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Comment by hitekker | Hacker News Reader

Linus seems like a jerk if you see him as an entitled engineer maintaining a popular OSS library.

But if you instead see him as a CEO, responsible for every single part of the Linux kernel, running on one billion machines, his behavior becomes natural. Even warranted, since, often-times the people at the recieving end of his wrath are not making some whoops-daisy technical mistake; they are trying to exert power and extend their influence through the code they write.

Remember how grsecurity tried to destabilize the Linux kernel?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14633163

Or how one core maintainer broke userland and refused to fix it?

https://m.slashdot.org/story/179833

Linus shut them down.

Linux keeps a thousand volunteers in line. The vast majority of whom are not subordinates, duty-bound to respect nice words. At this high level, with such enormous stakes, I wouldn’t want a weak willed leader who lets the children run amok.

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Your sense of how leadership works is really screwed up. Nothing in TFA suggests being "weak". Quite the opposite, per the author's intent, and I agree: "It's still forceful and unambiguous." The most scathing responses I've ever written in my professional career contained zero profanity, zero ad-hominem attacks, or other attempts at verbal abuse. But they still had unambiguous and devastating impact. If your only concept of strength of leadership amounts to "be maximum asshole", then you have a really horrific concept of leadership.

Instead, I'll offer this. In my experience, great leadership is the skill of getting a group of people to take action on a cause without having/using authority over them. Instead, you seem to think leadership is about taking authority over people by being a jerk to them.

No one's saying that Linus shouldn't be a strong advocate for the kernel. This is entirely about his refusal to acknowledge or improve lousy communication skills that obfuscate his generally excellent technical arguments, and needlessly push away contributors who have actual self respect.

>> the stakes are enormous

This is the key difference between kernel development and other volunteer efforts.

Most volunteer efforts are worse off when people are scared away by strong language and pointed explanations of their shortcomings because their performance isn't really that important. It's not that big of a deal if you spill something at the food kitchen or goof up part of the set of the school play.

The kernel is not a typical volunteer effort. You can't show up with nothing but goodwill and be a net good. It requires skill and discipline, and people who don't have that but try to inject themselves into the process need to be told to go away for the good of the project. Pretending otherwise only causes people to get their feelings hurt. I wonder if there should be a different word for it than "volunteer", because the connotation of that word is that showing up and wanting to be helpful is enough.

Correct. The “volunteer” part means that Linus’s formal authority is actually quite limited.

In a company the Boss can fire the incompetent or malicious. Not so with Linux; The BFDL has to constantly poke and prod the community away from its impulses.

The truth is that leadership without formal authority is messy. It only gets messier as the problems becomes more important and as more people get involved.

The alternative to outbursts is hierarchy; for Linux to structure itself even more, endowing Linus with even more power, such that he could temporarily suspend the contributor at his discretion.

No insults, no screeds, just a silent squelch.

A far neater outcome that would also be anathema to the politically unconscious.

I'm not sure why you think that skilled people who won't walk away and go devote their time to a project where they don't have to put up with an asshole boss and his army of apologists.

But is Linus actually telling anyone to go away for the good of the project?

I don't like Linus's approach because it takes the conversation away from "how did this break, let's investigate carefully" and steers it towards blaming an individual for making a mistake.

As Mauro points out in the replies, the patch here was trying to fix an issue where one driver (uvcvideo) was returning error codes that didn't match what the majority of drivers were doing -- something that was also a bug and was also breaking userspace. The -ENOENT that Linus screams about is an internal driver error that accidentally was returned to userspace in one place.

No core maintainer was refusing to fix userspace (read the thread!), they just wanted to understand the breakage in question since the patch was intended to fix something else!

Software is hard and tricky. The correct response to managing this complexity shouldn't be calling someone an idiot for trying.

A lot of the widely-celebrated "Linus burns" have important, nuanced discussion behind them that is thrown out the window when it's reduced to swears and anger.

> But if you instead see him as a CEO,

Still seems like a jerk to me.

Don't you think Linus could solve those problems without being a jerk though? If he could, then maybe shitty attitudes are just superfluous or even impeding his objectives...

> Linus seems like a jerk

Linus is a jerk and he gets away with it entirely because apologists like you make excuses for him at every turn.

He's a dictator. he can say no and leave it at that. He can say no and explain. Acting like a jerk is not a necessary part of this process.

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