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> Completely irrelevant and not true in my opinion.

Hardly, when talking about brash/abusive behavior in the context of an industry where women are underrepresented, I think it's plenty fine to mention that there might be a connection to be made.

> the gender of the poster makes no difference

Eh, I don't agree. It's well-observed in social sciences that men are given more leeway to be abusive than women are; one example is how often words like "abrasive" or "bossy" come up in performance reports: http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias...

Or just look at our popular media: how many male antiheroes on TV have enough audience to support them vs. women antiheroes? For every Walter White or Doctor House or Tony Soprano, how many unlikeable women are there? Roxane Gay writes about this pretty well. http://www.buzzfeed.com/roxanegay/not-here-to-make-friends-u...

> Does the gender issue really have to be shoehorned into every story?

Per above, I don't think it's "shoehorned." And I think it's fine if we talk about it more than we currently do, because there's plenty to suggest we don't talk about it enough or are insufficiently introspective about it.

It's shoehorned because it's inserting a completely unrelated assertion despite nothing in the slightest pointing to it at all on the rest of the article.

It would have made just about as much sense if they'd written "This would be entirely different had it been written by a black person". But they just had to make it political and race just isn't a hot enough topic in the tech world so they didn't go for that.

It's a pathetic attention grab that sullies an otherwise valid critique.

>Eh, I don't agree. It's well-observed in social sciences that men are given more leeway to be abusive than women are; one example is how often words like "abrasive" or "bossy" come up in performance reports: http://fortune.com/2014/08/26/performance-review-gender-bias....

Have they ensured that they are using identical behaviors in this comparison?

If women are socially punished for being abrasive or bossy, you could consider THAT to be a problem. I might consider it a basic human right to use curse words, get angry, and come off as abrasive, and in fact I truly do.

Somewhat relatedly, the supposition some people have that "women" need to be especially protected from teh scary curse words pisses me off. THAT is a gendered prejudice based on Victorian morality or something.

> I might consider it a basic human right to use curse words, get angry, and come off as abrasive, and in fact I truly do.

This is a common error, but you're mixing up the idea that the government shouldn't be allowed to penalize you for your free speech and the idea that no one at all should be able to react to you for using curse words, getting angry, or coming off as abrasive.

If I think you're an asshole, I'm perfectly within my rights to not hire you, not befriend you, make fun of you to other people, not invite you out on camping trips, "accidentally" give you smaller slices of birthday cake at company parties, write internet comments calling you a doofus, etc.

I don't know why you think I made that error. Is it because I said "human right" that you think I was making a point about government censorship?

I read your comment above as saying this:

"It's a problem that women are socially punished for being abrasive because I consider being abrasive a basic human right."

It is a basic human right to use curse words, get angry, and come off as abrasive. That fact does not protect you from social punishment if you behave in a way that the people around you don't want to tolerate. Nor should it.

I meant to say if women are especially penalized in an unfair way that hinders them from other basic stuff like career and community. Of course people are free to dislike abrasive styles of talking. But combined with gender discrimination, it becomes a problem. I don't think men should be excessively punished for cursing either, but they generally aren't (in secular societies).

What does being abrasive or bossy have to do with abuse? These are character traits, and not necessarily bad ones.

I had the same feeling about the last bit of the article. Drama for no reason. I would be glad if the tech community focused more on tech than on shitstorms.

Some people are just too sensitive. If you don't like how Linus behaves, then don't deal with him. Noone forces you.

But why post an article on your blog which is associated with Mozilla including a gist of collected swear words? At least Linus didn't engage in some meta-drama nonsense.

unfamiliar: I don't agree though that this makes Linus a unstable person. In fact I'd say if people can't swallow some swear words, then they are in turn not emotionally strong enough.

There's no reason that anyone would need to be emotionally strong enough that in a company with adults in which the focus is working together on technology, they should expect to get sworn at a few times as an acceptable interaction with their peers.

In normal interactions actually no - there are a few very rare situations where it might be appropriate to use expletives for emphasis.

Day to day project work is not one of those.

They don't have to expect it or even accept it. They can, if they want to.

But they could as well just tell Linus he's a jerk. Or filter out the technical aspects of his post and ignore the rest. Or stop working with Linus.

But there is no reason to create a wide discussion around this, imho.

> If you don't like how Linus behaves, then don't deal with him. Noone forces you.

Linus' status in the Open Source community makes him a role model for some people (whether he likes it or not; I suspect he doesn't), and so people imitate him. It's much less palatable coming from someone with less credibility and experience.

if the alternative is SJW's watering down the discourse, I'll take thirty more Linuses, thanks.

That's another problem. Maybe adult people shouldn't have role models that they blindly copy in every way.

To the downvoters: may I ask for a reason? Are you saying blindly copying people is a good thing? I don't get it.

> If you don't like how Linus behaves, then don't deal with him. Noone forces you.

That's a pretty steep hurdle for potential contributors to Linux.

But I suppose that's BSD's gain.

I have noticed that Nordic non native English people often have very good spoken English but have a poor grasp of the unwritten rules concerning "engineering language"

It's not just Nordics. Non-native speakers tend to see swearwords as funny (aren't they the first thing one learns, after all? Even as a kid!), I'm guilty of that myself.

For English in particular, this is reinforced by abundant film material: the cooler the movie, the highest the chance to have it packed with swearwords, because it makes it sexier for native-speakers. This results in non-natives (who will likely consume this sort of exceptional material but not necessarily the more average stuff) assuming "harsh" language is more acceptable than it might actually be in practice. Some productions' appeal is almost entirely based on swearwords, e.g. In The Loop.

Yes taking Malcolm Tucker as a guide to appropriate English usage is not a good idea.

My wife and I are both software engineers, so I'm particularly sensitive to this topic. However, this even through me for a loop as to why it was mentioned.

Me too. Like, I think I agree with this post? But I'm not sure it's the best illustration of the phenomenon, or even a good one.

Yeah, it's just... awkward.

> Does the gender issue really have to be shoehorned into every story?

There are some people who believe it needs to be brought up more, even in places where it's off topic, because raising awareness is easy and historically it has been an effective strategy to move the needle on public perception.

Linus isn't celebrated because Linus is a famous programmer notorious for being quick to reach for the poison pen, Linus is being celebrated because he's a man, or so the story goes.

I agree that gender isn't relevant to Linus's behavior. The door swings both ways on abuse, after all. Humans of all gender identities are equally capable of being terrible to humans of any gender identity. But if the author's gripe is with the public reaction to it, it sort of makes sense why they would bring gender up. Namely: strategic political reasons.

Shanley Kane criticised Linus and got her and her family's addresses posted, death threats, rape threats, and other horrific abuse. If you think gender isn't an issue, you haven't educated yourself well enough.

This comment is very amusing in the context of the article. Shanley Kane uses abusive language, at minimum, two orders of magnitude more often than Linus does.

Abuse requires a power imbalance in favour of the abuser. That was not the case for Shanley's criticism.

I think I know what you're trying to say, but it probably isn't true that abuse requires a power imbalance, unless "willingness to abuse" is itself a form of power, in which case the word doesn't mean much anymore.

> What the... where on earth did this come from?

It comes from the same place all flamebait comes from: they're picking a fight.

If you've been paying attention to Mozilla post-Eich, it's overrun with social justice warriors now. the JWZ's are long gone, since replaced by the Apparatchik[0]. Thankfully, the Servo side of things still has competent engineers.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparatchik