comments here and I don't think I've ever seen him being disrespectful (even though most of the time he has to debunk myths and misconceptions about his work). I suspect that the perception that Lennart is "difficult" comes from the fact that people do not like to have their beliefs shattered (corrected) so thoroughly :)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 18, 2015 12:32 UTC (Sun) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link]

>From what I know he's a nice person.

That's because he's had all of his unflattering oral history purged from the Internet. For an example of how this fails, see his comments on the "kdbuswreck" article on LWN. Available on Google to those willing to search, of course.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 10, 2015 10:55 UTC (Sat) by ms_43 (subscriber, #99293) [Link]

How did you get that idea? There is a substantial disagreement about this between the two individuals you mention. Did you see this post, which is very much on-topic here?

https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/p...

"But no, it's not an efficient way to run a community. If Linux had success, then that certainly happened despite, not because of this behaviour. I am pretty sure the damage being done by this is quite obvious, it not only sours the tone in the Linux community, it is also teaches new contributors to adopt the same style, but that only if it doesn't scare them away in the first place. In other words: A fish rots from the head down."

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 21:12 UTC (Mon) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]

Do you have any evidence yours is? When I look at btrfs compared to zfs or hammer, for example, I see no particular evidence of technical superiority produced by the current Linux development model.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 21:19 UTC (Mon) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (22 responses)

Did you completely ignore the summary, let alone the actual article? The kernel just lost a technically respected contributor, because people would rather be jerks than accommodate a contributor's desire to work in an environment that focuses on technical issues rather than hyperbolic and hostile commentary. It's really really hard to be offensive if you just simply discuss technically issues in rational, analytical manner. And your proof for your side is?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 22:43 UTC (Mon) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (21 responses)

One specific contributor, who obviously did not agree with most other developers.

However, if the LKML is such an issue, why wasn't it bypassed? Surely it's possible to review by proxy. If there is a large group of people that can't stand the LKML, but have useful contributions, surely they should be able to contribute through some sort of proxy.

And if there is indeed such a large group, LKML posters will have to consider it. Right now there's no such a group.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 1:08 UTC (Tue) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (13 responses)

Actually, they don't have to consider it, and you have no proof it doesn't exist. I have at least two : Sarah and Con Kolivias. Again, we have data on one side, and nothing on the other.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 2:45 UTC (Tue) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (11 responses)

Add mjg59 to the list. (Also a good example for the person elsewhere in the thread who wanted an example of homophobia and/or sexism.)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 3:55 UTC (Tue) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (2 responses)

Oh, and Alan Cox, after he bravely delved into the tty code to clean up that hairball, and just ended up on the receiving end of one of Linus' rants. That was a pretty significant loss. Not just a contributor, but a maintainer, with a significant amount of kernel info tied up in his head, just cause Linus couldn't state objections clearly and concisely without going on some random diatribe. We're up to four people, and the population size of significant kernel contributor's isn't that big. Reaching statistical significance..

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 5:45 UTC (Tue) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link] (1 responses)

And Andre Hedrick, who suicided

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 5:57 UTC (Tue) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link]

And Richard Gooch, who became one of the many contributers who go to Google never to contribute again.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 12:32 UTC (Tue) by hitmark (guest, #34609) [Link] (5 responses)

Homophobia?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 23:10 UTC (Tue) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link] (4 responses)

I presume this means the "Guys, this is not a dick-sucking contest" remark, implying that dick-sucking might be something unsavory for guys. If he had said that to a woman, it's pretty obvious how she could consider this as a personal insult putting her into a sexual context based on her gender. It's not that much different with gays I guess because its use of a discriminating insult puts talker and listener on unequal footing. Like with "nigger", "but they talk like that to each other" does not really count since then it is done among equals.

At any rate, like "dick size contest", it identifies masculinity with power. Personally I consider this more gynophobic than homophobic.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 6:41 UTC (Wed) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (3 responses)

" Like with "nigger", "but they talk like that to each other" does not really count since then it is done among equals."

whoa!!! do you read yourself ? 'among equal' ? when exactly are 'they' not "among equals" ????


Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 13:21 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

What he's saying, is that it is normal - AND NOT ABUSIVE - for a group of people to use those terms about themselves. So if a group of black people people talk about themselves, then they can use those words freely, but outsiders can't.

Personally, I think a lot of this is the ****** politically correct brigade, objecting on other peoples' behalf when those people couldn't actually give a damn, but too many people seem incapable of obeying the golden rule - "don't be gratuitously offensive". And its corollary - "don't take offense when none was intended". As I said - I couldn't discuss race on Groklaw because too many important people took offense at my only means of expression ... :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 19:46 UTC (Wed) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link]

"What he's saying, ..."
I know, but that is _not_ what was actually said. What was said is that some people are deemed to be among "equal" when they are in company of other people that share one or more superficial visible criteria, and therefore are _not_ among 'equal' with the rest of the population.

I live in the US, I'm well aware of the knee-jerk irrational reaction to some 'magic' words, and the laughable double standard that come with it. Very typical of the local culture to think that two wrongs make a right....

All that by peoples that advocate -- apparently for others, not them -- ultra-sensitivity to what other _might_ fell about what one write/say.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 10:47 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

So, on black people using that word between themselves as "equals", note that are some (influential) people in that community arguing that that is not the case and that they should not do so. The rapper/poet/social-commentator Akala makes a lot of interesting points on this in various interviews. E.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlBartyyyfk

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 18, 2015 13:14 UTC (Sun) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link] (1 responses)

Whoa there pardner.

Matthew Garrett is the guy who libelled Ted Ts'o as a "rape apologist" on his blog (as Valerie Aurora[-1] had immediately before on hers), calling explicitly for social ostracism (shunning) on him, all because of a years-old[0] mailing-list post questioning a long-debunked statistic of radical feminists used to push convention codes-of-conduct. And if that's not enough, consider the magic number policing[1], hen-pecked advocacy of "deferring to [whomever] on social issues"[2], and his belligerence at various public codes-of-conduct being modified to not include the anti-white, anti-male presuppositions. He's hardly any model of civility at all.

For technological arguments, there was that time when Garrett's vision of Secure Boot in Linux required the removal of kexec and every other feature he thought could be used to subvert Secure Boot. Pressed for argument (on the LKML, no less), he doubled down on fear: Microsoft will surely deny Linux the ability to boot on Future Computers, unless the prophet is obeyed. Had he got what he wanted, it would've placed a security-related (wholly intransparent, yet overridingly important) power of veto over all kernel architecture in his hands. Suffice it to say, the attempt was rejected -- and the follow-up, which proposed to put key signing middleware into the kernel (for unexplained but vaguely related reasons), got the short fuse. A skilled developer is able to describe and justify such submissions, whereas any well-meaning fool can claim that It Must Be So Because Security while being entirely wrong.

And check it out: Microsoft hasn't spanked all of Linux with their Secure Boot hegemony. Who'd've thunk.

But, yes, let's think that he'd finally got so sick of the awful, awful LKML culture that he chucked his toys out of the pram & went to play with the cool kids instead. It's what he says himself, isn't it. Just like Sarah Sharp, ex-kernel developer since over a year ago, cares very little for the kernel besides making grandiose demands of the ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic composition of the Linux maintainership, after her re-heated ragequit.

If there's a communication problem on the LKML, then it is something very different from what the Aurora/Garrett/Sharp triple would have you think. Those three, and their useful idiots, bring with them their very own suite of politicking, backstabbing, and behind-the-scenes abuse.

[-1] suggesting an unilaterally bitter rivarly in the filesystem space
[0] which must've taken some digging indeed
[1] no boobies in the kernel! think of the children!
[2] because of course everyone's a bleeding Rainman, desperately in need of chaperoning so as to not frighten the Women & Horses

Enough

Posted Oct 18, 2015 13:52 UTC (Sun) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

I suspect you have just single-handedly convinced a lot of people that folks like Matthew have a point. You need to stop doing that here.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 20:26 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Thankfully CK only left the mailing lists -- not kernel hacking entirely.

BFS is a godsend for those of us who don't have a 16-core Xeon in our netbook or phone and want to actually use it. And it'll *never* be in mainline because the maintainers are so arrogant.

Same caveat applies for the (unrelated) BFQ: the maintainer's demand there was along the lines of "submit this as a broken up series of patches that mutates CFQ into BFQ one step at a time or we won't consider it at all". That's like asking for btrfs as a series of diffs against xfs.

"reviewing by proxy"

Posted Oct 6, 2015 2:41 UTC (Tue) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (6 responses)

Now there's an idea! Someone like the Linux Foundation could assemble a bank of humans (or software?) to could act as discreet proxy email filterer-forwarders between rude communicators on LKML or whereever and nice communicators. As long as most traffic can go through email, and latency is reasonable, it might work.

"reviewing by proxy"

Posted Oct 6, 2015 7:45 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (5 responses)

But aren't there such examples already?

A reply to the original post mentioned Linaro. What about various subsystem mailing lists and trees? Do all of them follow the main LKML standard here? From previous discussions I vaguely recall that no. So do such "different" subsystems have better development performance? Easier to attract new developers? Easier to keep developers?

And no, the fact that certain 4 people left citing this issue is can hardly be considered a trend - it's still closer to an anecdote. They may have had various other reasons to leave. They might have left even if the LKML was managed differently. Or maybe (pure speculation, just to be the devil's advocate. Because I have no data) applying such a code of conduct may have prolonged useless arguments in the list and thus eventually caused various people to give up as they can't get over the "red tape" needed to contribute

"reviewing by proxy"

Posted Oct 6, 2015 12:43 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> applying such a code of conduct may have prolonged useless arguments in the list and thus eventually caused various people to give up as they can't get over the "red tape" needed to contribute.

FWIW, this has happened to me a few times, in both F/OSS circles and professional employment -- Where the "process" (official or unofficial) ends up overshadowing the software itself.

I find it incredibly demoralizing, and, at least for me, is the best way to ensure I will find something else to do with my time.

"reviewing by proxy"

Posted Oct 6, 2015 13:41 UTC (Tue) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (3 responses)

"They may have had various other reasons to leave."

Except, you know, several of them had *explicitly said* that's why they stopped contributing to the kernel.

"reviewing by proxy"

Posted Oct 7, 2015 5:51 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (2 responses)

People may be upset for various reasons and I don't fully trust their subjective report on that. However, that's not my main point.

The kernel development is alive and well. People occasionally come and go. Thus the fact that certain people left due to some reason is not meaningful enough. We all know that if it ainn't broken you should not fix it. I was hoping for someone to reply with an example of a subsystem mailing list that behaves differently, to allow comparing. However, no one gave that reply so we're left with baseless arguments.

"reviewing by proxy"

Posted Oct 7, 2015 13:23 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> I was hoping for someone to reply with an example of a subsystem mailing list that behaves differently, to allow comparing.

I'm on the linux raid mailing list. I've yet to see Neil Brown foulmouthing anyone ... it's a very well-behaved list ...

Cheers,
Wol

"reviewing by proxy"

Posted Oct 7, 2015 14:34 UTC (Wed) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

>We all know that if it ainn't broken you should not fix it

Losing strong developers for bad reasons is pretty broken.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 9:09 UTC (Tue) by ortalo (guest, #4654) [Link] (6 responses)

And I suppose I cannot cooperate with you if I do not agree on these "mandatory mutual benefits" terms?

This kind of "cooperation" will not be much useful if it only works in these ideal environments where everyone *must* take a satisfying part of the benefits. Such perfectly rewarding situations are not so common and many things in the world necessitate a lot more gratuitous actions (e.g. justice, healthcare).
So, with your basic criteria, you will definitely end up abusing others help to your own benefit (without recognizing it due to your personal perception of the cooperation terms).
Maybe women are be more sensitive to these kind of false promises. That could explain why there are so few in some communities. Maybe these are the communities that do not share correctly the rewards of actual work?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 13:14 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (5 responses)

>And I suppose I cannot cooperate with you if I do not agree on these "mandatory mutual benefits" terms?

"mutually beneficial arrangements" are the basis of all human interactions.

Seriously, why would I spend some of my free time writing copyleft software if I didn't derive some sort of benefit from it? Even if I only gain a sense of self-satisfaction, it's still a benefit.

Personally, I'm aligned with Donald Becker's attitude -- when asked why he "gave away" many ethernet drivers "for free", his response was along the lines of "I wrote a bunch of drivers, but got an entire operating system in return. I came out ahead." (If someone can come up with the exact quote, I'd appreciate it..)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 20:55 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

> > And I suppose I cannot cooperate with you if I do not agree on these "mandatory mutual benefits" terms?

> "mutually beneficial arrangements" are the basis of all human interactions.

The problem I think the OP has (and I do too) is these "mandatory mutual benefits". What if, TO ME, they are an ANTI-benefit. That's why I have a IB problem with that word "mandatory".

Classic example - I have just been enrolled in one of the new "mandatory workplace pension"s dreamed up by our government. Where I pay in 2% of my income, and my company has to pay in another 1%. And where it's probably extremely easy for the pension provider to cream off several hundred percent of the interest in charges, transaction fees, rigged deals, etc etc. Where's the "mutual benefit" for me in contributing? I'd probably do a much better job if I was allowed to invest in my own scheme. Except there are cozy backhanders between the politicians and bankers so my savings can be ravaged by the bankers for use as political contributions ...

I find far too often that when marketers tout the "benefits" of their latest products, my reaction is "but they'll leave ME worse off!"

Cheers,
Wol

workplace pension scheme

Posted Oct 6, 2015 23:38 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (2 responses)

The scheme isn't mandatory, it's just set up as "opt out" rather than "opt in". If you're the sort of person who actually makes a choice, nothing has changed. If you're the sort of person who just lets things happen to them, vaguely meaning to do something about it "later" and that later never comes, now you get a workplace pension whereas before when you retired you'd have nothing.

The pension provider is regulated, so no, it's not "extremely easy" for them to "cream off several hundred percent of the interest" as their regulator would fine them far more than they could expect to make with such shenanigans. Most of these products are passively managed long term market investments, a mixture of government bonds, shareholdings and that sort of thing. For the passive management service the provider expects typically 0.5% (some older schemes will be 1%) of the total value annually. It would be quite striking if you managed to consistently (remember you need to keep this up for as much as 40 years) beat these numbers with your own "scheme" by enough to make up for losing the 50% boost from your employer for choosing an authorised scheme, but you are quite welcome to try.

The pension provider's product will typically also feature a lifestyle "curve" where as you approach retirement they gradually move funds from the passively managed medium risk investments to a very low risk investment with lower expected income. This reduces the risk that a market "crash" will suddenly wipe out your pension a few years before you retire with no chance to recoup the loss. Managing this yourself requires more discipline than most people can bring to bear. After all, many people doubtless thought in the weeks before the dotcom crash, these stocks just keep climbing, it would be foolish to get out now, wouldn't it ?

workplace pension scheme

Posted Oct 7, 2015 13:39 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

I really don't trust them - there's far too much evidence of frauds and fraudsters are far too inventive. All you need is a bonus scheme that's based on results, and someone will find some way of rigging it. As for the provider being fined, well that just makes matters worse - your manager has rigged the system, pocketed his bonuses, and left. Then the provider gets fined and, well, where's he going to get the money to pay the fine from? Chances are it WILL end up coming out of *your* pocket. Just look at all the money the mutual insurers paid out to policy holders in the wake of the endowment crash? Where did that money come from? The only place it *could* come from - the policyholders' deferred bonuses!

Problem is, you really need to start with a decent amount of money, because charges really do eat into your returns, but IFF you're prepared to put in a little bit of effort (and it really is only a little) you can make a lot of money fairly easily. Just remember Warren Buffet - "investing is a long term commitment" - day-trading will burn your profits in charges very easily. And only invest in *value* that you *understand*.

I'd look for shares at about the 40, or 110, 260 position in the FTSE that looked undervalued, buy them, and then sell them when they go above the 30, 100, or 250 position for a very nice profit.

Oh - and as for the dot-com crash? Apart from the bubble stocks (which you should have been riding as a gamble, not an investment), pretty much ALL the NYSE or FTSE stocks bounced back and in only a couple of months were higher than before the crash. The typical buy-and-hold investor didn't even make a year-on-year loss! It's only the day traders and johnny-come-latelies piling into stocks they didn't understand that got burned - oh, AND the trackers, who were heavily invested in bubble stocks because they dominated the indices ...

Cheers,
Wol

workplace pension scheme

Posted Oct 7, 2015 20:12 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Well you seem to have some idea of how you'd do it, knock yourself out. As I said, the system isn't mandatory (for you, it's mandatory for your employer to offer it) so you can opt out and do things your way, go buy those arbitrary shares picked from FTSE and spend your evenings scouring the listings for changes, you can probably even write a bit of Perl to make the buy/ sell decisions and just perform the execution manually.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 8:53 UTC (Thu) by ortalo (guest, #4654) [Link]

All this assumes that you can easily be within a secure, transparent and resource-full environment where your view of cooperation is sufficient.
As soon as threats arise or resource lack for "mutual benefits" to exists for everyone, or some rumors and lies become popular, your view of cooperation can rapidly turn into unilateral coercition or abuse. (Do you think a whining child, a gun-holding policeman, a flaterring politician or a clever advertiser rely on your ideas to interact with you?)
I think that's the basic problem here. Mrs Sharp considered that she was not in a suitable environment for her to cooperate. You do not offer any solution to that. And you cannot with simple "mutual benefits" reasoning.

BTW, review your example too. The response you quote deserves more examination no? Donald would *also* have had the operating system if he had not given his drivers code. So he is also mocking his interlocutor narrow mind in my humble opinion. The key point is probably to stop thinking *only* in terms of reward/benefits. If I am right: me too. If not, too bad. :-)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 18:40 UTC (Mon) by mebrown (subscriber, #7960) [Link] (4 responses)

I'd agree with your comment that "only people matter", and then go further. Why would you want to let anybody in your community behave in such a way as to drive off potential contributors? Especially when this behaviour is so easy to see and avoid? If the code is the only thing that matters, then why would you want to drive away the very people who can make the code better? Remember that lack of social graces is not an indicator of above-average coding skill.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 19:08 UTC (Mon) by BradReed (subscriber, #5917) [Link] (3 responses)

You seem to assume that having social graces is an indicator of above-average coding skill. Just because someone wants to be a contributor, does not mean they necessarily have anything to contribute. If the only thing you have to contribute is criticizing others' social skills, then are you really helping linux development?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 10:38 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (2 responses)

Same thing if you turn it around: What benefit is there in having people driving other people away. There seems to be an assumption that the quality might go down if you're not allowed to be sexist, etc. IMO quality is down because people are sexist. Further, if you really wanted a highly technical debate, then why allow all this bad non-technical behaviour/discussions?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 20:28 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

> ... f you're not allowed to be sexist

who is being sexist here? Sarah isn't complaining about kernel developers being sexist, she's complaining about other things.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 10:26 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

Ah, true. However, point is still the same

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 15:57 UTC (Mon) by mordocai (guest, #71668) [Link] (18 responses)

I understand your point. I think though that there is a very hard to measure benefit in having a more diverse group of people work on the project. Ideally, there would be a way to make people like Sarah Sharp feel welcome while not causing anyone else who currently develops on the kernel to feel unwelcome. I don't know what this would be though.

From a pure code quality/amount of code standpoint causing existing contributors to leave would hurt much more than preventing some newcomers from joining, at least at the current point in time where we seem to have plenty of existing developers working on the kernel. If it gets to a point where there are not enough developers though, we will have a big problem if the primary reason developers are staying away is how communication is handled.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 16:35 UTC (Mon) by mrshiny (guest, #4266) [Link] (17 responses)

There have been several studies that showed that more diverse teams often outperformed homogeneous teams.

There is no reason to believe that the current Linux team is optimal in its membership.

There is no reason to believe that the current Linux team can't learn to communicate effectively AND politely.

There is no reason to believe that people who don't like to be abused are worse coders than those who like dishing out abuse.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 17:25 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (10 responses)

> There have been several studies that showed that more diverse teams often outperformed homogeneous teams.

The current Kernel development team is extremely diverse, with the one possible exception of the plumbing between the legs of the programmers. So your comparison falls flat to begin with.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 17:27 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

> The current Kernel development team is extremely diverse, with the one possible exception of the plumbing between the legs of the programmers

Gender is far more than "plumbing between legs" and is an important aspect of said diversity. I wouldn't call the current group extremely diverse in the absence of it.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 17:37 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

> Gender is far more than "plumbing between legs" and is an important aspect of said diversity. I wouldn't call the current group extremely diverse in the absence of it.

The current kernel developers come from all sorts of backgrounds, all sorts of economic histories, and from a large number of cultrures and countries around the world.

I think that it's far more diverse than what you would get in any company that hired from people who live/grew up in any one area, even if that company had a exact 51%/49% female/male ratio.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 17:40 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

It is far more diverse is some areas. In gender diversity, not so much. Reducing it to "plumbing between legs" doesn't help at all.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 18:19 UTC (Mon) by mrshiny (guest, #4266) [Link] (6 responses)

Gender is not about "plumbing". It's way more complicated than that. The existence of transgender people would seem to prove that. But in any case, I wasn't speaking only of gender diversity, though the kernel dev team has driven away its fair share of women.

There are many ways to measure diversity. People coming from different countries is one way. Ethnicity is another way. Gender a third. Sexual orientation is another. But also, personality types, culture, etc. The current team is a lot of old white guys. Not 100%, but a lot. Just look at any photo of the kernel dev conferences.

The kernel is supposed to be an open team, where anyone who care write good code is welcome. But it's clear that they must not be as open as they seem, or else their population would be more diverse than it is. And one way they can help is to stop being abusive to people who are trying to help out.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 18:31 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

you can have more diversity in a group of 'old white guys' who come from different backgrounds and different countries than in a 'rainbow' of people who grew up attending the same schools.

you can't tell diversity by looking at a picture.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 2:21 UTC (Tue) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (1 responses)

"you can't tell diversity by looking at a picture."

you're trying very hard to use reason and logic... but it is and will be in vain.
resistance is futile, you will be assimilated....

There is no reasoning with people that take for truth with a straight face the postulate:

"Any subset F of a set E must exhibit the same statistically properties wrt to every conceivable properties than
the set E, regardless of F... except for gym club membership"

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 4:10 UTC (Tue) by mrshiny (guest, #4266) [Link]

"Any subset F of a set E must exhibit the same statistically properties wrt to every conceivable properties than the set E, regardless of F... except for gym club membership"

This is clear proof that you're not listening to the argument. Nobody is claiming that the kernel team's demographics should exactly match the world's demographics. But it's pretty clear that it doesn't even come close. It's so far off that anyone who claims that the kernel team is "diverse" is just laughable.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 18:04 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> Gender is not about "plumbing". It's way more complicated than that. The existence of transgender people would seem to prove that. But in any case, I wasn't speaking only of gender diversity, though the kernel dev team has driven away its fair share of women.

Give me a scientific definition of sex, or gender, that actually works and I'll be amazed.

The ONLY definition of gender that I know of that works 100% is "you are the sex you feel you". There is not a perfect correlation between your genotyope (which can not only be XX or XY, but can be XXX or XXY, and probably other variations too) and your phenotype (the "plumbing" as someone called it) which can not only be male or female, but hermaphrodite and/or other variations on a theme.

As I say, the ONLY 100% sure fire definition is a brain scan. There are differences between male and female brains. There is, apparently, a 100% perfect match between people who say "I feel a male" and have a male brain, and people who say "I feel a female" and have a female brain.

Cheers,
Wol

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 19:08 UTC (Fri) by mrshiny (guest, #4266) [Link] (1 responses)

It's not even clear what it means to have a male or female brain. There are so many factors involved in the biology and socialization that you can't just divide brains up that way.

"male" and "female" brains

Posted Oct 9, 2015 20:36 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Yes, it's not clear but there have been interesting studies that hint at differences. There have been both live brain scans and and post-mortem dissections of brains that suggest that transsexuals brains are more similar to other brains of the gender they identify with and less similar to other brains of their biological sex.

We also know that different parts of the fetus develop at different times; genital differentiation occurs way before brain development is far along and there are hints that during fetal development, a baby may develop a female body but a more typical "male" brain and vice-versa. Again, so far we only have hints, but not exact details.

I'm pretty familiar with this topic as a modicum of googling will reveal.

-- Dianne Skoll.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 2:32 UTC (Tue) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (5 responses)

"There have been several studies that showed that more diverse teams often outperformed homogeneous teams."

Anything convincing skeptics, in an engineering type problem domain?

Diversity of thought is more important than - and independent of - diversity of physiology.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 3:13 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (4 responses)

> Diversity of thought is more important than - and independent of - diversity of physiology.

Unfortunately you can't really measure the former, so instead we get quotas enforcing the latter.

(BTW, I wholeheartedly agree with you)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 9:56 UTC (Tue) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (3 responses)

And how exactly did we jump from a female high profile developer being driven away by hostile behavior to quotas enforcing diversity of physiology?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 12:34 UTC (Wed) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (2 responses)

Reading between those lines is not even hard. If you designate "diversity of physiology" as a desirable quantity, you will set out to measure it. You will have goals - whether explicitly stated or secret, short of which you will declare the situation a "problem". It's a quota.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 13, 2015 13:54 UTC (Tue) by mrshiny (guest, #4266) [Link] (1 responses)

I think we can all agree that we want the best people for the kernel, right? And that there is no correlation between race/gender/decision orientation/etc and intelligence. with me so far? If there kernel team is predominantly white males, it stands to reason that smart women and non-whites (etc) AREN'T in the team. That means the kernel loses what benefits they can provide.

We don't need quotas to identify a problem. We don't need quotas to realize that part of the solution is just trying to be more inclusive and polite. There kernel is supposed to be a meritocracy. Funny how so few minorities are represented. Unless you're claiming that they're just inferior, there must be some other problem keeping them out. You should listen when they tell you what the problem is, as Ms Sharp has done.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 13, 2015 14:09 UTC (Tue) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link]

There are so many logical leaps in that chain that it reminds me of the Drake equation.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 18:37 UTC (Mon) by mwcremer (subscriber, #59863) [Link] (3 responses)

If somebody can make a compelling case that a change will result in a higher quality end product, then as I user that's something relevant to my interests.
How can a “compelling case” be made?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 20:13 UTC (Mon) by jhardin (guest, #3297) [Link] (2 responses)

I'd suggest one data point that should be gathered is: who would leave the kernel development community if they were required to behave in a courteous and professional manner? Then the negative impact of that change could be assessed.

Assessing the positive impact is more difficult. We can potentially assess it based who has already left (e.g., how important was Sarah's contribution), but that's incomplete: how do you assess it based who isn't willing to join currently and might if such a change were made?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 4:13 UTC (Tue) by mrshiny (guest, #4266) [Link] (1 responses)

I find it bemusing that we'd expect kernel developers to leave because we're insisting that they not act in an abusive manner.

In any case, important projects often live on beyond the developer's interest in it. Just look at GlibC. The maintainer was notoriously toxic and difficult to work with. Sure, he was competent, but his departure opened the door for improvements to be made and for other smart people to join the team.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 5:48 UTC (Tue) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link]

There are more than enough talented and well socialized kernel developers that, if all the abusive ones left, Linux development would continue just fine. Quite possibly accelerate.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 23:59 UTC (Mon) by gwolf (subscriber, #14632) [Link]

Consider that free software development is not just a coding sweatshop - it's in some way an ongoing experiment on human behavior. And yes, we have been studied by all kind of social-sciences and humanism scholars.

In the end, not only the code matters. In the end, this odd style of loosely coordinated software development, lacking strict boss-employee relations, is based on personal needs and social interactions. And if social interactions become too harsh for people doing the actual work, we (as in "the humanity", those that benefit from this workstyle) are going to lose big time.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 21:55 UTC (Tue) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link] (1 responses)

As a Linux kernel user, I want the highest quality software possible. The emotional needs of the people who make it are only relevant to me insofar as they affect the quality of the end product.
To quote Linus: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." And he's quite generous with ripping eyes out and casting them away.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 3:13 UTC (Wed) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]

> To quote Linus: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."

Except that you quote Erik Raymond here, who phrased this as "Linus' law".

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 16:36 UTC (Mon) by sorokin (guest, #88478) [Link] (34 responses)

I'm not related to kernel development in any way and I don't have an eye on lkml. Could someone post a link what post she finds personally disrespectful? The post in her blog is very vague and it doesn't have any examples.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 17:00 UTC (Mon) by hp (guest, #5220) [Link] (33 responses)

Everyone involved here agrees with Sarah that the environment includes personal attacks - including the attackers. They simply defend those attacks as somehow ok or desirable. Google should find you tons of examples but I'm too lazy to Google that for you. :-)

Reconsider this kind of "please prove it to me" reaction in the future though: http://simplikation.com/why-sealioning-is-bad/
The point of Sarah's post wasn't to prove something to bystanders.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 17:59 UTC (Mon) by scali23 (guest, #104768) [Link] (13 responses)

This is the request you are replying to:

> I'm not related to kernel development in any way and I don't have an eye on lkml. Could someone post a link what post she finds personally disrespectful? The post in her blog is very vague and it doesn't have any examples.

I would usually say "assume good faith", but even without good faith I feel really puzzled in how anyone could find it worthy of a stigmatization.

In any case OP: I recall this thread http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=137390362508794&... but as you I don't have an eye on the LKML.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 18:52 UTC (Mon) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link] (12 responses)

I'm not a fan of advocating swearing at people (things, concepts, or in cases where it's appropriate humor, sure...) but that thread doesn't seem as bad as I was expecting.

I get Linus's reaction against the notion that everything should have the veneer of professionalism. Maybe not to the extreme that he rails against it, but I am at least somewhat sympathetic. I've worked in places where it's OK to say "<developer>: Dude this code is busted crap and we need to fix it before it fucks us over" and ones where we "may need to reevaluate and see if we can refactor this for our next sprint to address some issues with our latest deliverable". The ones with the bluntness and more casual standards for language built better stuff. The ones with the more professional language seemed nice and friendly to outside observers, but still had personnel issues... they just weren't as obvious at first glance because they were cloaked in a layer of buzzword bingo.

Language doesn't fix organizational issues. If you have a fucked up power dynamic and double standards, you'll still have a fucked up power dynamic and double standards even if you never say "fuck".

What trying to restrict everything to using professional language *does* do is make everything into a presentation. Every commit, every message, every IM becomes a little mini exercise in HR compliance. And as a developer, I can say that there are times when all that mental context-switching gets frustrating and draining.

If there are personnel issues -- and it seems like there are -- the Linux community needs to fix them. I agree with Sarah's point elsewhere in the thread that there's a big difference between swearing about a piece of code and dressing down the person that wrote it. Even in a casual environment like I alluded to, the latter is not acceptable.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 20:19 UTC (Mon) by jhardin (guest, #3297) [Link] (10 responses)

I've worked in places where it's OK to say "<developer>: Dude this code is busted crap and we need to fix it before it fucks us over"
But that is not a (discourteous, bigoted) personal attack against the developer.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 21:40 UTC (Mon) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link]

Agreed. That's why I think there are some deeper personnel issues at root here other than just the use of bad language or ripping apart someone's code (even to their face.)

It's not pleasant to have someone tear apart your code, publicly, in front of you. But there's value in that, even if it includes a lot of swearing and irritation. What's not useful is letting that segue into a personal attack on the developer in question.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 1:04 UTC (Tue) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (4 responses)

But it is pretty much useless. How about - this code triggers an oops, under commonly encountered condition X so we need to fix. Saying it's crap is just as useless as the management speak. I'm really tired of people defending lazy and annoying comments by saying they're marginally more useful than other lazy and annoying comments. I disagree that vague, hyperbolic and hostile comments improve things more than just plain vague comments.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 3:20 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (2 responses)

If only the real world were quite so simple. Some code is so sweeping and nebulous that you just can't reason logically about it, short of writing a book anyway. Email-sized arguments therefore get boiled down into emotionally-charged aesthetic observations. devfs, X, capabilities, Mir, HAL, systemd, etc etc etc.

Agreed, vitriol and hype are useless and should just embarrass the author. But sometimes lazy arguments are the best we can do with the time that we have.

This is not to excuse lazy arguments, of course. We can and should do better. I just wouldn't like to see anyone err too far on the other side and demand quantitative proof before removing a difficult subsystem.

(hm, speaking of nebulous arguments boiled down into unsubstantiated emotional response...)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 3:58 UTC (Tue) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (1 responses)

Then you say this code is so large and difficult to follow, it's time to start over. Still a lot clearer than "crap". Crap code could mean anything.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 4:33 UTC (Tue) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

But lots of merged code is large and difficult to follow. Scheduler, I/O, VM, DRM, ...

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 18:27 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I agree with this. I quite often review code produced by developers who work for me and I have never and would never say "this code is crap." I'd say something like "this code can fail in situation XYZ" or "this code needs refactoring because there's cut-and-paste" or whatever... but never anything insulting.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 13:34 UTC (Tue) by nhippi (guest, #34640) [Link] (1 responses)

However, many people take bugreports on their code personally, so calling their code "busted crap" is taken as a personal insult. This is fault of the "coding superhero" cult, where the only reason of bugs is "incompetence". The superhero cult also one of the reasons we have so little diversity in OSS developers...

incompetence

Posted Oct 10, 2015 8:54 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> where the only reason of bugs is "incompetence".

Whereas we all here know well that bugs result only from the incompetence of... some managers breathing down your neck until you "ship it!" as soon as it vaguely compiles :-)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 15, 2015 8:13 UTC (Thu) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link] (1 responses)

Blunt dismissals like that may work face-to-face when the person making such statements can directly monitor the reactions of his counterpart and when there is limited audience. However, here we are talking about a public thrashing without actually being able to see the reactions it causes and adapt to them.

Not being able to judge your counterpart's emotions and temper your own accordingly particularly in social interactions is a hallmark of several personality disorders like Asperger's syndrome. It tends to cause severe social frictions and makes life rather problematic for those who are afflicted.

In electronic media, everyone is handicapped like that, particularly when not even trying anticipatory empathy since the reactive empathy is far too late in order to keep the damage in check or at least to intended levels.

Smart people will try to lessen rather than increase the impact of being severely handicapped by the circumstances of communication.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 15, 2015 22:02 UTC (Thu) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link]

"Smart people will try to lessen rather than increase the impact of being severely handicapped by the circumstances of communication. "

Smart people 'temper' their reaction to incoming speech taking the same considerations into account..

It is bewildering how people, that claim to master 'empathy' so much, seem incapable of the most basic symmetry consideration of their arguments.

BTW, nice passive aggressive way to call people that disagree with you 'dumb'...

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 18:11 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> I get Linus's reaction against the notion that everything should have the veneer of professionalism. Maybe not to the extreme that he rails against it, but I am at least somewhat sympathetic.

All too often the veneer of professionalism is used to hide the crap underneath. So yes, Linus is spot on the money with that.

But to then use that as an excuse for not being professional? That's just one almighty unprofessional cop-out!

As was said - "Caesar's wife must not only BE above suspicion, she must be SEEN to be above suspicion". The *veneer* of professionalism is worse than useless, you must *be* professional.

Cheers,
Wol

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 18:01 UTC (Mon) by sorokin (guest, #88478) [Link] (18 responses)

> Everyone involved here agrees with Sarah that the environment includes personal attacks - including the attackers. They simply defend those attacks as somehow ok or desirable. Google should find you tons of examples but I'm too lazy to Google that for you. :-)

Actually I remember only one case: https://lwn.net/Articles/559061/ and I assumed that probably similar discussion have repeated again. I have googled and I have found nothing. So I assume that it's a continuation of this old story.

> Reconsider this kind of "please prove it to me" reaction in the future though: http://simplikation.com/why-sealioning-is-bad/
> The point of Sarah's post wasn't to prove something to bystanders.

Proving a point is very important. Without appropriate links, for a reader it looks like she want to look like a victim (while she is not), getting some publicity and make kernel community look bad (1). (sorry if this phrase is rude in some way, I don't know English very well to use correct euphemisms). With appropriate links, a reader could see that she was indeed offended/abused (2).

I don't see enough evidence for (2), so I'm inclined to believe in (1). But as everyone else seems to believe in (2), I assume that I just don't have enough information. That is why I asked for more links.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 21:09 UTC (Mon) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link] (14 responses)

Sorokin, you've googled? Really?

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Linus+Torwalds+rant

Try a few variations on that last keyword, say "abusive", "flame", etc. It doesn't take much effort to find many quotes from Linus where he asks people to kill themselves, or calls them idiots and full of bullshit.

As a bystander who isn't the target of such language it is perhaps easy to paint it all merely as a poor attempt by Torvalds to make some of his messages a bit more memorable. But try for one moment to imagine that you're a developer who's code will be scrutinized by Torvalds, and I'm sure you'll understand how unpleasant it is to be exposed to public humiliation on one of the most watched mailing lists in the world.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 22:57 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Agreed, and I'll go a step further: I find it unpleasant to watch even as as an uninvolved bystander. It doesn't hurt my sensibilities or send me into social justice mode, but it does make me tune out. Distasteful and boring.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 23:24 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (11 responses)

So... I found some Linus Torvalds rants.

As the owner of a software development company, I would fire someone who behaved that way in public to other developers, no matter how good a developer he or she was.

It's completely unnecessary to behave that way to produce good code. Plenty of other projects have far more congenial development environments and have high quality code. Maybe in 1991 it was amusing, but I really think in 2015 it's time for Linus and others to grow up.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 9:44 UTC (Tue) by ortalo (guest, #4654) [Link]

As I said previously, maybe it's not only growing up now, but also sharing the benefits of their work. Whatever the merits of major maintainers and past contributors they do not have a right to take more of a *share* of the current benefits generated by the kernel than newer or minor developers. Unless Linux has turned into a company that is.
As much as I would appreciate one who only swears by the command line; there is no need for another american software magnate in this world. Is all this "toughness" just an attitude or a way of preventing sharing the pie with foreigners or newcomers?
Sorry for raising the question, but everyone is so much into protecting its own assets and investments in the beginning of this century... Remember Keynes: in the long term...

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 12:25 UTC (Tue) by hitmark (guest, #34609) [Link] (5 responses)

That page seems to limit themselves to showcasing only the "naughty" lines, and fail to present the context etc that preceded the rants.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 14:30 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (4 responses)

Maybe, but I cannot think of any circumstance under which I would tolerate an employee going on such public rants. It's just childish and rude behavior.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 14:50 UTC (Tue) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link] (3 responses)

I'd not talk like that, and I'd have problems accepting some of those directed towards me (and obviously also others). But maintaining a one-sided character assassination page isn't exactly proper behaviour either.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 19:43 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes, maintaining a page of rants is slightly unfair. But it's par for the course, especially if you're a celebrity (which Linus Torvalds is in our little world.) We're in the middle of an election campaign in Canada and several candidates have been brought down by people digging up embarrassing Twitter or Facebook posts from their past. That's just how it works.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 20:22 UTC (Tue) by andresfreund (subscriber, #69562) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't find the status quo, especially not politics, a good argument here. Otherwise there'd be no need to discuss the communication style in communities either.

Most of the examples where Linus lashes out I in a totally over the top manner, seem to be in cases where the code of conduct *he*sees as a given is violated. Asking for a merge of non compiling or completely broken code, arguing for breakaging userspace, sidestepping procedures and so on. It often seems line both sides of this discussion don't try to understand the other.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 2:47 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

That's fine, but if Linus wants to lash out in that way he should compose the email and then delete it. Or at most send it to the person he's mad at. Not publish it on a public mailing list.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 17:57 UTC (Tue) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (1 responses)

"http://*.aspx"
enough said...

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 15:21 UTC (Wed) by jubal (guest, #67202) [Link]

How does the file extension invalidate the content?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 15:39 UTC (Wed) by Kamilion (subscriber, #42576) [Link] (1 responses)

Part of the way I see it, there is nobody who has risen to the position to be able to take the position of chief maintainer from Linus. As far as I know, he's said he'd give it up if someone was worthy of carrying the torch. And, well, it *IS* his project, despite all the contributions from hundreds of thousands of people across the world. Putting him out doesn't seem quite right either.

One of the reasons I work for myself is because I'd probably get fired for how I talk about some of the opinions I hold. (Mostly against oracle.)

[07:14:55] <====> ----- there is corruption in the MySQL database, attempts to repair are ongoing. I'm waiting on an update from ++++++ as to how he's getting on with it.
[07:16:26] <Kamilion> too bad postgresql isn't supported more widely :<
[07:17:20] <Kamilion> ever since I converted years ago, I've either not noticed problems, or just had so few that they aren't flagged in memory...
[07:17:47] <Kamilion> versus having to remember far too many hairy days fighting with mysql
[07:18:05] <====> Kamilion: had we known of the w-p issue, steps would have been taken. It's the 1st time I've had a MySQL dbase go sick in over 5 years.
[07:18:09] <Kamilion> and two years of the pain of Oracle Enterprise Database
[07:18:24] <Kamilion> I still cringe when I remember most of that
[07:19:37] <Kamilion> a hundred thousand man-hours of pointless boilerplate because some chump thought that being super extra mega explicit was the better way to go. And then someone else decided later, oop, nope, not good enough, let's do the same thing with a 2 at the end.
[07:19:54] <Kamilion> and thus, was born, the bane of my existence... datetime2
[07:20:22] <Kamilion> a million years of pain, conflict, and torment on the mind who inflicted this upon other human beings
[07:21:33] <Kamilion> just knowing of it's dark power brings sorrow and regret to all who hear of it (because they have to listen to me whinge about it in long-form)

Frankly, I'd much rather remove the influence of commercial software's make-work attitude that has resulted in such overspecified solutions as CORBA, Java, and XML.

To illustrate my point:
Here is a new python script:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import antigravity

And here is a new java project:
https://github.com/making/spring-boot-blank

As a developer, I can demonstrate an opinion that I clearly prefer the former over the latter. There *WILL* be people out there that will demonstrate the opposing opinion.
Arguments will be held, drinks will be thrown, sharp words exchanged, and among men, fisticuffs to the floor or first blood.

I simply cannot imagine a female persona that would equate software development with a barfight. It would not even occur to them as a last thought, let alone a first. The mere association between the two would be a concept as foreign to them as the myriad of uses woolite has for hosiery cleaning to a male persona.

I fear the issue has a far deeper-seated cultural mismatch between participants than the surface appears. The log trapped under fifty feet of murky lake water, itching to catch your anchor. If it's not causing a tangle *right now* it's easily overlooked until it's got you, and just as easily ignored once again after you've gotten untangled.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 20:55 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

> Part of the way I see it, there is nobody who has risen to the position to be able to take the position of chief maintainer from Linus.

"Risen"? That word could be exposing your prejudices.
Where I come from, the key role of a leader is to support the workers, enable them to get the work done, lift them up when they fall down, support them so they don't trip.
Seeing a leader at the "top" of a pyramid is such an unhelpful picture.

Leadership is certainly an important role, but not necessarily more important than any other.
Leadership is also a specialist role. It is harder to replace a leader than some other roles, but not all.

I suspect there are a number of people who could step into Linus' shoes if they were vacated. Each would bring a different set of strengths - certainly not the same strengths as Linus, but probably not the same weaknesses either.

But as Linus' shoes are not vacated, there are no candidates pressing for the job (and if there were, we probably would reject them for that reason).

> I simply cannot imagine a female persona that would equate software development with a barfight.

I've never had doubts about my gender before ... but maybe I'm a bit female.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 12, 2015 2:14 UTC (Mon) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link]

I can't help but notice this rhetorical behaviour of the anti-Torvalds mob. Asked for evidence, a concrete reference to the public communication by which the condemners formed their opinion, what do they answer? "Go search for it yourself." "It's generally agreed." "The lurkers all support me in E-mail." Might as well ask us to go convince ourselves, or to keep lowering a threshold of complaint until the conclusion matches.

It's not as though a convincing answer were difficult to provide. It'll be at the minimum a hyperlink, for crying out loud; copy and paste from the browser's URL bar, basic post-1984 GUI skills required. Surely some activist or another will have written the argument out in full on some wiki or another, by now? It's been two years already.

This suggests that the evidence doesn't exist, and that the current re-heating of the "depose that awful fire-breathing Torvalds" campaign has an even greater portion of hot air to reason for complaint than the previous. If this is true, then it's sad that all they can muster are some bargain-basement distortions, in themselves debunkable with a brief trawl through the LKML archives.[0] However it's (slightly) disturbing to see various tech media swallow and regurgitate the provided narrative hook-line-and-sinker: these are questions which they could've asked as well (and it'd be nice to quote something properly cut-and-dried, right?), were it not for their fear of seeming heretic to the pitchforks-and-torches of Twitter.

I argue that the preceding is indeed the case. My evidence is that all was quiet on that front until this latest pair of ragequits; and that therefore all that's actually going on is the raging, and quitting, of a shrill but well-connected minority.

[0] like that "dicksucking contest" one where it's clearly seen advantageous[1] to point to "blue language"[2] over its justification, namely that the justification for merging was a variation of "security interest trumps all", and that the submitter had been previously accused of "doubling down on fear". But who's going to justify a good moral conclusion, these days?
[1] to an incredibly minute degree[2]
[2] what's this anyway, pre-school?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 0:31 UTC (Tue) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

She isn't trying to prove anything to you or any other innocent bystander. Her post was directed at a very select group of people that know exactly what's going on and what she has a problem with and who opposed fixing it. LWN reported on it because a significant portion of LWN users are participants and directly involved.

You are an outsider looking in, it's a bit rude to demand backup from a discussion you aren't even a participant in. I'll never understand an attitude that just because you read something about it on the internet that you are somehow now part of the conversation with the need that the author now justify and backup their statements to you.

As others have said it's not hard to find bad stuff on LKML, just search google for linux kernel mailing list and flame or various bad words and variations of flame. There are literally hundreds of examples and some very choice ones from Linus himself. Linus has done it often enough that he's publicly known for it.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 12:30 UTC (Tue) by hitmark (guest, #34609) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't get why she raised a stink there. The initial quote include a winking smiley, indicating that the line was said in jest. As such, the responses seem, at least to me, to be some friends joking back and forth. At best her response can be akin to a comedy scene where someone walk in on something and get the wrong sense. But as the quotes provide context, that seems improbable. All in all the reaction seem way out of proportions to what was going on.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 15, 2015 9:09 UTC (Thu) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link]

When you communicate in public, you communicate in public. If you want to use private code, communicate in private.

When our family meetings (4 siblings) started to include newly gained partners/inlaws, they tended to be very on edge since they thought we were going to crank out the knives any minute. We were habitually calling each other the sort of things we called each other when growing up.

It was a very stressful environment for the newcomers and "that's just the way we talk" did not really make it all that much more tolerable. So we had to adapt.

In the case of LKML we are talking about a globally published discussion group with people from a much more diverse background than our extended family. It seems sort of obvious that this kind of common sense for leading a public discussion would apply even more here.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 17:01 UTC (Mon) by buda (guest, #81839) [Link] (12 responses)

it is a major shame for the free software community .
I did not think there were so many sexist developers

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 17:27 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (9 responses)

point out the sexist comments that drover her away.

As I understand it, the comments she objected to were not sexist, but the less-than-perfectly-polite comments when responding to bad code (Linus' rants being the poster children of such things)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 17:33 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (8 responses)

In fact, her post refers to:

> The focus on technical excellence, in combination with overloaded maintainers, and people with different cultural and social norms, means that Linux kernel maintainers are often blunt, rude, or brutal to get their job done. Top Linux kernel developers often yell at each other in order to correct each other’s behavior.
>
> That’s not a communication style that works for me. I need communication that is technically brutal but personally respectful. I need people to correct my behavior when I’m doing something wrong (either technically or socially) without tearing me down as a person. We are human. We make mistakes, and we correct them. We get frustrated with someone, we over-react, and then we apologize and try to work together towards a solution.
>
> I would prefer the communication style within the Linux kernel community to be more respectful. I would prefer that maintainers find healthier ways to communicate when they are frustrated. I would prefer that the Linux kernel have more maintainers so that they wouldn’t have to be terse or blunt.

there are no references to any posts tearing her down as a person, and from watching the kernel list for just under two decades now, I think such posts are very rare, and more frequently misinterpreting the post by the person who feels like they are being torn down.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 18:24 UTC (Mon) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (5 responses)

Talk about blaming the victim.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 19:03 UTC (Mon) by jmichels (guest, #98352) [Link] (4 responses)

Who is blaming the victim? Can you explain your comment in more detail?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 22:57 UTC (Mon) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (3 responses)

dlang essentially said "if somebody feels they're being abused and/or harassed, they're misinterpreting what has been said". How is that *not* blaming the victim?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 13:29 UTC (Tue) by jmichels (guest, #98352) [Link]

Maybe I am missing something here, but I don't see him saying that in any of the comments you are replying to. Are you sure you are replying in the right place?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 18:24 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> dlang essentially said "if somebody feels they're being abused and/or harassed, they're misinterpreting what has been said". How is that *not* blaming the victim?

Well, unfortunately, far too often when somebody (claims to) feels abused or harrassed, it's the mark of a professional mischief maker :-( (Otherwise known as the Politically Correct Brigade).

Yes, there ARE a fair few cases where offense is given when none is intended, but a little grown-up discussion should solve that. (I originally wrote "adult" rather than grown-up, but that could be misunderstood :-)

The difficulty is telling the difference between the victims where offense is given, and the trouble-makers where offense is taken. But in BOTH cases, I would actually say that blaming the "victim" is often the correct response ... in the trouble-maker case that's obviously the correct response. In the genuine victim case, the victim may well be over-sensitive. And then of course the problem is when the offender, although not intending offense, doesn't care about spraying offense wherever it may land ... :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 10, 2015 0:44 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> Well, unfortunately, far too often when somebody (claims to) feels abused or harrassed, it's the mark of a professional mischief maker :-( (Otherwise known as the Politically Correct Brigade).

I think this has some merit but in reality the PC Brigade who create the most mischief tend to be the ones protecting and protected by the status quo, who claim to be offended if anyone challenges their ideas or status, as this derails the conversation especially among those who reflexively seek a false balance as they don't seem to want to make qualitative judgements about who is right and who is wrong and believe that "both sides must do it", helping the person who's ideas are being challenged and hurting the challenger.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 18:40 UTC (Mon) by alvieboy (guest, #51617) [Link] (1 responses)

Honestly, I see nothing unusual on any LKML post that addresses her differently from anyone else.

She just feels uncomfortable, but that I think it's not related to she being a woman.

As far as it concerns me, despite being more than technically able to contribute to Linux Kernel, I chose many years ago not to. Perhaps for the same reasons she now leaves - it's a harsh environment.

Equality of treatment is that. Everyone is treated equal, independently of sex, race, culture, so on.

Now, if Linus (example) would treat her nicely and not treat Greg-KH (example again) the same way, just because she's a woman and her posture as woman (not as herself) would be the cause, that would be discrimination.

However, different people need to be addressed and handled in different ways - but again this relates to the person way of being, not to sex, culture and so on.

Alvie

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 14:43 UTC (Wed) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

>Now, if Linus (example) would treat her nicely and not treat Greg-KH (example again) the same way, just because she's a woman and her posture as woman (not as herself) would be the cause, that would be discrimination.

Presuming that she needs special/gentle treatment because she's female is definitely sexist. Giving her special/gentle treatment because she asks for it is being polite.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 15, 2015 9:15 UTC (Thu) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link] (1 responses)

There are not enough women on the LKML to make sexism even worthwhile. Too few targets. She was rather put off by the acrimonious lumberjack communication style employed by some developers against others. Almost all of those communications by statistic necessity being male-male.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 21, 2015 19:14 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Your claim that sexism doesn't happen in environments where there are a lot of men and few women is hilarious and more or less entirely 100% wrong, sorry. Hint: you can be sexist even when you're not directly addressing a woman.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 17:07 UTC (Mon) by JMB (guest, #74439) [Link] (1 responses)

This situation can not be totally avoided - but maybe one can learn to improve it further.

As a former scientist I prefer clear words and hate diplomatic tactics.
On the other hand, I did never intend to insult someone personally - even when I clearly
say that he/she is wrong - and under according circumstances even that he/she lies.
As a teacher I asked a few times students (later - face to face) if they feel insulted by
jokes or remarks I made - which in reflection may be misunderstood - and if they wish my
regrets repeated in public - and fortunately {for not having insulted, of cause} were told
every time that they did not feel insulted. I hope that this was true ... one may never know
for sure. And of cause I avoid similar situations to those which just happened.
Emotionally but analytically correctly telling people about problems was several times
recognized as rant ... which I have never understood ... but one may never understand
both sides - especially when one has chosen one personally. ;-)

The hard scenarios which really made Sarah Sharp closing the door and writing the blog
are not clear to me - I was never a hacker but followed kernel mailings since 1994 ...
(later LKML mostly even on daily basis - for curiosity).
I can understand both sides here - but if someone has the feeling not to get personal respect
and talks to others - well, there should be people understanding, helping, trying to change
something ... behind closed doors at least. This seems to not have happened successfully,
which is a pity.

One can get the remark to be too empathic / sensible / thin-skinned.
Actually I am in a quite similar situation in two fields and really do think of a departure;
both are occupations which are coming from my heart - so it is no easy going - but the pressure
is high enough to possibly come soon to that final decision, too.
I hope people losing energy in one field get enough from another one to stay healthy -
when this is not clear/sure closing a door is just survival tactics and necessary.
No one should say anything negative about that - even if he/she can not understand the depicted
point of view. Struggling for correct behavior in both respects is just ... human.
Maybe our respected editor means something around that line in his 1st comment here.

Actually, I don't think code quality is everything - but of cause extremely important.
I am more on the freedom side than on the enough eyeballs side. :)
And who may have a notion who many people are lost/gained by changing the way to communicate?
This is a personal matter and should only be regulated when necessary.
But yes, a code of conduct should include examples which are regarded by most/all as not being
acceptable and commonly agreed upon avoiding those ... shouldn't it?

This news bit is personal - the other things happened in the past unnoticed ... so:
Her work is important and should be continued similarly ...
I just hope she will receive the energy she needs to do whatever is fulfilling - and that
this case improves the situation for others someday.
Nothing else matters.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 14:56 UTC (Tue) by JMB (guest, #74439) [Link]

Matthew Garrett seems to look for distance with LKML, too:
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/38136.html
And for the similar reasons ...
Improving that situation may be a good idea for those
being in such an internal position.
Hoping the best ...

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 18:34 UTC (Mon) by jmichels (guest, #98352) [Link] (13 responses)

Personally, I like the Linux kernel team's bluntness. I am sorry it does not appeal to some people. I respect their right to feel the way they do. I hope they respect my right to feel the way I do.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 21:17 UTC (Mon) by petkan (subscriber, #54713) [Link] (7 responses)

The Internet is not for sissies. I would just s/Internet/Kernel/ ;)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 21:41 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (4 responses)

Ah. If you're not someone who likes being insulted, you should sod off and leave one of the largest communication networks ever built to the jerks? Really?

That's quite an arrogant attitude.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 10:34 UTC (Tue) by petkan (subscriber, #54713) [Link] (3 responses)

The Internet and the Linux kernel are both made by humans. The result is far from perfect, but that's the reality.

I do like the way the kernel community work. I am submitting patches and maintaining drivers for seventeen years now and one of the reasons why i am still doing it is that i can speak my mind at the LKML. In my universe code quality is supreme to "bad" language. "Bad" is _always_ a matter of personal perspective. Or a cultural thing. Not all of us live in the USA and share the view of "political correctness". More often i see the latter as pure and utter hypocrisy. I don't like it when somebody tries to shove "better" rules down my throat. "Better" is also a matter of perspective. ;)

The Linux kernel community is built by volunteers. This community has it's own peculiarities. You either accept these or try to change them to your liking. Sarah's attempt to change those failed. Now she's leaving. I say this is the natural course of things. No drama.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 20:27 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

> "Better" is also a matter of perspective. ;)

insults are not always obvious in the word choice either.

see what "bless your heart" can mean when voiced by a southern gentlewoman.

Personally, I much prefer the open and frank discussions of LKML to the politely voiced backbiting I've seen in other places (including inside companies). In my opinion, the LKML approach is far less damaging in the long run.

And yes, I have been on the receiving end of Linus snapping.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 14:23 UTC (Wed) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] (1 responses)

I propose a simple test: if one would dare to say the same comment to an angry Mike Tyson face to face, then it's appropriate to use it in a mailing list. Otherwise it's not.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 18:40 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Not a good test: In that case I suppose I would not dare rejecting his patch at all.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 13:02 UTC (Tue) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link]

So what do we sissies do with our code?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 15:26 UTC (Wed) by jubal (guest, #67202) [Link]

A few questions:

• What do you mean by saying “internet is not for sissies”?
• What does “sissy” mean?
• Why did you use this particular word?
• Why do you think internet should not be used by people who you'd call “sissies”?

Thanks in advance.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 21:48 UTC (Mon) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (1 responses)

You can be direct without making personal attacks, and you can require people to defend their code without making them feel unwelcome.

And you can feel however you like; your actions based on those feelings, however, may not be welcome in communities that wish to create a better environment for everyone involved.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 2:50 UTC (Tue) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link]

" may not be welcome in communities that wish to create a better environment for everyone involved."

the 'for everyone involved' meme is getting old...
it is obviously _not_ better for _everyone_ involved.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 1:14 UTC (Tue) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (2 responses)

If by bluntness you mean pointless profanity and rants that do not add any clarity to a technical discussion, you have an odd definition of honest analysis.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 17:09 UTC (Tue) by jmichels (guest, #98352) [Link] (1 responses)

If by honest analyst you mean enforcing your opinion about how another person and I choose to communicate with each other, you have an odd definition of diversity.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 15, 2015 9:19 UTC (Thu) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link]

You don't communicate "with each other". That would be private Email. You debate on a globally accessible public discussion forum.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 21:28 UTC (Mon) by alvieboy (guest, #51617) [Link] (10 responses)

> "allowed to get away with subtle sexist or homophobic jokes"

Any concrete pointers on these ones ?

I understand those may have been private - I'm still trying to figure out whether Sarah has a point or not. I was not able to see such jokes so far (I did not search much, to be honest). The jokes I saw were... usual jokes between guys who know themselves well, and completely innocuous.

I wonder if Sarah is a follower of LWN, and if she can enlighten us on this matter. If you are, please note that we are not with you, not are we against you. We're just trying to get a clearer view of how this came to this end.

Alvie

Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels

Posted Oct 6, 2015 2:57 UTC (Tue) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (9 responses)

A friend who went to Google and no longer contributes to open source says that internally they joke that "Google's entire technical staff could be summarized as 'people who'd been burned out of Open Source'". This is consistent with my observations: we've lost a lot of good people over the years who simply no longer want to put up with the nasty attitudes they have to deal with.

Relatedly, I hope next year LWN can send someone to cover the new Open Source and Feelings conference - their agenda. That's a challenging, but appealing, vision of what open source communities can and should be. (My own thoughts on it here.)

Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels

Posted Oct 6, 2015 2:58 UTC (Tue) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link]

(doh, didn't mean this as a response - obviously non-responsive to Alvie's question, though I did somewhat respond up-thread.)

Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels

Posted Oct 6, 2015 13:01 UTC (Tue) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (1 responses)

"Open Source and Feelings"

No, that's too far a pendular counterswing.

Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels

Posted Oct 8, 2015 14:28 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I suspect you're just going by the conference name. The talks look sensible to me.

Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels

Posted Oct 6, 2015 20:01 UTC (Tue) by graydon (guest, #5009) [Link] (5 responses)

Fwiw the main factor pushing me away from further contribution to FOSS is the culture. Not the difficulty of the work, not the unrewarding nature of the bugs or anything. Just the people and their hostility, arrogance, dismissiveness, insularity and defensiveness. I try to continue to contribute, but the overall culture is (and has been for as long as I remember) the limiting factor in my willingness to engage. It infects me when I have contact with it -- I become a meaner, more argumentative, more anxious, pickier and less generous version of myself -- and it poisons the joy I'd otherwise find in the activity. I wind up ashamed to have anything to do with it, looking for other pass-times, other social groups.

I know lots and lots of people who are good programmers who used to enjoy the community but have similarly burnt out, left, resigned themselves to programming only for pay. It's very painful for a lot of people.

Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels

Posted Oct 7, 2015 15:48 UTC (Wed) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (4 responses)

Do you find that FOSS development communities per se are different with respect to hostility etc. from other types of online communities (forums/blogs/magazines/chans/social*/etc.)? Is it the onlineness or the FOSSness that you think is a attracts stronger repulsors?

Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels

Posted Oct 7, 2015 17:26 UTC (Wed) by graydon (guest, #5009) [Link] (2 responses)

I think FOSS communities have frequently been epicentres of setting norms for online discourse. They interact with several other online cultures (gamers, infosec people, chans, bloggers), and of course silicon valley libertarian culture. Possibly these days reddit is the biggest epicentre; but its norms grow from the same roots, and there's substantial cross-pollination.

The connecting thread is a sort of radical-honesty / tough-love idea, that by sufficient amounts of transparency, "honest competition", argument and conflict, one will arrive at a good/just/true/ideal outcome. That freedom to speak one's mind is the #1 most important priority in all circumstances, and that any suggestion to the contrary -- that one speak carefully, choose words in a way that's aware of consequences, consider other people's feelings, etc. -- is equivalent to being rounded up and sent to a prison camp by the thought police. That it obscures truth and harms progress.

What actually happens when this weird social-darwinist "virtue through conflict" norm governs a group is that weaker and more vulnerable people feel too hurt, exhausted and attacked to participate, and even those who have the energy to participate waste a lot of it in defensive status-arguments over non-issues, and the meanest, loudest, most persistent or merely most verbose people eventually come to dominate discourse. It produces very distorted goods, very approximate truths, very non-ideal outcomes.

I'm writing this as an honest attempt to answer the question. This is the only response I'm going to post. I've discussed this sort of thing with you enough in the past to be wary, but it's been a while and maybe, just maybe, this time it'll be heard and not turn into a sealioning session where you demand evidence and try to argue me out of it. This is the impression I have. I've been in the community 20 years. I stay on the edges because of this. If you want to not believe it, it'll be better for you to just chalk it up to me having a morbid and defeatist personality than engaging in further argument.

Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels

Posted Oct 9, 2015 5:45 UTC (Fri) by da4089 (subscriber, #1195) [Link] (1 responses)

Let's assume there's a substantial number of the potential FOSS developer pool who feel that the dominant cultures of FOSS projects are overly hostile.

Is there something preventing these like minded, technically capable people from building their own communities? Or is it that any such nascent community becomes infected by those with a more aggressive communication style? Is it just too draining to constantly try to tame (or eject) those individuals who do disrupt?

I ask, because if this was a technical issue, the solution would be to fork. But having forked, I guess it takes a bunch of work to maintain the distinction?

Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels

Posted Oct 9, 2015 15:56 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

I think this is a real danger: "any such nascent community becomes infected by those with a more aggressive communication style."

I think the reason that people don't generally go on rants in corporate environments is that you're usually face-to-face with your coworkers. Even people who telecommute occasionally have face-to-face interaction and more often phone or video conferences.

It's a lot harder to be an asshole to someone in person. In a development environment where most people hardly ever see any of their collaborators, the weakness of email as a communication mechanism really hurts: You can't see people's body language and fights tend to escalate instead of being damped down by conciliatory body language or natural inhibition when one sees one is upsetting someone else.

Two related bits: Google staff and OSFeels

Posted Oct 7, 2015 20:06 UTC (Wed) by Nelson (subscriber, #21712) [Link]

It has been my experience that FOSS is thankless. Lot's of people have opinions on how things should be, but few help out. (Check out nearly any systemd discussion anywhere for a good example.. not just do people have opinions but the personal attacks there are appalling.) You hear all the complaints about something not being how they want it but relatively little help comes in. People generally have myopia for their own needs and disregard the greater community. People will sell and profit from the code of others but the kick backs to the original authors is rare, that won't stop the demands from coming though. The rare contributors want to contribute on their terms and be treated like they're wonderful because they're contributing to your project, your terms and needs be damned, no matter how clear they are spelled out.. Linus' behavior isn't new, I'm not going to defend it because I don't like the way he says some things (because of the profanity mostly,) but he's the king of being on the receiving end of it all. You have no idea how many times someone has "fixed the scheduler" by just depositing some stupid patch that doesn't even follow the code formatting guidelines...

LKML has profanity, there are plenty of inside jokes, I've seen tons of code shredded there but I don't think it's usually personal, that's not the norm. Different people see and hear different things differently. I don't think much of it is personal, but some do, no question about it. You have to extend yourself some to contribute, you take some risk and there is a good chance you will fail. They'll tell you why and how to fix it though, but I can see some folks taking that failure as personal. It's pretty clearly not a supportive culture that promotes growth and it's pretty clearly something that some folks find toxic.

The original blog poster had another post that suggested Linus was advocating violence when he was pretty clearly joking. I don't know if that was just a misunderstanding or something else, it seemed pretty obvious that it was a joke. I may be a jerk for this, but I feel that finding a culture as toxic or even finding it abusive (I guess if someone uses profanity or all caps when they talk/email with you, some could consider that abusive..) is a very very different accusation than sexism, racism, or homophobia. Maybe it's splitting hairs and it probably doesn't matter that much when you're on the receiving end or feel that your receiving it. It seems like it should be pretty easy to demonstrate the sexism or homophobia though, and I'm fairly confident that the greater kernel hacker community wouldn't tolerate it. Honestly, for all its warts and issues, I don't think most kernel maintainers would tolerate it if any maintainer denied patches for any non-technical reasons. Maybe I'm mistaken but can anyone point to any examples of that?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 12:58 UTC (Tue) by lkundrak (subscriber, #43452) [Link] (1 responses)

Let me take this opportunity to thank the LKML crowd for being great.

I don't interact with kernel opportunity too often and on the couple of occasions I've submitted my drivers or fixes to mainline I've largely enjoyed it. My contributions were far from perfect but still I've been treated with respect and got perfect feedback and help. And as a free software developer who is used to sometimes being ridiculed in discussion forums and getting feedback I harsher than deserved I value being treated with respect very much.

Not sure if this is specific to the subsystems (arm/rpi tree, v4l, networking) or maintainers I've interacted with but it's been a pleasurable experience, much unlike what I've heard Sarah complain about. I'm sorry she felt the need to slam the door shut when closing it and probably can understand why she felt need to do that but I feel it's just unfair to all the wonderful people around Linux to depict the community as stereotypically unfriendly.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 13:25 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> I don't interact with kernel opportunity too often and on the couple of occasions I've submitted my drivers or fixes to mainline I've largely enjoyed it. My contributions were far from perfect but still I've been treated with respect and got perfect feedback and help. And as a free software developer who is used to sometimes being ridiculed in discussion forums and getting feedback I harsher than deserved I value being treated with respect very much.

This largely mirrors my experience with LKML too. Oh, some of my code was utterly shredded (one of those messages ended up as an LWN QOTW), but the feedback was always relevant and constructive, and never directed at me personally.

That said, the first time I popped up on LKML I was a bit of a smart-ass and deservedly got smacked for it...

(Ironically, LKML is already one of the most diverse development environments you'll come across...)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 19:48 UTC (Tue) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (8 responses)

On 27th February this year, the "Code of Conflict" was merged.

Have there been any incidents worth mentioning (or any at all) since then? I'm not aware of any, but then I don't pay very close attention.

While it is hard to let go of past hurts (particularly when no apology is forth coming), maybe it is time to put our past behind us and look to the future. After all, grudges are like babies.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 22:09 UTC (Tue) by andreasn1 (guest, #88420) [Link] (7 responses)

I stumbled upon this (via twitter) from last month, and it stood out to me as a bit unnecessarily rough:
"Christ, people. Learn C, instead of just stringing random characters
together until it compiles (with warnings)."

https://lkml.org/lkml/2015/9/3/428

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 22:46 UTC (Tue) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (6 responses)

Thanks for the link.

Linus goes on to say

> So I can see how this bug happened, and I am only slightly upset with Lorenzo who is the author of that commit.

and it is very quickly revealed that while gcc-5.1.1 gives a warning, gcc-4.9.2 doesn't.

So that attack from Linus, which you quoted, seems to be an emotional response which seems to not be justified by the facts, and is an accusation of much more incompetence than the evidence shows even in the most extreme interpretation ("just stringing random characters together").

I agree that is uncool.

Does the "Code of conflict" help us here? It only triggers if someone feels "personally abused, threatened, or otherwise uncomfortable". I wonder how Lorenzo felt. Apparently someone felt enough about it in some way to tweet it.
Is it worth a formal complaint from someone to test the process?
Would it be appropriate for the TAB to approach people involved in the conversation to check if they felt "personally abused, threatened, or otherwise uncomfortable" rather than just leaving it up to the individuals to raise the issue?
(maybe they already have and everyone is happy)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 2:29 UTC (Thu) by djbw (subscriber, #78104) [Link]

The "code of conflict" is simply the wrong polarity of burden compared to a "code of conduct". You can point someone who is being abusive to a code of conduct and say "please stop". Otherwise, you're expressly telling the recipient of abusive behavior "put up with it until it rises to the point of injury that you feel you need to involve a disinterested third party to mediate". I submit no one will ever meet that threshold before simply moving on to another project.

I'm less concerned with long standing kernel developers being abusive to each other compared to the observers of those interactions. My anecdotal experience is that these observers of violence on LKML go on to emulate it thinking "that's how you command respect and get your way". They completely miss the point that the respect and "getting your way" comes from a proven track record of being almost always correct from a technical perspective.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 18:43 UTC (Thu) by mgross (guest, #38112) [Link] (4 responses)

I just read that post. I see nothing wrong with it and I'm rather impressed with the amount of effort put into the email to explain things and educate people on things that are important.

Does anyone honestly think we would be better off if he just replied-all with a "please check your compiler warnings"?

I don't.

BTW I think CoC's are Marxist "right-think" tools of censorship and CoC supporters are either confused, evil or both.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 23:16 UTC (Thu) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

Indeed, the post has many excellent qualities. After all these years Linus is still passionate about the kernel and the quality of code. It's good to see.

It is just unfortunate that it is spoiled by an irrational and unjustified accusation of extreme and deliberate incompetence.

Had Linus, on proof-reading before posting, simply deleted the line about "stringing random characters
together until it compiles" it would have done nothing to reduce the effectiveness of the email, and much to reduce the possibility of it causing harm.

I understand that Linus believes that the passion he displays is an important part of his communication style, and he may well be correct. There is a very simple rule that allows you to maintain emotional passion, but avoid (or substantially reduce) the risk of harm:

Make "I" statements, not "you" statements.

"I can't believe I still get patches which add new warnings"

This is only one line in an otherwise very productive email. But it is unarguably attacking "people" (and by implication one or two specific people) rather than attacking the code. And "attack code, not people" seems to be an informal code-of-conduct that is largely agreed too.

> BTW I think CoC's are Marxist "right-think" tools of censorship...

I'm a little surprised that you are agreeing to use the same language as the rest of us - I'm sure it restricts your ability to think freely....
FWIW, I think CoC's are useful tool for unambiguous communication of group norms. It is intrinsic in the human condition that we sacrifice individual freedom to benefit from group support. In situations where body language cannot communicate/mediate those norms, a CoC can help.

Sharp: Closing a door (on the Marxist right)

Posted Oct 10, 2015 1:12 UTC (Sat) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (1 responses)

> BTW I think CoC's are Marxist "right-think" tools of censorship and CoC supporters are either confused, evil or both.

I kept thinking about this ... partly because I wasn't really happy with my flippant response (sorry), partly because seeing "Marxist" and "right" in the same sentence seems odd, but mostly because I need something to think about as I cycle around the bay.

I guess your reference to "Marxist" draws a parallel with the contrast between a controlled economy and a free market. Having a Code of Conduct is a bit like a controlled economy - you are only allow to do that which is within the rules. You, I presume, would prefer a more free-market approach where people can say what they like but must suffer the consequences.

While the free-market has a lot of strengths, it has requirements that are not always met - particularly various freedoms and transparencies. There are some edge cases where it doesn't work at all, such as fly-by-night confidence tricksters and monopolies. Most (all?) free markets still have regulation to try to avoid the worst excesses of these.

In the kernel community, a senior maintainer - and particularly Linus - has an effective monopoly. The result is that market forces don't really work ... or they work by people leaving the community and going to work in some other project which isn't healthy for the kernel community.

So people suggest the Marxist controlled economy of a Code of Conduct. Is that the only way?

One idea I came across a while ago that applies to leadership teams is "Ask for forgiveness, not permission". The idea is that if all the team members keep having to ask permission to do things, nothing much gets done. If instead they are given freedom to follow their own ideas, with the understanding that forgiveness can be negotiated if things go wrong, then the net result is much more positive.

Applying that to the kernel community, I imagine the community as a whole being the source of permission or forgiveness, and the individual kernel maintainers (from Linus out toward the fringes) being the team members who might mess up occasionally and so might need permission in advance, or forgiveness after the fact.

A CoC promotes the "You need permission first" approach and maybe that it a good reason to reject it (in the context of a smallish community of maintainers - it may be more appropriate else where).

So how would the "ask for forgiveness" approach apply? It would mean that team members who (whether through carelessness or malice) harm the community (or part of the community) would need to acknowledge the harm and seek forgiveness, and the community should be ready to forgive.

A lot of the infractions that are mentioned in these discussions are from years ago. This suggests the community is not eager to forgive. But then there has been little or no acknowledgement of harm (not even "I don't see how what I said was hurtful, but I can see that you are hurt, and I'm sorry for that hurt whatever its cause") or requests for forgiveness.

Are we, as a community, capable of compassion? Capable of acknowledging we may be complicit in some hurt? Capable of seeking and providing forgiveness? Or do we drive away all the people with those abilities?

Sharp: Closing a door (on the Marxist right)

Posted Oct 11, 2015 17:11 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Just a note to say that analysis like this is why I still read LWN comments, despite their increasingly cesspoolish nature. If LWN had an adaptive scorefile you'd be at or near the top :)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 10, 2015 3:16 UTC (Sat) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

> CoC supporters are either confused, evil or both.

Add 'desperate'? In the past six months the Atom editor community grew faster than the stewards could keep up. I'd guess that the leaders felt like they needed to do something and do it fast. Their first choice blew up in their face (IMO rightfully so), but the second one seems pretty harmless.

Maybe this falls under 'confused.'

In general, I agree: CoCs end up getting gamed by trolls, encouraging SJWs, and causing way WAY too much useless discussion. But it's a very real problem that they're trying to solve, and they're among the very few tools that project leaders can turn to. If you have a workable alternative, I'm sure a lot of people would be interested.

Linus: tone on LKML

Posted Oct 6, 2015 20:25 UTC (Tue) by nicku (subscriber, #777) [Link]

My un-edited notes from Linus's Q&A session at LCA this year:

Question: Tone on mailing list is nasty; why?

Answer:

Not a nice person, care about technology, about the kernel, but not about you!

Only thing agree on are technical issues. Non-technical issues become important, ensures never agree.

People differ in what they agree on,

Love arguing, not want to bow down to others,

I would suggest that argument does not require being nasty.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 13:54 UTC (Thu) by msnitzer (guest, #57232) [Link] (1 responses)

Having been flamed for the first (and hopefully last) time by Linus a few weeks ago I can honestly say he can skew too far towards personal insult and belittling in his quest for finding the truth about the question/problem/debate of the day. He can be very shifty too. If you know, and he knows, he was subtle in his insult but that the insult was there he'll not own it. He acts like nothing happened; makes you out to be crazy if you seize on the insult. But he is human and is capable of having a bad day. Given his status, if he has a bad day it makes for news stories. That in and of itself is a really difficult thing to deal with.

In the end, Linus _is_ the life-blood of Linux. He _is_ right far more often than he is wrong. He just lacks all the social graces we wish he had once he is flaming us.. ;) I was rocked a bit by having been flamed but I got over it. But to do so I ignored the original problem that started it all (slab caches being shared across every subsystem). The more controversial the proposal/action the more justified you must be with hard proof to justify yourself. I couldn't be bothered to care enough about this issue to take on 1) Linus with all his defenses up 2) hunting down all the fine-grained justification needed to justify my position. So in the end Linus did his job (filtered out a half-baked change that would've impacted the entire kernel) and I harbor no resentment towards him. He has a tough job and he needs people to fall in line. Along the way he _could_ be kinder and gentler about it but I cannot honestly say I'd be able to cope with the N threads of communication he does _and_ be tactful when people you hope to be better let you down. I let Linus down and so he flamed me. Hopefully it won't happen again.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 11, 2015 17:13 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

He is an old denizen of alt.flame. I'm not sure you can ever recover from that -- it's like learning COBOL, it warps you for life. :P

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 15:58 UTC (Fri) by pyellman (guest, #4997) [Link]

On the internet, no one knows you're a dog -- unless you type "woof, woof, woof".

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 18, 2015 19:29 UTC (Sun) by toyotabedzrock (guest, #88005) [Link] (3 responses)

Many tech people have a slight amount of autism even if they don't want to admit it, so what she is arguing is that we should exclude them based on how they where born.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 18, 2015 21:42 UTC (Sun) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

> Many tech people have a slight amount of autism even if they don't want to admit it,

Hard to test, but I'm happy to accept that premise.

> so what she is arguing is that we should exclude them based on how they where born.

I don't see how it leads to this conclusion.

The core request is that people "attack the code, not the person".
I accept that some people (possibly people with autism) may have trouble understanding why that might be important. That doesn't mean they can't follow the rule though.

It's a bit like the white space rules: indent with tabs, not spaces. Some people think this is very important, others wonder what the fuss is all about. But we can still follow it most of the time, and acknowledge an error when an error is made.

Some people (possibly with Autism) might take a while to learn the difference between attacking people and attacking code. They might need some practical helps like "Make 'I' statements, not 'you' statements". But I'm certain it can be done. People who cannot learn to follow simple rules like that are not going to get very far in the tech world.

It isn't autism that leads people to being repeat unrepentant offenders. It is pride.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 19, 2015 0:07 UTC (Mon) by jubal (guest, #67202) [Link]

Nah. People on the autism spectrum seem to be usually pretty nonplussed by folks like you, who seem to conflate autism with being a total jerk. To wit, here are Russell Coker's (etbe) articles from the time Bruce Perens tried the autism spectrum derailment technique: one, two. Pray take the time and read them.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 19, 2015 16:52 UTC (Mon) by etbe (subscriber, #17516) [Link]

jubal: Thanks for your comment and thanks for summoning me. ;)

toyotabedzrock: A few years ago I met Sarah at LCA and had lunch with her and a group of other delegates. I didn't get the impression then that she would discriminate against people like me and I didn't get that impression when reading her blog post about leaving the Linux kernel community. I have had private conversations with a number of women who have similar opinions to Sarah.

The people who are against Aspies are people like YOU. This was a long discussion about behaviour on mailing lists (most of which I didn't read because I've read enough that I just see familiar patterns) and you were the one to bring up Autism. Your implication that people like me cause the problems is what could theoretically lead to exclusion. I say theoretically because white men almost never get excluded regardless of what they do.

neilbrown: I don't think it's pride, I think it's privilege. People tend to do things that they can get away with.


Copyright © 2015, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds