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Comment by jakobe | Hacker News Reader

I did not mean to call Torvalds names. Apparently I wasn't careful enough in my wording.

I meant to express my frustration how the community often accepts socially inacceptable behaviour from accomplished people.

When "normal" people fall into a rage, we tell them to learn coping with their anger. If they keep yelling angrily at people, we might even suggest they see a psychiatrist. Not as an insult, but because we sincerely believe that they could maybe learn some coping strategies to get along better with other people.

But for some people the rules are different. When someone complains that Steve Jobs verbally abused his employees, or when someone complains that Linus Torvalds uses unnecessary profanity, a lot of people start to justify this behaviour. They claim it is necessary for their success, etc.

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Torvalds is not 'falling into a rage', he's venting, and doing it in a controlled manner, as a ton of people do. He also doesn't 'keep yelling angrily' - it only appears that way because the only comments of his that get publicised are the fruity ones.

I remember one of this 'Linus Swore!' threads on HN a while back, linking to a comment of Torvalds' that had little in it but anger... presented out of context. I went back and had a look, and it was in a bug thread where it was around comment 120. Up to that point, most of his comments (about 10% of the thread) were informative and trying to explain the issue to the recipient of his eventual ire, who obstinately refused to give way. That Torvalds had spent a dozen patient comments was not advertised... only the one with his final anger.

This is why these threads fire passion in me despite not being a kernel dev myself, because there is clear and constant misrepresentation of who he is and how he operates.

You are right, I don't know much about Torvalds. He might be a very patient person most of his life. Like any public figure, he is probably badly misrepresented on the web.

But what makes me sad is that when he does snap, there's a large number of people who come and justify his behaviour. People don't say "You are misrepresenting him!". People say "He gave so much to us. He has the right to behave this way."

A lot of people use the "he's given so much" defense as a reaction to how widely it seems to be published out of context. This seems especially when they appreciate the culture that created the kernel but have not been following the discussion themselves. There is some feeling that this painfully honest abrasiveness is part of what makes the whole distributed contribution culture work so well and that if we do not defend this uniqueness it will give way to the same watered-down politics you find in so many corporate and even open source projects. Which is kind of silly because Linus isn't going to change. He has made that much clear.

you just don't get it. you're still stuck on the notion of "socially inacceptable behaviour". the whole point here is that the standard by which you judge "socially acceptable" is broken and detrimental to the community. Linus behavior is socially acceptable. He is honest, passionate, says what he means, and most importantly, he is forgiving and doesn't hold grudges.

The type of behavior that Linus is railing against here is the politically correct culture of insipid office politics, forced politeness, and concealing the true meaning of communications in order to make the communication a more effective tool of political manipulation.

this encourages duplicity, causes people to become disengaged from the work and obsessed with their political relationship to their coworkers, and it breeds long lasting unacknowledged and unforgiven grudges. its a horror show. but you consider it "socially acceptable" because it matches your standard of politeness for some reason.

> this encourages duplicity, causes people to become disengaged from the work and obsessed with their political relationship to their coworkers, and it breeds long lasting unacknowledged and unforgiven grudges.

Does anyone familiar with it think the Linux kernel development community has successfully avoided all that? Not Linus himself, but the community he leads and whose norms he helps set?

This is a false dichotomy.

There's a happy middle ground between being rude and playing insipid office politics. It's called politeness and doesn't have to make communications less effective or less honest.

its not a false dichotomy. sometimes tone IS content. if a person did something that you consider to be such a bad error that you wish them to hear your deep concern/annoyance then it is correct to be "rude", or rather to use harsh language and avoid sugar coating. Linus exemplifies this style of communication.

> rather to use harsh language and avoid sugar coating.

It is tedious when people keep saying that "avoiding sugar coating" means "be rude".

It is fine to avoid sugar coating something. It's not fine to be rude.

> such a bad error that you wish them to hear your deep concern/annoyance

There are many ways to express deep concern or annoyance without being rude, and without sugar coating something.

"It is very frustrating to me that I have to check so much of your work. Please take extra-special care next time you commit something. Here are the errors you've made so far. This has involved a lot of extra work, and has distracted me from doing other work. This is not the first time you've made these simple mistakes. We appreciate your effort, but it might be better if you worked on $OTHER_THING rather than $THIS_THING until you understand our requirements."

That is professional, harsh, true, constructive, and gets stuff done. It's not sugar coated. It's also not rude.

> I did not mean to call Torvalds names. Apparently I wasn't careful enough in my wording.

_This_ is the problem. We're all engineers here, right? We appreciate that swearing in such a fashion is a concrete implementation of an abstract concept. The abstract concept of scorn or vehement disagreement. It just so happens your implementation was a little off before:

"Apparently I wasn't careful enough in my wording"

... but even if you tidy it up, its still the same abstract.

This post more or less proves his entire point. I can wander around in a professional capacity and utterly slaughter people with fancy sounding words because my implementation of scorn is _very_ sly when I'm in enterprise. Yours is IDENTICAL.

> socially inacceptable > fall into a rage > yelling angrily > see a psychiatrist > Not as an insult > learn some coping strategies > get along better with other people

That is all 100% unadulterated scorn. It's incredibly, incredibly personally _offensive_..... but your implementation is sly so it's acceptable in a "professional" environment.

Personally I prefer Linus's implementation as its more straight-forward and its easier to see what he's thinking making it more clear how he feels if one were to work together with him.

You can't be careful enough unless you abstain from saying what you mean. I think that's the whole point of this Linusgate.

You think Linus is mental. You can't massage it out to be non derogatory unless you give up the content.

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