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Comment by yohanatan | Hacker News Reader

Not at all. I was making no positive logical argument. Merely pointing out the flaw in the one I responded to.

To put it plainly, the post I responded to made the claim: "Linus was nice when he posted it to the GCC list; therefore everything is fine." This argument doesn't hinge on the GCC guys having thick skin but rather on the apparent unlikeliness of their seeing the more offensive messages in the kernel list.

Further, even if we take into account the 'thick skin' argument, it does not excuse the behavior-- bad behavior is bad even if the affected party doesn't think so. This is why often times the State will prosecute domestic violence cases even when the affected spouse/partner does not wish to do so.

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> This argument doesn't hinge on the GCC guys having thick skin but rather on the apparent unlikeliness of their seeing the more offensive messages in the kernel list.

I made no such argument; in fact my reply to you specifically recognized the fact that a GCC developer might come across Linus' message on the Linux kernel list. My argument was that such a GCC developer would recognize that the Linux kernel mailing list does not belong to him or his project, it belongs to Linus and his project, and the fact that Linus' tone when he posted to GCC's bug tracker was quite different shows that Linus understands the difference too.

Maybe it would help if you read the conversation again. I'll paste here for convenience:

>>>>>> Linus just being Linus (paraphrased).

>>>>> That may be so but I'm pretty sure that pretty much every study that's been done on this says insulting people is demotivating and generally destructive behaviour.

>>>> He has not insulted any people though. He has said bad things about the piece of software called gcc-4.9.0, but he has not once in that email adressed a person in a negative way.

>>> Uh, do you think GCC just spontaneously sprung forth into being? No, it was created by people, and Linus is indirectly insulting them.

>> As a number of people have already commented, when Linus posted the bug report to the GCC project, he was careful not to insult them.

> Do you think those people exist in some sort of vacuum where they don't have access to (or will become aware of) the kernel mailing list thread?

Did you really intend to say that a person can only be insulted if they are insulted in every place a particular issue is discussed? Or are you saying that if a person is treated kindly in at least one avenue, then it doesn't matter how many others they may be insulted in (i.e., the one kind treatment negates all the other offenses)?

Since you brought it up in your quote, I should clarify that I agree with the person who said that insulting a piece of software is not the same as insulting the person who created it, not even "indirectly".

That said, my own argument had nothing to do with "what counts as an insult", whether Linus being non-insulting on the GCC bug tracker "cancels out" what he said on the kernel mailing list, etc., etc. I was simply pointing out that the fact that Linus was not insulting when he posted the bug on the GCC bug tracker indicates that he had a genuine intention to help get the bug fixed. (The GCC bug tracker thread makes it clear that the GCC developers recognized that too.)

In other words, I (like the other commenters I referred to) was focusing on whether or not Linus was actually trying to help or not, and what actually got accomplished as a result of his raising the issue. You are focusing on what kind of language he used and where, whether it was "kind", whether "kind" language in one place "cancels out" insulting language in another place, etc., regardless of the substance of what does or does not get accomplished. I was not making any claim whatever about the questions you raise.

I think if you read the entire thread it should be clear that the topic of conversation was in fact "the lack of kindness in Mr Torvalds' public persona". It is in fact your attempt to focus on whether Linus was actually "trying to be altruistic" or not which is in fact incongruous (i.e., discontinuous) with the rest of the conversation. One can "try to be altruistic" all they want but if they cannot package it in nice words, then they are merely going to be [rightly] ridiculed for the "attempt". Also, as I pointed out before, the mere fact that Mr Torvalds can get it right in one context but not in another shows that he in fact knows the difference between right and wrong.

> One can "try to be altruistic" all they want but if they cannot package it in nice words, then they are merely going to be [rightly] ridiculed for the "attempt"

But that's not what actually happened, as far as I can see; Linus' post on the GCC bug tracker appears to have gotten the GCC developers to pay attention to the bug, not to ridicule Linus for using nice language on their bug tracker but insulting language on his own mailing list.

> the mere fact that Mr Torvalds can get it right in one context but not in another shows that he in fact knows the difference between right and wrong

I would say it shows that he knows the difference between one context and another. Whether or not that difference is also "the difference between right and wrong" is one of the points at issue; you can't just assume that your personal opinion about that is shared by everybody. As you pointed out in an earlier post, it's up to each of us to decide that for ourselves.

> But that's not what actually happened, as far as I can see; Linus' post on the GCC bug tracker appears to have gotten the GCC developers to pay attention to the bug, not to ridicule Linus for using nice language on their bug tracker but insulting language on his own mailing list.

The 'ridicule' I was referring to is this firestorm of a thread: the mere fact that we are even talking about this on HackerNews (and the wider Internets) and that a large majority of the commenters here agree with me that it was, in fact, deserving of ridicule.

> Whether or not that difference is also "the difference between right and wrong" is one of the points at issue;

Whether one can [in his own reasoning] get all the way to 'wrong' from 'adolescent, silly & childish' is really quite a minor issue to me. But, I think it's pretty obvious to most adults that it was in fact pretty adolescent, silly & childish (i.e., socially under-developed) and that's enough for me.

Further, if I had to choose one form of overly adolescent behavior, it would be the fun type coming from 'brogrammers' and startup culture rather than this trite anti-social and uber-negative poison from 'hardcore Linux(TM) hackers' (but I can certainly understand that this is merely a preference of mine in particular).

> The 'ridicule' I was referring to is this firestorm of a thread

Which is not going to have any effect on the Linux kernel or the GCC compiler. I'm not participating here because I think it will change anything substantive; I'm just doing it because I feel like it.

> a large majority of the commenters here agree with me

Have you actually counted?

> I think it's pretty obvious to most adults that it was in fact pretty adolescent, silly & childish

I think you are overestimating how many "adults" agree with you.

And whoever is downvoting these posts is a sick human being.

Even if we disagree about the other matters being discussed earlier, I do have to agree with you about the misvoting you've been subjected to.

There is no legitimate reason for your comments to have been voted down.

I'm seeing this sort of blatant and unjustifiable misvoting happening more and more often here. It's really making it harder to read a lot of legitimate content, and it's discouraging participation in otherwise perfectly fine discussion.

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