
Linux kernel dev Sarah Sharp quits - albertzeyer
http://www.networkworld.com/article/2988850/opensource-subnet/linux-kernel-dev-sarah-sharp-quits-citing-brutal-communications-style.html
======
rjsw
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10331891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10331891)

------
teh_klev
Yesterday's discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10331891](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10331891)

------
zamalek
I see where she is coming from. My first (and last) foray into the Linux
community was ~2003 in high school. I decided that I was going to try and use
Linux for "real stuff" \- which implied internet access. At the time I used my
smart phone as an EDGE modem which didn't work in Linux. After hours of
switching dual-booting between Linux and Windows I had devised a 1-liner that
would detect the PCI vendor/id by diffing some device listing with the device
plugged in vs. not plugged in. It would then insert the information into <some
file>.

I approached the IRC room for the distro I was using (this time from within
Linux!), asked for a wiki or some website where they would recommend I post
the quick-fix and got a disproportionate aggressive response from a few of the
participants.

A few weeks later my brother got me a friends-and-family license for Visual
Studio and I've been developing on Windows ever since - I found people always
appreciated contribution (ironic) no matter how insignificant, and would give
far friendlier (as a relative term) advice on how to fix problems with the
contributions.

I praise Linus and the Linux community in general for their bluntness and
honesty, but I don't think being honest requires being nasty to high school
children.

 _Edit:_ I strongly recommend having a look at the Contributor Covenant[1]. It
has some great guidelines for ensuring that any misguided contributions are
guided toward success in a friendly manner.

[1]: [http://contributor-covenant.org/](http://contributor-covenant.org/)

~~~
jordigh
Although unfortunate, your experience doesn't seem to be directly related to
the community that Sharp is experiencing problems with. She is talking about
working with Linux-the-kernel, not a particular distribution of GNU/Linux.
What I mean to say is that "the Linux community" in this case refers to kernel
hackers, not to Debian, Ubuntu, or whatever other distro maintainers. There
are different attitudes and factions within those larger communities.

I also find a bit of a contradiction between you praising bluntness and
honesty while at the same wishing for not being nasty to high school children.
It is kind of impossible to have both. I would prefer if people were cautious,
not blunt.

~~~
HLRoku
Not to nitpick, but it is perfectly possible to be honest with someone without
coming across as hostile. There may be cases where being blunt and honest
might be difficult without coming across as rude, but if the default honest
behavior is just to come across as hostile and vile there's probably something
wrong with the individuals in question.

~~~
joezydeco
Unfortunately, a lot of these kernel developers have day jobs.

I was recently working with a particular hardware module from a certain
company. Their lead technical support person was also helping develop the ARM
side of the kernel and merge their drivers into the tree.

The awful technical interactions and pretty much the complete lack of patience
and empathy for a _customer_ , made the whole thing a nightmare. Eventually I
lobbied, and got, our company to drop them as a vendor and move to a
competitor. That one developer created -$1,000,000 in annual revenue for the
vendor.

I still don't think they realize what happened.

~~~
meapix
> I still don't think they realize what happened.

Basically your goal was to punish not to correct?

~~~
joezydeco
Yes, absolutely.

Since this was the business model this company deemed acceptable, I figured it
was completely acceptable to do it in return. When all you receive to your
questions is "RTFM, idiot", that's a punishment in my opinion...not a
correction. And I'm the one holding the million dollar purchase order in my
hand.

I could not (and would not) waste development time trying to reeducate this
person into being a better customer support person. That's not my job - it's
theirs. Sometimes you need to whack someone on the head with a 2x4 before they
get the message.

------
coldpie
I strongly empathize with this decision, and I think it's unfortunate to lose
a valuable developer because many people feel a lack of basic politeness is a
virtue.

It is a hard problem to solve, and the open source model greatly aggravates
the problem. Within an open source project, no one is accountable for their
actions, by design. This ends up meaning you can say whatever hurtful things
you want, and unless you _really_ cross a line, most people except for the
target of the attack will ignore it. If you haven't been the target of such
frequent negative reinforcement, it's easy to tell others to "shake it off"
and learn from the experience. And maybe you can do that a handful of times.
But it really drags to have the work you put a lot of effort into described as
crap and yourself physically threatened for having dared to bother someone
else with it. Eventually, you're not going to want to work on it anymore.

The reason it's a hard problem to solve, though, is that sometimes you _do_
get crap code, or bad community members, and you need a mechanism for dealing
with that, too. Open source means you effectively can't "fire" anyone from the
project. The best you could do is ban them from all of the project
communication channels, or make it extremely clear that they're not welcome,
and well now you're back to negativity. On a project the size of the kernel,
where do you draw the line?

I guess if your attitude is "software uber alles" then hounding and insulting
submitters that aren't up to standard seems like a legitimate way to improve
your product. But if you're more concerned about creating a welcoming and
diverse development environment, then it's time to lighten up and dial down
the vitriol. Those goals are at odds, and a balance needs to be found. Sharp's
departure might be a sign that the current balance is wrong.

~~~
jzzskijj
I think hounding and insulting Linus does comes at least a bit from self
protection. I can just assume the amount of wacky ideas he might get on daily
basis, that would have little or no value in the product. Being aggressive
about low quality ideas is to limit the input that is wasting his time. And to
end the discussion and not to waste more time on explaining why he doesn't
want to consider that any longer than he already has.

Just trying to understand why he behaves as he does.

------
Syssiphus
And then there is this:
[http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8123533&cid=506646...](http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8123533&cid=50664697)

~~~
RyanZAG
_> > Then Linus made a joke about Greg being big and squishing people_

 _> Not fucking cool. Violence, whether it be physical intimidation, verbal
threats or verbal abuse is not acceptable. Keep it professional on the mailing
lists._

WHAT?

Thanks for injecting some actual facts into this. I was actually hoodwinked by
that blogpost into thinking something was wrong here, but upon reading the
actual conversation it's clear that this Sarah started any and all problems
herself. Well, there goes my sympathy in this case.

Goes to show you should never believe anything without actually checking the
source.

~~~
morley
I think she was responding to this line:

> You may need to learn to shout at people.

That is, after all, the last line before her reply, according to this view of
the thread:

[https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/23/107](https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/23/107)

It's unfortunate that her response lists physical intimidation before verbal
abuse, but I don't think she "started any and all problems herself." Her point
is still valid.

~~~
morb
Try this:
[https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/18/324](https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/18/324)

~~~
digi_owl
The response from Ingo Molnar may also be worth a read:

[https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/19/331](https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/19/331)

------
hueving
Good riddance. Her blog indicates that she was trying to change an entire
community's behavior so she didn't have to be offended. That's just as
oppressive as the people slinging around insults.

Some people work better in harsh environments and some work better under
environments where everyone's feelings are taken into account and you kill any
behavior that could offend anyone.

The kernel dev community is not a place that censors rudeness. If you don't
have the ability to read mean words, it's not a community for you.

~~~
steego
It sounds like she likes working on the kernel but she'd like to do with
without hostility/rudeness/insults. So she took the first step that
_everybody_ takes which is to complain or try to discourage behavior they
don't like. Now she's taking the step of leaving. How is she being oppressive
again?

~~~
zxcvcxz
It was oppressive to try to change the culture in the first place.

~~~
EmanueleAina
So the Free Software movement is oppressive because it is trying to change the
software culture from proprietary to free?

~~~
bardan
Seems like a moot point given that proprietary isn't free to begin with.

~~~
EmanueleAina
Care to explain?

As I read it, it seems a tautology: if one seeks change, it seems obvious that
the initial condition has to be different than the target one.

------
jzzskijj
The Linux kernel development culture has always been like this, so it is a bit
strange that foul language using bunch of developers turning out to be foul
language using bunch of developers is a shock for someone. It suits for some
and sure will annoy/scare some. As far as I know bashing is not about the
person, but it is about the quality of idea or implementation.

Is it right? Maybe. Maybe not.

Of course there is this line, where some people are doing it in professional
context and are expecting it to be... professional. In every level. That I
find a false expectation, as LKML and this "terrible" culture has a public
track record of a few decades. Of course not everyone can choose what kind of
work they do and which projects they attend to, but someone working in IT
corporations probably isn't one of those unfortunates.

I don't find it amusing, that someone's feelings have been hurt. But on the
other hand I find it a viable alternative for all that wasted time on
correctness, when someone's idea or implementation is terrible, but no-one can
tell it directly, that this really is crap.

~~~
coldpie
It's a false dichotomy. You can give honest reviews and tell people they're
wasting their time without resorting to "Shut up, Mauro. And I don't _ever_
want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer
again. Seriously."

[https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75](https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75)

~~~
Arnt
I read it, and I see that Linus was right as usual: The patch in question
_did_ break userspace and _did_ behave in ways POSIX says the kernel shouldn't
ever do.

It's a pity that some others have adopted Linus' loudness without also
adopting his habits of grasping the issue and being right. Linus says "don't
break the posix rules%@#$!$@#$", never "do as I prefer$#@$@#$!@#$". There's a
big, big difference.

~~~
raverbashing
This

What would be the general level of frustration if something fundamental was
broken?

More importantly, how frustrating it is to get back to the same kinds of
problems?

(I remember a similar issue with ACPI where the kernel got into a
'fix/break/fix' loop until they decided to change the approach and not accept
breakages anymore)

------
kazinator
In my over 30 years of BBS, mailing list and Usenet experience, the pattern
I've observed that the ones complaining about the behavior of others are
almost invariably annoying _personae non gratae_. Based on that experience,
before digging into any facts here, I'm already predisposed to a suspicion
that this person might be a poor developer who is bad for Linux, and the
hostility is basically doing its intended job.

That is to say, if you're the target of hostility, it's likely because you've
been written off by the community as an imbecile or some such.

Not saying this is the case here, but I'd avoid making big public displays of
complaining about forum behavior, and "exit drama" exactly for the reason of
attracting such suspicion on myself.

------
dlss
I'm always surprised to read about how awful the linux community sounds, given
how great the product is.

Does anyone familiar with the psych literature know if Linus' behavior here
might be causal of quality? Abrasiveness feels like it might cause
conformity[1] effects or similar, which sounds like poison for a tech
project... but then again, some of the best software I've seen has come from
"proving someone wrong on the internet" so maybe it depends on the type of
person?

Any references would be appreciated.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asch_conformity_experiments)

~~~
forgottenpass
_I 'm always surprised to read about how awful the linux community sounds,
given how great the product is._

Digging into the psych here is a wild goose chase because you're starting
without a useful impression of what the kernel community is like. Unless
you're already a kernel dev, you only hear about kernel maintenance if the
drama blows up big enough to wind up in your periphery.

The kernel community is about _work_ , it's generally _way too fucking boring_
for anyone other than Jon Corbet to report on. If you want to analyze the
kernel culture, then the things that do show up on your radar are just
anchoring your assumptions. Even if they turn out to be right, it's still bad
craftsmanship to extrapolate from them alone.

------
FussyZeus
Can I just say, the comments on this article are amazing. Guys drawing from
the experiences of people like Joel Schumacher or the Fortune 500 men. You're
writing drivers you nitwits, and based on my experiences with the graphics
drivers in linux, you have a long damn way to go.

Just sounds like a bunch of those "rockstar" programmers that we all dread
working with, the ones who walk into your office and tell you half your
codebase needs to be rewritten to use Node.js or whatever trendy thing is up
at the time.

Honestly, looks like a whole bunch of guys who never got around to growing up.
If an idea is that terrible as to warrant that level of criticism, turning it
into personal attacks both trivializes the actual criticism you're giving and
should be completely unnecessary. As they said in a Cracked video...people
this obsessed with winning are usually losing in their natural state.

------
kzrdude
Lwn discussion:
[http://lwn.net/Articles/659221/](http://lwn.net/Articles/659221/)

------
ibotty
source is her blog entry [http://sarah.thesharps.us/2015/10/05/closing-a-
door/](http://sarah.thesharps.us/2015/10/05/closing-a-door/)

------
delish
it's "basic human decency" if you're in favor and "political correctness" if
you're not. Both refer to an external virtue/sin.

This lkml conflict would be addressed with _statistics_ , that is: It would be
so nice if we could give evidence that the culture improves the kernel's
quality, or hurts it.

I have no opinion on whether it is or isn't "just basic human decency" or "the
insidious threat of political correctness." I do think that if the kernel
"succeeds" (for whatever definition of that) that we'll retroactively decide
we defended against political correctness. And vice versa.

~~~
dragonwriter
I think you have it backwards: people will believe that the Linux kernel is
better than it would be without the cultural elements that are complained of
if they believe the complaints are excessive political correctness, and
believe that it is worse than it otherwise would be if they believe the
complaints are about basic human decency.

------
raverbashing
Actually even though Linus has shown to be 'direct' and sometimes 'rude' there
are _much worse people_

> within a developer culture that required overworked maintainers to be rude
> and brusque in order to get the job done

And I guess that's the root cause of it

~~~
FLGMwt
Why something have to be the _worst_ for someone to be fed up with it?

------
gadders
Political incorrectness != being an arsehole, which is what seems to happen
here.

------
chris_wot
Curious, is Mauro Chehab still doing Linux kernel development?

~~~
snits
Yes, he is still the maintainer of a number of things in the kernel.

------
fapjacks
It takes a certain type.

------
hpihhgibb
Hard to read any discussion here on HN when random posts get removed while
hating on stereotypes of men get a pass.

~~~
sp332
Neither this article nor Sharp's own blog post are about sexism or problems
with "men". This is about the Linux kernel devs.

