Several months ago at work I found a vendor app that was calling listen(0), i.e., listen for up to 0 connections, and worked fine on older kernels because they rounded to a minimum of 8. Newer kernels stopped doing that. Nobody cared. Nobody got criticized, constructively or unconstructively. (By the time we noticed it was several kernel releases upstream so bringing it up would just be asking for another change to userspace.)
Linus himself broke userspace once in the hope nobody would notice. Spoiler: they did. https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/5/29/541
And that's not counting all the things that aren't part of the stable interface like procfs and sysfs nodes, device names, etc. There is a clear version of what Linus is trying to say. He's just never said it.
Seems like the new style comes across as just heavily disappointed and with a breach of trust, which I guess compared to the plain anger of old is easier to convey without swearing and vivid imagery.
I think I personally would still prefer to receive one of the old style messages, but that's probably just because I better handle people angry with me than disappointed.
This, so much this.
I was raised in a hot-headed european household where people would get angry and argue energetically, often using coarse language. It clearly demonstrated care, passion, and a willingness and desire to continue suffering together.
The low-energy disappointed response sends a very different message. It's probably my upbringing, but it leaves me feeling like the collaboration is over and I should pack up my things.
That's actually not that unusual. I actually found this email a lot harsher, in a certain sense.
When you losing your temper and swear at people, it's scary and intimidating because the hindbrain recognizes that behavior as, "this person is very likely to hit me". And since hindbrains are hindbrains, this reaction still happens even if it's over the internet. But you also end up making a big fool of yourself and leading people to discount what you're saying out of hand, because obviously you're angry and worked up. People losing their temper are hilarious from a safe distance, which is among other things the basic premise of Lewis Black's entire career as a comedian.
When you calmly and methodically communicate using only facts and logic, you do lose the hindbrain "this guy is going to hit me" reaction. But you get something more powerful. Heated anger indicates an unresolved problem. That's why you're all worked up--you have a nice little adrenaline rush going because you've detected a problem and you're fired up to go fix it. Being calm, even cold, is much more final: it indicates that everything is resolved. This approach completely disarms the defense mechanism of saying "Linus is just a dick" or thinking that he only said what he said out of anger.
People get angry over things they care about, but they'll cool off, and you'll learn what matters to them. However, if you're playing by The Rules and break them, you'll carry that mark for years, regardless of whether or not who's enforcing got over the incident.
In my books, Linus was always alright, but I like more polite yet firm Linus even more. Best of both worlds.
Merry Christmas to Linus and all Linux contributors (!), and thanks for one of the greatest gifts of modern time.
It‘s too direct but easily understandable.