After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Aside (The New Yorker)

Posted Sep 24, 2018 11:44 UTC (Mon) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Aside (The New Yorker) by mfuzzey
Parent article: After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Aside (The New Yorker)

I think the real problem now is the forcing through, without discussion, or even an explanation of the problem it tries to resolve in the kernel context, a US centric, politically motivated, CoC that is *not* about furthering the aims of Linux, or even *just* about being nicer each other.

That's probably because people were in a bit of a hurry. However, the way it came in suggests that the Linux CoC is amenable to incremental improvement or outright replacement just like any other part of the Linux source code would be. If at some point someone came up with a reasonable set of patches or even a more suitable CoC altogether, possibly one which fixes obvious (or subtle) errors or omissions in the current one, it should be feasible to post it, discuss it, improve it, and eventually merge it just as if it were an improved device driver or file system.

After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Aside (The New Yorker)

Posted Sep 24, 2018 12:12 UTC (Mon) by mfuzzey (subscriber, #57966) [Link] (1 responses)

I sincerely hope you are right.

However we *already* had a CoC, in the form of the "code of conflict".

If I were to submit a patch ripping out an existing driver or filesystem and replacing it with a new "improved" version I would fully expect to be challenged "what's wrong with the current one?, *why* do we need to do this?".

If my changelog entry didn't even touch on those questions I would expect it to be rejected.
Yet this was rushed through with *zero* explanation of why it was needed.

Now ok, those who signed off on this are all core kernel devs, not some small time driver guy like me but I would have expected a change of this importance to have far more signoffs and actually be discussed, at least among maintainers if not the entire kernel community. And even if it were decided that a public discussion would be too "'messy", I think the very least to expect would be a public statement of what was wrong with the previous CoC, why they chose this one and what others were considered.

And just what made this so *urgent* anyway?
Just the impending article in The New Yorker? Does the press now get to decide the kernel development process and rules?

After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Aside (The New Yorker)

Posted Sep 24, 2018 18:03 UTC (Mon) by tuna (guest, #44480) [Link]

"Now ok, those who signed off on this are all core kernel devs, not some small time driver guy like me but I would have expected a change of this importance to have far more signoffs and actually be discussed, at least among maintainers if not the entire kernel community. And even if it were decided that a public discussion would be too "'messy", I think the very least to expect would be a public statement of what was wrong with the previous CoC, why they chose this one and what others were considered."

Linux is Linus' project. He can put whatever he want in it.