Most people prefer to be lied to by someone pleasant than have their stupidity accurately and bluntly laid bare.
That's the short of it. I've never seen a Linus rant be a personal attack. Every time, he's pointing out that someone who ought to know better is being dangerously stupid to the detriment of a great many others.
Some people take offence at this -- even if they're not the target of Linus' ire -- because they mistakenly believe that everyone has the right to be treated nicely by others irrespective of their bad behaviour.
> I've never seen a Linus rant be a personal attack.
He called for someone to be 'retroactively aborted'.
> they mistakenly believe that everyone has the right to be treated nicely
Everyone should have the right to be treated reasonably nicely, even if they misbehave, unless there's some kind of threat to life or some other extreme that obviously never comes up in the context of software development.
You mean like anti-vaxxers dragging down the overall protection rate until there's outbreaks occurring despite everyone else's best efforts and then people die? Like how 50 Samoan children died because of them? https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/anti-vaccination-a...
Is that what you meant?
Or can we not use mean words against anyone even if they threaten our childrens' lives?
This Linus comment in particular makes me very very ashamed of writing "In every circumstance.".
This is the comment in question[1]. Linus obviously could have gone & seen who the original author was. And this is not a defense. But the person he was talking shit about was no longer around. He was talking about some old code, that some other maintainer was having to deal with, in some shitty crap ass situation that everyone was stranded in, ships smashing against the shore, &c.
While again I'd emphasize the "not a role model" aspect, I again can empathize with how batshit upside down the rest of the world seemed at this point. But overwhelmingly yeah, this is a not good look, this is really discouraging to hear. Which is sad, because, you know, typically when Linus is hammering it out, giving a big corporation the middle finger or what not, it's like: thank god, a decent human being (who is not easily ignorable like the rest of us) is finally saying it true.
But it's still an incredibly uncool way to phrase it all. Worst possible form of sound byte to be able to relay & parrot around.
Reminds me of one of the most popular radio personalities where I live. Let's just say that he's got a strong personality with some rough edges, but he's very entertaining on air. I've gravitated to whatever channel he's currently on after being fired from the last one for his behaviour or comments.
But think about it: They hired him specifically for his personality, because he's a cash cow, and then... what? Fired him for it? Did they not listen to his wildly popular show on the previous channel he was on? Did they not know what they were getting themselves into? Did they somehow miss the fact that he was available for hire only because his previous channel fired him?
Who is to blame here? The idiot that got a big cat as a pet, or the cat for being a wild animal?
PS: Jeremy Clarkson being fired from Top Gear is a similar situation. He's a fantastically entertaining TV personality precisely because of his personality.
I strongly believe that people like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and Linus Torvalds are necessary. You can't convince everyone to play along nicely with kind words alone. Sometimes you have to knock some heads together, and the type of people that do that, well... they're the type that will happily knock heads. It's a package deal.
Honest and direct feedback is one thing, belittling people for not fully understanding an edge case can be counterproductive. Linus is also not immune to mistakes, and he admits to having a general lack of understanding of the emotions of others.
That's the short of it. I've never seen a Linus rant be a personal attack. Every time, he's pointing out that someone who ought to know better is being dangerously stupid to the detriment of a great many others.
Some people take offence at this -- even if they're not the target of Linus' ire -- because they mistakenly believe that everyone has the right to be treated nicely by others irrespective of their bad behaviour.