From Vox Day: the geeks have fought back on the idea of a civility code for the most crunchy of successful projects: the Linux kernel. If you want to be a contributor to the kernel your code will have brutal peer review, and if it passes you have to maintain it.
Sarah Sharp maintained the USB 3.0 drivers as part of her job at Intel and wanted corporate type control of the conversation. She failed. She has left.
Led by the meritocratic example of Linus Torvalds, the Linux development community successfully defeated an attempt by an SJW entryist to impose “civility and professionalism” i.e. a weaponized code of conduct, on the community…
Good riddance. That is exactly what a successful anti-SJW defense looks like. If the entryist is whining and crying and angrily decrying the mean antediluvian neanderthals who won’t cater to her feelings, you can be sure that the community she is attacking – and which she only cared about insofar as she could attempt to control it – did the right thing by refusing to give in to her.
This is good news for Linux, as the flipside of the Impossibility of Social Justice Convergence suggests that those organizations that resist social justice incursions will be considerably more likely to remain focused on their primary functions.
Well, Linus is Linus. And that is obstreperous, childlike, brilliant and at times abusive. He has written and maintained the most successful open source kernel for two decades. There are other ones: Gnu has one, minux has one, the BSDs have one… but Linux is now the basis of the OS behind android and Ubuntu… and most of the big iron and web servers that exist.
As I said, he can be childish. I like that, and I like his sense of humour.
.. after extensive statistical analysis of my G+ polling, I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion that internet polls are bad. Big surprise. But “Hurr durr I’ma sheep” trounced “I like online polls” by a 62-to-38% margin, in a poll that people weren’t even supposed to participate in. Who can argue with solid numbers like that? 5,796 votes from people who can’t even follow the most basic directions? In contrast, “v4.0” beat out “v3.20” by a slimmer margin of 56-to-44%, but with a total of 29,110 votes right now. Now, arguably, that vote spread is only about 3,200 votes, which is less than the almost six thousand votes that the “please ignore” poll got, so it could be considered noise. But hey, I asked, so I’ll honor the votes.
Sarah, in my view, made a few mistakes. Firstly, she tried to tell the person who runs things that she sets the standards and he must be polite. Linus had the reaction I have when people try to tell me not to use big words. I use even bigger ones. When I’m chirpy I use basic Anglo Saxon. When I am not I get very precise, and start using English with erudition, precision, and with the clear intent to cause damage.
The Linux “workplace” is primarily a mailing list in which developers discuss changes to the kernel. The criticism of Torvalds came yesterday from developer Sarah Sharp, a software engineer at Intel who has made numerous contributions to the Linux kernel in the past seven years. Sharp wrote:
Seriously, guys? Is this what we need in order to get improve -stable? Linus Torvalds is advocating for physical intimidation and violence. Ingo Molnar and Linus are advocating for verbal abuse.
Not *fucking* cool. Violence, whether it be physical intimidation, verbal threats or verbal abuse is not acceptable. Keep it professional on the mailing lists.
Let’s discuss this at Kernel Summit where we can at least yell at each other in person. Yeah, just try yelling at me about this. I’ll roar right back, louder, for all the people who lose their voice when they get yelled at by top maintainers. I won’t be the nice girl anymore.
Sarah Sharp
Sharp’s e-mail quoted statements from Torvalds such as “Have you guys *seen* Greg? The guy is a freakish giant. He *should* scare you. He might squish you without ever even noticing” and “Greg, the reason you get a lot of stable patches seems to be that you make it easy to act as a door-mat. Clearly at least some people say ‘I know this patch isn’t important enough to send to Linus, but I know Greg will silently accept it after the fact, so I’ll just wait and mark it for stable.’ You may need to learn to shout at people.” (Torvalds’ target is Linux kernel chief Greg Kroah-Hartman.)
On her blog, Sharp pointed to two other e-mails from Torvalds containing language such as “Mauro, SHUT THE FUCK UP!” and “Rafael, please don’t *ever* write that crap again.”
“Linus, you’re one of the worst offenders”The argument over whether such language is appropriate then moved off-list, with Torvalds trying to make the conversation private and Sharp making it public again. “Oh, FFS, I [was] just called out on private email for ‘playing the victim card,'” Sharp wrote. “I will repeat: this is not just about me, or other minorities. I should not have to ask for professional behavior on the mailing lists. Professional behavior should be the default.”
At another point, Sharp added, “I am serious about this. Linus, you’re one of the worst offenders when it comes to verbally abusing people and publicly tearing their emotions apart.” She noted that while Torvalds has shown that he can politely tell developers their work needs changes, “You just don’t want to take the time to be polite to everyone.”
Torvalds’ responses to Sharp’s e-mails made it clear he has no intention of changing the way he writes to people on the Linux kernel mailing list. He even claimed to be something of an oppressed minority, saying Sharp should be sensitive to his Finnish culture and its reliance on cursing. In response to being called “one of the worst offenders,” he wrote:
Yes. And I do it partly (mostly) because it’s who I am, and partly because I honestly despise being subtle or “nice”.
The fact is, people need to know what my position on things are. And I can’t just say “please don’t do that”, because people won’t listen. I say “On the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle,” and I mean it.
And I definitely am not willing to string people along, either. I’ve had that happen too—not telling people clearly enough that I don’t like their approach, they go on to re-architect something, and get really upset when I am then not willing to take their work.
Sarah, first off, I don’t have that many tools at hand. Secondly, I simply don’t believe in being polite or politically correct. And you can point at all those cultural factors where some cultures are not happy with confrontation (and feel free to make it about gender too—I think that’s almost entirely cultural too). And please bring up “cultural sensitivity” while at it. And I’ll give you back that same “cultural sensitivity”. Please be sensitive to _my_ culture too.
Google “management by perkele”.
Do you really want to oppress a minority? Because Finns are a minority compared to almost any other country. If you want to talk cultural sensitivity, I’ll join you. But my culture includes cursing.
In another e-mail, Torvalds told Sharp that “the ‘victim card’ is exactly about trying to enforce your particular expectations on others, and trying to do so in a very particular way. It’s the old ‘think of the children’ argument. And it’s bogus. Calling things ‘professional’ is just more of the same—trying to enforce some kind of convention on others by trying to claim that it’s the only acceptable way.”
Torvalds concluded:
Because if you want me to “act professional,” I can tell you that I’m not interested. I’m sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I’m not going to start wearing ties, I’m *also* not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what “acting professionally” results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.
Clearly, Torvalds has an aversion to the corporate world. He works full-time on the kernel, with his work being funded by the nonprofit Linux Foundation (which in turn is funded by IBM, HP, Intel and dozens of other companies). The Linux Foundation has traditionally taken an extremely hands-off approach to Torvalds’ work. We asked the Foundation if it has any response to Sharp’s comments or any plans to discuss the matter with Torvalds, but we didn’t receive an immediate response.
The Linux foundation is hands off because a happy Linus is a productive Linus and they want the next kernel with the patches they need implemented. Linus has learned to scale by testing those around him… brutally… until he can trust them to make high quality decisions and that allows him to review code quickly and fast.
But he is not going to stop being a Finn.
So Sarah got stomped, which is exactly what should have happened . You don’t want office politics in a project team. You want a team that truste each other, and you don’t want to be walking on eggshells. If it is wrong, you want someone to call it out, and then help you fix it.
However, she is now saying she is the victim
although Sharp was careful not to name any names, Linux creator Linus Torvalds has undeniably been the most visible example of the sort of behavior she cites in the blog post. As the chief maintainer of the Linux kernel, Torvalds has frequently been profane, personal and unpleasant in his criticism of what he deems poor code or bad decisions, and his is the lead that many developers follow.
Sharp has publicly locked horns with senior Linux kernel developers including Torvalds in the past over issues of civility and professionalism, and has, arguably, been more responsible than anyone else for pressing the community to consider those issues more critically in recent years.
But even relatively minor moves to curb bad behavior have met with angry resistance from some kernel devs – a meekly worded “please be respectful” policy adopted as a kernel patch earlier this year provoked furious commentary on mailing lists and Reddit discussions, even if Torvalds himself lent the policy some cursory support. (Torvalds could not be reached for comment at the time this article was published.)
Sharp said that she’s tired of trying to push this particular rock uphill.
“Sadly, the behavioral changes I would like to see in the Linux kernel community are unlikely to happen any time soon,” she wrote. “Many senior Linux kernel developers stand by the right of maintainers to be technically and personally brutal. Even if they are very nice people in person, they do not want to see the Linux kernel communication style change.”
SUSE employee and Network World contributor Bryan Lunduke said that Sharp’s loss is “a bummer,” but argued that her departure doesn’t necessarily reflect badly on the kernel community.
“[N]ot everyone likes a politically correct work environment,” he said. “Not everyone will enjoy working in every environment, but my perception is that most working on the kernel enjoy doing so.”
Lunduke admitted, however, that Sharp’s departure isn’t going to help the image of Linux developers.
“It’s definitely not the greatest publicity in the world,” he said.
I disagree with Lunduke. I think this is excellent publicity: the idea of the code remaining king has been reinforced, and the SJWs have been removed. it is a win. The same creeping politics has destroyed too many projects. Linus is an example to us all.
And, to those fools who are trying to fork the kernel, you have to let your changes fold back as Android has: and if you don’t have someone fairly big supporting you there is a chance it will be, like Minix, a footnote in computing history.
