Hacker News Reader

Comment by microtherion | Hacker News Reader

As an aside, this is a superbly professional e-mail, with clear references to the applicable standards, and the disapproval of the broken service stated firmly, but using clean language. Does anybody really think that Linus' (hopefully) past practice of starting with a foul mouthed rant, and only drilling down into the technical detail three pages in was a more effective way of communicating?

View on HN

It wasn't "past practice". Linus' rants were a rare event, in case of major "sins" commited by core contributors. They are what made it out in the open, but a lot of Linus' messages in the mailing lists is actually a sane, technical discussion.

I recall Linus calling some filesystem brain-dead (-damaged?). Could be [1] or [2], but I'm getting a cloudflare error when I try to visit the links. Not as bombastic as some of his rants, but this email is much more professional.

[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/70688...

[2] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/7076...

I'm sure Linus used clean language 99.999% of the time. He sends dozens of mails daily, so his rate of swearing is not out of the ordinary. The media made it to be something newsworthy, when it was not.

Well, there may be some selective reporting, but I'm pretty sure you could go through the public writings of other prolific open source contributors (e.g. Larry Wall) without even digging up ONE instance of public profanity.

It was more entertaining, and also working to figure out others' mistakes is more rewarding if you get to berate them in public, so not being allowed to rant reduces the incentive to do the work and thus makes more likely that mistakes will remain unnoticed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com