I feel it's equally important to point ot that Torvalds recognized his toxic behavior, apologized for it, and took steps to rectify it.
In an email to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, which also addresses the kernel update of Linux 4.19-rc4, Torvalds writes: "I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely."
"I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately."
Not going to touch the general toxicity as it's something Linus has already apologized and worked through with professional help, but I love the attitude when it comes to responsibility.
Far too often it's easier to blame someone else for error.
"No this is our problem, and I'm ashamed you're trying to blame someone else for it" is respectable take
So I recently had a conversation with some who though Linus Torvalds (kernel) and Linus Sebastian (Linus Tech Tips) was the same person.
That was a pretty funny and confusing conversation.
Yeah, those mailing lists used to have some quite funny stuff; my favorite so far is smth along the lines of "whoever thought this was a good idea should be retroactively aborted".
But, on the other hand, damn it's toxic. Should've really sucked to work on the kernel back then.
I was curious as I couldn't help but laugh, but damn dude. That is rough. Hilarious looking at it now, but I feel bad for whomever was at the receiving end.
Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FUCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fuck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?
Honestly, I maybe get why some people are too sensitive to work in such conditions, but from my professional experience, Iβd much rather prefer getting angry mail explaining why my actions are stupid, than everyone being nice to one another but the codebase is utter garbage and everything falls apart, which happens a lot in private companies.
You can be polite or just straightforward and still get your message across.
"We don't blame bugs on user programs", "This is not an error code that should be used here", "Your coding standards may have relaxed over your tenure, be sure to maintain quality code.", etc. I get the annoyance, but you can be firm without yelling, especially in a professional environment.
Edit: Seeing the full context of Mauro's message (posted below), I can see why Linus took this tone. Mauro was being pretty condescending to a dev.
Ugh, having been on the receiving end, this type of belittlement is the worst, and breeds resentment, factionalism, and a host of other toxic elements in the workplace.
Irrespective of the validity of his critique, prima donna developers are the worst and I would start looking for jobs elsewhere because programming is already stressful enough, don't want to start worrying about the people.
I like the discussion this has generated around toxicity and professionalism, but I'm still very amused by the fact that he censored himself in the last line after not doing so for the rest of the message.
Linus only reacted this way to people who really should have known better. This isn't a "here is my first ever patch, I read all the rules and I hope I didn't break any" situation. The person he is chewing out is a kernel maintainer. They are someone who is experienced and trusted and Linus was rightly angry that this poor quality work was submitted.
However... Linus has also worked a lot on himself in the past few years, fully acknowledging that he shouldn't behave this harshly when someone fucks up. If the same situation was to present itself today, he would be much more professional, but would probably still be a bit angry and you'd know about it.
Linus is a flawed human being, but credit where it is due, he has worked on some of his character flaws.
It's disgusting that this post has not been removed, has a 96% postive vote ratio, has over 1K upvotes and is sitting at the top of All after almost a day.
This isn't a Linux meme. It's a celebration of abuse, abusive behaviour and abusive people.
All the people ITT condoning or making even the slightest accommodations for this behaviour ought to be ashamed and need to take a good, long look in a mirror.
What are the moderators of this community thinking? Are you reading this stuff? Do some of you agree with any of it?
Of all the things to celebrate about Linus and Linux this is not one of them.
There is no value in leaving this post up. There is nothing to be learned or gained by revealing just how gross some supposed Linux supporters may be.
Does anyone ITT seriously think this is how Linus or Linux developers want to be remembered and celebrated for their dedication and decades of toil?
Do you think anyone that's been on the receiving end of this kind of abuse on the job or in the home wants to jump onto Lemmy today to see this celebration of abusive and awful behaviour.
There are no excuses to be made. It doesn't matter that this happened many years ago and that Linus has managed to overcome behaving like this. The post itself is now the issue.
The many comments that have made even the slightest excuse for this kind of behaviour are awful and damaging to the reputations of Linus, Linux and the Linux community.
I like that Linus is so strict on not breaking user space because this obviously aids with compatibility and it's probably a big part of why rolling releases work.
But I sure hope Linus' eventual successor won't be toxic and...cringe. It's hard to take someone serious when he's raging this much.
Damn that was probably very hard to read for Mauro. This is something you never want to receive as Mail in your job. On the other hand it is good that Linux priorities fixing the kernel instead of letting other developers fix your code.
This email should have stayed in Draft for a few hours and then come back to remove all the expletives. At least Mauro has something to hang on the wall of his crapper.
I agree, it's completely unacceptable to introduce a bug and then to instead of taking responsibility for introducing such a bug, you start pointing fingers at everybody else.
It's like when a car hits a cyclist following all the rules and then tries to blame the cyclist for not following some made up rules that only exist in the drivers head "Cyclists should be on the SIDEWALK if they don't wanna get hit!"
Not only were they wrong to hit them, they're DOUBLE wrong for trying to blame them after the fact.
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