
Abusing Contributors is not OK - JoshTriplett
http://www.curiousefficiency.org/posts/2015/01/abuse-is-not-ok.html
======
sbilstein
Linus is one of the few brilliant jerks out there who is truly brilliant.
Unfortunately his antics have made it OK for lots of less talented individuals
to think they have the right to treat people like dirt in order to write good
code.

He's exceptional in my opinion but I often wonder what the OSS community would
be like without behavior like his. I recall not wanting to major in CS when I
entered school because the only programmers I knew when I was young were from
newsgroups, forum, and OSS communities that I perused as kid...and they all
seemed like assholes. I'm glad I changed by mind cause I was so interested but
thick skin shouldn't be the bar for contributing to tech.

edit: I'm certainly not defending Linus. His talent makes him a net positive
but he definitely should not treat people the way he does.

~~~
rektide
Flipping off a bad hardware company, writing some scathing roasts of
patches... he's obviously not checking himself into staid polite behavior,
absolutely. The extent to which this makes him a jerk, or makes him bossy is a
connection that I've always felt is tenuous at best.

Even his meanest patch roasts are things that I'd hope people realize can be
taken in stride; technical work will have to go in but work can progress, and
Linus is not forebearing, he's not enhancing the difficulty of doing that
technical work by being directly scathing to the existing work, and generally
(what I think most people regards as) humorous and spirited to the rest of the
readership.

What I haven't seen is any real attempt to find citeable referencable direct
impacts of Linus being flamboyant as he produces his technical outlook. Which
contributors have taken serious injury, and how has it impacted them?
Certainly contributing is hard and finding out the work needs to be redone is
hard: what measures can we assign to how much harder those necessary acts are
when it's a "jerk"-y delivery (which as I said is not a term I'm not confident
is appropriate or applicable). Rather than focus on Linus's behavior as
problematic and the emphasis of it being a deeply stemmed root cause, I'd like
to see some hard impact-analysis with good data behind it that gives a better
idea of why we should adopt strict tone-policing of the necessary harsh and
brutal technical review process.

~~~
sbilstein
"Kay, this needs to be fixed.

Suggested fix: just use the 'seq_printf()' interfaces, which do the proper
buffering, and allow any size reads of various packetized data.

Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a
good idea to read things ONE F _CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for
each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f_ ck does idiotic things
like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely
too stupid to find a tit to suck on?" \- linus
[https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495](https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495)

do you want some data on the people who don't even bother dealing with sort of
talk? he could easily replace the second paragraph with something like

"This is an extremely bad way of doing things; reading one byte of a time is
terrible. Please research the system calls you are using before submitting
another patch, it's unacceptable to submit code that hasn't been thought
through thoroughly."

~~~
Torgo
"Key, I'm f _cking tired of the fact that you don 't fix problems in the code
_you* write, so that the kernel then has to work around the problems you
cause[...]I will _not_ be merging any code from Kay into the kernel until this
constant pattern is fixed.[...]This has been going on for _years_ , and
doesn't seem to be getting any better."

That name sounds familiar.

[https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76935](https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=76935)

[https://plus.google.com/+gregkroahhartman/posts/Kd57G8s1cTD](https://plus.google.com/+gregkroahhartman/posts/Kd57G8s1cTD)

"What I mind is people closing bugs and not admitting mistakes. If Kay had
even said "sorry, the excessive output was a bug in systemd, it's already
fixed in current -git", that would have been a valid reason to close the bug.
And for the people thinking this is a storm in a teacup: this is not the first
time Kay has done this, which is why I personally get so frustrated. Kay has
done the exact same thing with major bugs that were not fixed anywhere else,
and that caused machines to fail at boot time, and Kay happily pointed the
finger elsewhere for months at a time and closed bugzilla entries. [...]
people are (I think) understandably upset that systemd not only screwed up,
but then the people involved weren't even willing to say "sorry" about it but
instead go "uh, it wasn't our bug, deal with it".﻿

~~~
digi_owl
Makes one wonder if Sievers should be allowed to touch any more projects...

------
JoshTriplett
I found this well worth reading. Note the section "Ideas and code are still
fair game", which points out that eliminating bad behavior from a community
does not prevent project maintainers and leaders from taking good code and
complaining about bad code, as long as they don't tear down _people_ in the
process. Frequently, when this issue comes up in the Open Source community, it
produces flippant responses about how behaving better would prevent telling
people their code or even their core idea is broken.

~~~
npsimons
I believe that while Linus' attitude could be better, it is understandable.
Not that I'm excusing it, it's just that almost all the times you see someone
pointing out him being an asshole, you can go back up the email chain to find
the person he's being an asshole to being obtuse. Combine this with a deep
care that Linus has for his "baby", and tons of crap trying to get past the
radar on a regular basis, and it's understandable his reactions are what they
are.

Similar situations arise in communities where denial and/or subterfuge are
common tactics, such as climate change denial and creationism. Just look up
the term "sea lioning".

That being said, I am for more diverse opinions, which I think you only truly
get when you have more diverse points of view, which is why I agree that
prejudice is a very bad thing. What is interesting to me, though, is I have
yet to see prejudice from eg Linus. He's mean, yes, but he tends to "spread
the love" (as the kernel management guide puts it) fairly evenly and not based
on prejudice. Of course, I might just not be seeing this because I'm a white
straight cis male.

Last but not least, I agree that ideas and code are fair game for criticism.
Unfortunately, sometimes people associate with their ideas (and sometimes code
too) and take it as a personal insult when their idea or code is criticised.

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
This: "Not that I'm excusing it," is the same kind of weaselly phrasing as
"I'm not racist, but".

~~~
npsimons
Nice. Ad hominem. What's next, are you going to call me misogynistic? How
about homophobic? Would you be happier if I phrased it as "I'm not excusing
his behavior"? Because that's essentially the same meaning, just not as
"weaselly" [sic]. Also, sentence did not contain a "but", even semantically.

------
mcguire
There's a lesson here.

Once upon a time, I worked for IBM. At this time and in this place, decisions
were made at IBM based not on evaluating ideas, but on who talked loudest. I
watched a lot of good ideas get shot down, or more frequently just ignored,
because nobody vocal felt like supporting them or because someone vocal
decided the idea wasn't in their best interests. I also watched a crap-ton of
really shitty ideas rise to the top and get a fucking load of money wasted on
them because the set of people who can identify good ideas and the set of
people who are loud do not have a very large intersection.

Fortunately for IBM, it's a large company with nearly unlimited resources and
its position as the most successful technology company will never be seriously
threatened. Particularly its office systems, AIX, and PowerPC directions are
world-leading.

(For those of you with Asperger syndrome, that last paragraph was sarcasm. And
yes, I'm looking squarely at Larry Loucks.)

~~~
rektide
Your case is fair, and your advice is solid, but no one is sure it's
appropriate. At IBM there is a distinct chain of command and people who have
to interact with each other and a corporate body every day. A technical
mailing list can certainly suffer from domineering people monopolizing the
conversation as well, but most evidence we have of this- Systemd debates in
Debian, Gentoo- show a much more overt structural deficiency going on in a far
more pervasive fashion than what is found on LKML.

Look at the outcome in problem cases- whereas in a contained social
environment- a business- the containment ends in creative control ending up in
the lands of the domineering group, in mailing lists we tend to rampant
infighting and shifting lines of battle amongst larger parties. The 1:1 1:few
defined hierarchies and political power-games of a business have few clear
places we can draw parity to on a highly-trafficed mailing list: dissent
resisting the domineering force is highly visible and contested, and conflict
spreads as people weigh in and the conversation threads-out and threads are
linked into one another.

~~~
mcguire
You make a very good point, but I think you may be over-weighting the "chain
of command" aspect of the corporate body and under-weighting the "flame-fests
are fun, but somebody has to make a decision" aspect of a mailing list
discussion.

My personal favorite result of the latter are trigraphs in the C standard.
_Nobody_ liked them, but nobody argued strongly against them because they were
introduced so late.

------
sadfaceunread
Overall, I don't think this post is very good. It tries hard to ride the wave
of several important, valuable, and popular sentiments but I think that the
ways in which it misses the mark, mars its purpose.

I don't understand why Nick (the author) chose to group a bunch of unrelated
stuff in to an otherwise pretty reasonable post on decreasing personal attacks
in OSS communications.

The parts about systemic biases and asking speakers about them has essentially
nothing to do with the first part of the post. Essentially the entire "What
Can We Do About It" section reads like it was written for an entirely
different purpose than the rest of the post. It is fine to promote those ideas
but to tie the idea of increasing civility in communications as an idea of
countering systematic biases against certain demographics is a faulty
alignment of ideals.

Saying read a wiki on feminism as a way to reduce personal attacks in email
threads is bizarre. The notion that people are "experiencing harassment over
your identity rather than being critiqued solely based on the quality of your
work." is not related at all to my experience in OSS communities.

~~~
jrochkind1
I disagree. Men in our society are taught to be emotionally abusive in their
relating to others. Environments where emotionally aggressive communications
are the norm have a whole lot to do with gender roles in our society. And how
someone deals with such an environment is effected by their gender
socialization too, such environments are perceived and dealt with differently,
as a generalized trend, by women and men. (yes, individual men and women can
be on both ends of it, at different times).

~~~
barsonme
> Men in our society are taught to be emotionally abusive in their relating to
> others.

My parents sure didn't raise _me_ that way. Honestly, a large reason why so
many people are aggressive when they communicate is simply because they just
don't know how to communicate. It's not a male thing, nor is it a female
thing.

It's a "I'm unable to express my unhappiness regarding this scenario in a
well-thought out and respectful way, so I'm going to lob some insults at you
to make my point" thing.

My dad used to say that if you need to swear then you've obviously lost the
ability to express your opinion in an articulate, and polite way. I don't 100%
agree with that statement, but it _does_ have some truth to it when you apply
it a bit differently.

If you can't tell somebody their code is bad without berating them for even
being born it's not because you're a man or a woman, you either have a
condition which prevents you from recognizing you're being a dick or you do
not know how to communicate like a civilized human.

Being assertive, constructive, and listening well are three ways to be able to
communicate like a decent person. Being subservient or aggressive,
destructive, and failing to listen are three/four ways to communicate like a
person with a lack of social skills.

------
A_COMPUTER
Torvalds is being dogpiled . This is the third or fourth article I've read in
the last month that has tried to conflate Linus Torvalds sometimes being rude
with the horrendous, persistrent, ongoing harassment/abuse that is being
carried out by completely different people, in completely different industry.

If Torvalds is going to be used, is it too much to ask to stick to the things
he has done and not lump him together with death threats, SWATing, etc? Like,
catalog what HE said, in their context, and discuss those? Because I really
don't think they are comparable, and the conflation is disingenuous.

~~~
jneen
If he is, it's pretty tame compared to the treatment of those who criticize
him, and those who claim to support those who criticize him.

~~~
felipeerias
That is one of the scariest aspects of all this: there is an aggressive
Internet mob that does nothing of value for Free SW, but will come in full
force any time that an issue like this one is debated in the open, and will
stop at nothing to ruin the life of those they identify as enemies.

Encouraging civility and attracting new contributors are very important goals
for the future of Free SW. Achieving that will help us create better products
that can be useful for more people.

Therefore, having all this harassment and hate come up whenever there is talk
about improving the community is tremendously hurtful. It is sabotage, that's
what it is.

------
MadManE
What a charged headline. Of course abuse is not ok - anytime, to anyone.
Cramming the word into this title is pure incitement.

~~~
sadfaceunread
I agree. This is a click bait title. The words abuse and harassment should not
be used about as freely as they are in current meta-discussions of online
discourse.

------
sharpneli
I wonder why they have mixed feminism on this.

If we look at posts of Linus he is an equal opportunity jerk. He bashes people
solely because they have made a bad commit or suggested something absolutely
braindead even if they should have known better, regardless of their gender.

You can say he is jerk but you cannot say he is misogynist.

~~~
thramp
"Equal opportunity jerk" seems alright at first thought, but when you consider
that people of different races/genders have different social standing, it's
clear that some people will be disproportionately affected by others being
"equal opportunity jerks".

Plus, being an "equal opportunity jerk" is not a good policy at all — it's
downright abusive. No one should be verbally berated in public for writing
code that's not up to the maintainer's snuff.

------
dnautics
Nice != Good

Niceness is about worrying about how other people feel. Sometimes caring about
other people's _feelings_ (especially in the short term) can lead to
duplicitous, decietful, dihonest, fraudulent, counterproductive or wasteful
behaviors.

Being "good" in a sense is optimizing against those behaviors, which usually
is an orthogonal concern to niceness, but sometimes leads to distinctly being
not nice. I can't say one way or another if Linus is overoptimizing, but given
a choice between niceness and goodness, I pick goodness.

~~~
comrh
> Niceness is about worrying about how other people feel.

I really disagree. Niceness is about CONSIDERING people's feelings. Not overly
worrying or bending to them or self censoring but just being aware of your
effect on other people. Linus seems to be aware but thinks that considering
other people is a waste of time and I think that is a pretty toxic attitude.

~~~
dnautics
I think you're putting the emphasis on the wrong word here. The important
thing here is not worrying/considering but "feel".

I would guess that Linus makes a categorical distinction between emotional and
physical welfare - because emotional welfare is ill-defined and easy to
manipulate from the 'reciever's' point of view, he considers it at worst a
waste of time or at best a secondary consideration after definable things,
like achieving a software objective.

------
KVFinn
>Instead, what I do care about, passionately, is helping the best ideas win
(where I include "feasible" as part of my definition of "best"). Not the "best
ideas from people willing to tolerate extensive personal abuse".

Applicable in many different areas.

------
metaphorm
really? another diatribe about Linus? get over it. Linus is the way he is.
dealing with him requires thick skin, and he knows it, and we know it, and
anyone working with him needs to deal with it.

do you think complaining about him on the internet is going to get Linus to
change? what's the point here?

there's also an awful lot of false equivalency and inappropriate analogy going
on here. I don't think Zoe Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian have ANYTHING WHATEVER
to do with Linus' communication style. Invoking their names here is an effort
to summon a twitter shitstorm and its pretty low in my opinion.

~~~
zorpner
_really? another diatribe about Linus? get over it. Linus is the way he is._

What a sad, accepting attitude. The fact is that people are more aware than
ever than his behavior is unacceptable. They talk about it more and more often
every year, and that trend will continue. Eventually, he won't be able to make
a public appearance (in person or online) without getting called out on his
completely unnecessary and hostile behavior. Then he'll either change or be
shunted into irrelevance, and it will be a net positive for the Linux
community.

Fame and accomplishment are no license to be uncivil.

~~~
metaphorm
he's not uncivil. he's just blunt. the fact is, Linus does the right thing
when it matters. you might not like the way he writes emails on the developer
mailing list. you might think he swears too much or uses too much hyperbole.
it doesn't matter though.

what you're advocating here is censorship and ostracism of one of the most
important people in the FOSS world. think about that for a few minutes. you're
advocating censorship and ostracism. who's uncivil now?

edit: and now you've downvoted me for disagreeing. more "civil" behavior being
demonstrated here.

~~~
jfarmer
> it doesn't matter though.

It does matter if it means otherwise qualified contributors stop contributing
or, more likely, never attempt to contribute in the first place. Linus doesn't
know how to act any other way, but that doesn't mean there aren't other ways
to act that don't harm the overall success of the project but create a more
welcoming atmosphere.

It's like he's trapped in this weird world where "being nice" is the
alternative to being a temperamental jerk. How about being kind, patient, but
forceful? Lots of technical leaders know how to strike this balance and Linux
is worse of for Linus' inability to do so.

~~~
pierrebai
I'm tired of seeing civility and toxicity being mixed up. Blogs about Linus is
just one example of this type of discourse, which comflate being nice and
civil with mysoginy, racism, and the like.

Linus is not toxik.

Furthermore, there's this notion that being nice is a free, costless attitude.
Just as Nick Coghlan himself admits, being nice is hard and demand energy and
time. All things that come in limited quantity. There is also an unspoken
assumption in these rant that Linus is constantly being a bully. It's just not
true. The fact of the matter is, in a forum, you need to be able to use a
large range of attitude to deal with the wide range of people and
contribution. You can nicely rebute someone on a subtle topic. It's wasted
time to try to be subtle about boneheaded ideas. If you can't go termonuclear
from times to times, then your opinions get muddled. The fact is, it is hard
to convey the level of opposition by text alone. Using bluntness works. You
also have to deal with really disruptive people.

You just can't rule out never to be uncivil. It's a tool, to be wielded when
needed. There is hypocrisy in demanding not to be called an idiot when you
are.

------
joeyh
This post was flagkilled off the front page, and then unkilled after mgj59
raised a stink about it.

<mjg59> Hey @paulg you've created a website catering to people unwilling to
even discuss the existence of an abusive culture
[http://t.co/1vnEA27kKL](http://t.co/1vnEA27kKL)

~~~
dang
No one involved in unkilling that story knew about any stinks. This is just
routine moderation:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8931377](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8931377).

In such cases the variations in rank come from the community being divided and
thus both upvoting and flagging the story.

------
zxcvcxz
I don't take anything seriously that tells me to review the "geek feminism"
wiki.

These "geek feminists" tell people they have to follow a moral code they make
up on the spot then when someone says something they deem is "inappropriate"
they bully them and accuse them of horrible things that aren't true. This
actually happens and isn't debatable.

What I personally really don't like about these people is that they go after
open source specifically, which leads me to believe many of them have never
worked for a large company but only have experience in the open source sector,
which by it's nature allows anyone to participate.

I mean, accusing open source of being intolerant or whatever is like an alien
race accusing the human species of being intolerant because they observed that
--yes-- when you allow people to live in a society freely some people make
decisions others (gasp) _disagree with_.

These geek feminists should all go close their source and only allow people to
work with them who they deems is tolerable. A Big corporation --no matter how
progressive they may seem from the outside-- is always going to have someone
working for them that says some stupid shit. Look at the racist emails in the
wake of the sony leak from some of their top people.

I don't want a monoculture of people pretending to be nice. Blaming open
source is just a way to push an agenda.

If this "geek feminist crowd" wants to fork off and do their own thing and
base it around being nice to each other then it's just a matter of time until
their top devs get exposed for being human and they look like idiots. The geek
feminist community seems to contain more assholes than any open source
community I've ever been a part of, in fact I've worked with a few feminists
who have said some very nasty things about people of a certain color.
Unfortunately, the JavaScript crowd seems to have a lot of feminsits and I had
the displeasure of working with a JS developer who was a rich white straight
male feminist asshole google employee. He would talk about how hard minorities
have it on his personal blog and then get on github/irc and treat everyone
like shit. Pretty typical geek feminist in my experience.

~~~
comrh
I really don't think you have a very good handle on what you're railing
against. Especially because at the end you conflate diversity in FOSS with
criticism of Linus' attitude. This just reads like you have a really big axe
to grind against your reading of feminism.

~~~
zxcvcxz
I'm not the one whose conflating diversity with Linus' attitude, that would be
the feminists.

edit: please hn, tell me where I'm wrong.

My whole point is that making this a matter of diversity is _wrong_ and only
done to push a political agenda.

It's not Linus who is saying anything against any race or gender. He's being
mean and then some people calling themselves "feminists" are coming in and
saying "being mean to people is so much harder if you're a minority, so
therefore open source is racist".

I'm not conflating diversity with anything. Just pointing out that that's what
the geek feminists are doing.

~~~
zorpner
I'll give it a shot -- upthread someone makes the statement _It always seems
like jerks are better at handling other jerks than non-jerks._ Assume for the
moment that this is true, then combine it with the ample research revealing
that in workplace situations, men are respected for "jerk"-like behavior and
women are looked down on for it. Now you have a situation in which being a
jerk creates an environment in which women are less likely to succeed. This is
a pretty simplistic example, but a good representation of the type of
syllogism that can lead you from "abusive/uncivil behavior" to "anti-diversity
behavior". Hope this helps!

~~~
zxcvcxz
Sounds like you have to go out of your way to be offended.

