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.
Why so many people see letter as containing onlt 3 words and ignore part where Linus says that maintainer shouldn’t randomly blame userspace, how unrelated error code is(it’s like if your router crashed with message “there is no milk in the fridge”), repeats that maintainer shouldn’t randomly blame userspace, asks if patch good enough, says “WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE”,
I’m angry, because your whole email was so horribly wrong, and the patch that broke things was so obviously crap.
The fact that you then try to make excuses for breaking user space, and blaming some external program that used to work, is just shameful. It’s not how we work.
One does not simply break userspace. You’ll receive more than just angry bug reports. There are restless maintainers who will not sleep. And the great corporations are ever watchful.
I wonder if the guys here who are moaning like the snowflakes they are about Linus’ way of conveying the message (not the message itself) are from the US? I sometimes really wonder about the US mindset. The boss is critisizing you justifyably but in an inadequate tone? Hell breaks lose. But as an employee insisting on healthcare, an adequate number of days on paid time off, unionazing or at least have an able workers’ representation? Nah, that’s unheard of.
How about having some priorities? Grow a pair and chose your battles more wisely. The boss criticizes you? If he’s right, own up to your mistakes. Want some rights you are actually entitled to? Yeah, that’s what you fight for.
Don’t allow your boss to speak to you like that, unionize, and fight for your workers rights - including the right for dignity and respect, listed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but also for higher pay and better working conditions.
After twenty plus years of watching LKML and Linus’s behavior in general, I have to concur with you. Reading a lot of the ‘linus is an asshole’ threads, there’s generally a clear runup towards an outburst.
Just recently he called some developers out because it seemed evident they weren’t testing their patchsets on bare metal. So it’s not just code that gets called out, it’s also development methods that end up causing upstream pain.
Poor Mauro: they weren’t good at what they loved, they blamed others for their failings, and their community leader was nuts.
Jokes aside, we’ve already got toxic right there. Linus isn’t right, but someone like that would be fired with good cause. It’s one thing to make a mistake, it’s quite another to blame your co-workers for your own shoddy work.
In the following responses Mauro was very professional. l haven’t heard much about recently but Linus had some high tier anger issues. Most of the cases I was following back then he was right, but desperately needed to cool off.
I feel like people are overlooking the fact that this is typical early internet behavior lol.
I get that its the linux kernel mailing list, but I’m pretty sure Linus was way more wild online than in person because that’s how public internet forums and IRC used to be like.
Stallman has also said some equally braindead stuff lol.
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