It also requires the social capital necessary for the calls to be taken seriously.

I don't worry about Linus being silenced by prevailing culture; I worry that there won't be another Linus after him.

I wonder if something like FreeBSD is better suited for sustainability - from what I can tell, there's no "dictator" figure there, no critical single point of failure.

Consider an organization that would rather cease to exist or be relevant, than to allow itself all the freedoms to pivot and mutate significantly.

Institutions are much harder to set up, they require that you consider that evil people do evil things, so you have to set up rules and processes. The execution of those rules and processes have to span enough people that a conspiracy would be unlikely. It doesn't always work of course, people find ways to subvert institutions (the zero day exploits of their time).

I've worked at a company that had 20 people and a company that's had 5000 and some ones in between.

Going from 2-3 people to 20 is pretty manageable. Everyone knows each other, work gets done, you can call people out on their bullshit, stuff is fixed, because everyone feels responsible and accountable.

Then you go to 100 people and a few of the original 20 leave and the whole culture changes. 1000's of people? Totally different ball game. Incompetence will slip through, no single person has a full grasp on everything, meetings and more meetings and more managers playing broken telephone all day and you got people in different cities and time zones and countries who've never seen each other face-to-face and it's just a nightmare to manage that.

It can be done, but that's when you really need competent managers, and those are extremely hard to come by.

I'm sure there are teams and divisions within Intel that are extremely competent, people at the top of their game who are looking at this debacle and just shaking their heads just as much as Linus.

Now, however, it's nearly worthless. Anyone can do distribution, both of work and of end products, with very little effort thanks to computers and the Internet. Now, the limitations of those corporate structures are starting to cut deeper and not be compensated for. Their assumption of all of the tremendous failings of in-person human communication (that 'broken telephone' you mention is only part of it, there's also the inherent prejudices and irrational means of influence at play which are inescapable) in combination with both voluntarily abandoning essentially every single benefit they ever offered to employees and the inherent limitations in such a centralized structure will result in them falling apart. I mean, if the market has anything to say about it. Back when factories got big people accepted things like limitations in variety of goods, limited to nil personalization, etc because supporting those things was difficult for factories. Such is still difficult for large companies. They have executives who want to impress 'grand visions' upon the company so that they have some excuse (both personal and professional) to collect such absurdly overlarge compensation.

The human brain, by the way, is limited to keeping around 150 people in mind and maintaining stable relationships with them. It's called 'Dunbar's Number' and while there's certainly variation amongst different people with regard to it, I think we can safely presume there is no one with the ability to maintain and consider 1000+ stable relationships. That this is not reflected in our social structures is probably an error.

Which is why FOSS is so important. Can you imagine a world where Linux was closed source? You’d never have any insight into security patches, or these discussions.

FOSS is nice, but it's not a silver bullet. In this case I think Linus is largely to thank. Things will be a lot harder if he decides to retire.

Maybe I'm projecting.

Well if Linus goes too far, Google and a couple other big corporate contributors could team up and fork Linux, and it would be very hard for the open project to compete. I think the fact that Linus is so good is a big part of what makes the whole thing hold together.

I have a suspicion that Satya's rise to CEOdom via Azure's success could be attributed to him too.

1: https://www.amazon.com/Show-Stopper-Breakneck-Generation-Mic...

Spectre and meltdown are a great example of this. Sure, ARM, Intel, and (to a lesser extent) AMD may want to downplay these things, but Google did not, so it became a big deal anyway.

So what? Nobody said that. This is a strawman.

Of course FOSS is not sufficient. Look at any homework-style GitHub repo. Nobody disputes that.

All that is said is that FOSS is necessary to achieve this level of quality.

That doesn't make any sense. This is a strawman argument.

Nobody ever said that FOSS is a silver bullet, not even FSFE, FSF, or Stallman himself.

Ranting and swearing is part of who he is personally, but those are not generally required for being a good project leader.

I agree that his other skills are likely more important overall, and there are certainly other ways to be memorable, but I don't think you can discount the contribution of the ranting.

Like others said, his language helps drive the point home and leaves more of an impression. It also humanizes Linus as well.

As far as this particular Torvalds screed goes, it strikes me as measured for him. He is very clear about what he wants more of and what he wants less of. It's the code that is garbage, and he doesn't get overly personal other than to chide Woodhouse for glossing over the quality of Woodhouse's own contributions.

edit: ahh right, "mis-designed by morons" which is pretty inflammatory, and he should do better than that. I suspect he is trying to provoke someone at Intel into explaining their intent. Insult their intelligence, and they'll reveal something about their (possibly sinister) motive.

Linux is what allowed Intel to get its biggest foothold into the UNIX server market.

Given enough time, SPARC chips would also become vulnerable to these issues. See what happened to ARM: their later (higher performance) designs are more vulnerable than their older designs.

Solaris, with the exceptions of a few bright stars like DTrace and ZFS, always seemed like a POS to me, compared to linux. Especially as a work-station. Sun went full retard with Java everywhere right before they went under and I have a feeling the Solaris Desktop experience, and by extension the UNIX desktop experience, would be something from my worst nightmares, something to make wish for Windows Vista.

Don't get me wrong, I love Linux and loved FreeBSD back when it was more easy to choose... But I do think the 'free UNIX' movement has had unintended consequences like the demise of Sun, and perhaps now also this exposing of a failure in what was a desktop class chip architecture that was elevated to server usage.

Everything has a cost is all I'm saying.

Honestly, back when Linux started getting momentum, RMS' GNU/Linux argument had merit. Most of the stuff people where running on top of Linux, never mind using to develop Linux, came from the GNU project.

I actually worked at a startup that threw out a working Linux / MySQL solution in favor of a Sun / Oracle one. Because, you know, VC...

> Many business failures i've witnessed happened ultimately because nobody had the energy to cut down the bullshit forest that constantly regrows around a company.

The sad thing is that people have unironically labeled Linus "toxic" for calling out crap very bluntly like this.

While I think you've also been bitten by the "we accept everyone! (who thinks the way we do)" crowd as well, this is not the place or the way to express that frustration.

Not any serious people, so why do we care?

From what I've gathered the findings are based on real data.

Citation? Sounds interesting.

I tend not to take my own mistakes very seriously unless they come with serious consequences. Having someone I respect tear into me would, I think, force me to take greater care and apply more attention to my work than I already do.

I've heard similar anecdotes from people who have contributed. I even recall a female contributor say something positive about it.

If anything you'd have trouble getting code in because maintainer thinks it would add more complexity than is necessary, or would make his job harder in the future, or after writing and testing the code, you'd find out you should have been doing things differently, etc. These are much more probable ways to get discouraged from contributing kernel code.

There's a high bar to getting code in, and that can be frustrating. But it also keeps the mainline attractive to users and developers, because of ever improving code quality.

"What the fuck is this? This came from Satan's butt-hole. Kill whoever did this - kill them immediately, here, I'll go and find this asshole who submitted this patch, and do it for you, you lazy ingrates, why do I have to do everything around here?"

It's clearly putting additional pressure on Intel. How you feel about that depends on how you feel about them furiously trying to sweep everything under the carpet and hoping nobody notices.

Personally I think his humiliation of Intel here is putting necessary pressure on them. If he couched his terms and tried to be "nice" about this they wouldn't feel nearly the same pressure.

I wasn't even saying that his tone on this particular instance was excessive. I was responding to the general accusation that "PC culture will silence him". There's exactly one sentence I have issues with here ("the whole hardware interface is literally mis-designed by morons"). The rest of the email is toeing the line, but manages to be forceful without being outright insulting.

I don't. This is pretty much part of his brand. He's developed a reputation for flipping his lid and lambasting people who have always deserved it using entertainingly colorful language. That's why these rants still get to the top of HN.

>I was responding to the general accusation that "PC culture will silence him".

I mean, that seems to be what you're trying to do by demanding that he water his language down to something that has minimal emotional impact.

It's not like using the word morons is particularly offensive, either - except to the people who actually deserved it (Intel).

>There's exactly one sentence I have issues with here ("the whole hardware interface is literally mis-designed by morons").

Which is the sentence that got this rant on hacker news, which attracted all the attention which is necessary in order to put pressure on Intel to fix their shit.

And yet the title of the submission is "Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons". That's a good suggestion that the moron quote is not "what got this rant on hacker news". Perhaps it's on hacker news not because the form is inflammatory, but because the content is insightful.

Maybe—just maybe—the fact that the Linux project lead publicly accused Intel of not having their shit together is newsworthy and would end up on the front page of Hacker News no matter what tone it was written in, because that is newsworthy enough in and of itself.

Damn you, Wintel!

It's a sad thing to say about the state of the human specie.

The same can be said of free speech.