OMG is he a 10x engineer? 11???

Seriously, there's no productivity benchmark beyond which you shouldn't treat people with respect. There are broken cultures where you can get away with it, but you'll still be an asshole.

Linus is an asshole not because it's some deep essential part of his nature, he's an asshole because people give him a free pass.

Parent post was asking whether your knowledge of how much of an "asshole" Linus is comes from only reading the publicized outbursts, and not interacting on a day to day basis.

While it's not preferable, I think that we can be understanding of the fact that people can sometimes have outbursts due to stressors in their life. That said, whenever I've seen people bashing a Linus outburst, I've gone and read said outburst. It's never as bad as the "tech press" make it out to be.

>While it's not preferable, I think that we can be understanding of the fact that people can sometimes have outbursts due to stressors in their life.

Sure. The question is, do the rest of us treat those incidents as mistakes where somebody went over the line and behaved poorly, or do we defend the behaviour and even try to argue that it's a sign of good project management that should be emulated because it 'tells it like it is' and keeps away the 'idiots'? Sadly the latter is a common attitude, as seen in other comments in this thread.

I'm not sure, but given his cultural background, I'd say he's less of an asshole than most people think he is.

The level of rudeness in conversation is very dependent on cultural background and those ignoring it display cultural insensitiveness

Europeans are more straightforward than Canadians and Indians where everything is said in a mild passive-aggressive tone that goes nowhere.

I understand and have experienced what you're talking about, but I don't think it gets to the meat of what people dislike about the way Linus (occasionally) communicates with people. Being more straightforward as in "no that's a dumb idea because X" may put people off, but can be chalked up to "cultural differences in communication". This doesn't really apply to the kinda stuff Linus has said that people complain about:

"Mauro SHUT THE FUCK UP"

"I don't _ever_ want to hear that kind of obvious garbage and idiocy from a kernel maintainer again. "

"fix your approach to kernel programming."

"There aren't enough swear-words in the English language, so now I'll have to call you perkeleen vittupää just to express my disgust and frustration with this crap."

It's ridiculous to claim that that's just avoiding unnecessary civility. Those statements aren't "blunt", they're just him being a dick.

I agree - and in fact, Linus does also - that some of those are crossing the limit.

What I find remarkable is that people always talk about the same half-dozen remarks - from an history of 20 years of kernel development completely in the open.

Linus is a fucking remarkable example of civility. He just doesn't have an office where he can shit all over people in private, like so many managers.

The reason people keep talking about those incidents is that a lot of people defend that behaviour (see other posts in this thread) or even promote it as the best way to manage a project and deal with 'inferior' programmers.

If everybody was just saying that those were unfortunate incidents where he lost his temper and agreed they were inappropriate then this debate wouldn't keep happening. Some people aren't prepared to admit that Linus is ever at fault in any way during these episodes. There is even a group of people who think that those episodes are examples of 'telling it like it is' and 'sticking it to the PC crowd' and thus should be replicated as much as possible to make sure your project isn't 'swamped by idiots'. Unfortunately some of the people with that attitude maintain open source projects (and have downvote powers on HN).

I have found buffer overflow bugs in widely used open source projects that I have not informed the developers about, because when I've made previous bug reports they acted like assholes. I don't feel inclined to open myself up for public humiliation just to contribute to their project.

> and deal with 'inferior' programmers.

Except the people he usually deals with in a harsh manner are not inferior, rather, from the examples, it is usually the top collaborators

> I have found buffer overflow bugs in widely used open source projects that I have not informed the developers about, because when I've made previous bug reports they acted like assholes

I understand, but did you follow the bug reporting procedure?

Also, some projects may act polite towards outsiders then direct criticism (and bugs) to /dev/null

We defend that behaviour because this debate keeps happening and people keep blowing his (few) outbursts way out of proportion.

I don't think it's the best way to manage anything, but I also don't think these outbursts are a big deal.

No, he's not a remarkable example of civility. He's just a realistic example of a person who manages others. The thing is, like you pointed out, he does it in public.

> What I find remarkable is that people always talk about the same half-dozen remarks - from an history of 20 years of kernel development completely in the open.

Your commend would be relevant if my comment was the top of a thread or something. Take a look at the context of the conversation. I wasn't popping in out of context out of nowhere and saying "Linus is an asshole, look at these comments!". I was responding to the specific assertion that these asshole-ish statements can be attributed to cultural differences. I in no way disagree with the idea that "Linus was being a dick in these cases" is very very different from "Linus is a dick".

While they are blunt and I don't disagree about "him being a dick" written communication is very different from spoken ones, I can imagine someone using such words in a certain context and they sound less harsh.

But in the written medium it really come across is the most harsh way.

But while maintaining the kernel sometimes he needs to get the point across and saying "this is unacceptable, I am disappointed" will not work.

For those examples, when reading the context I (usually) agree with Linus (and with his attitude), and this usually happens when the situation has been building up and people keep repeating those mistakes.

Also, there are people much worse than Linus on the LKML (and subsystem lists), also some people are very polite and helpful.

Linus explains his point of view on this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZ017D_JOPY

"Europeans"? Grumble. There is no "European" culture.

Also, Linus isn't representative of Finnish or Swedish culture (none of which put a lot of stock in assholishness) as much as he is representative of early 90's hacker culture and he never had to grow out of it. It doesn't work as well for a guy with a lot of power though, it isn't cool when he kicks downwards.

You know what I mean, unless you want to nitpick. Is "Continental Western European" good enough?

I'm not saying he's representative, but it certainly plays a part.

Unless you want "Continental Eastern European", which makes Linus sound polite?

He's right and throwing up "Continental Western European" as an answer really emphasizes that your picture of Europe isn't in line with reality. You are saying the cultures of Spain, France, Germany (and many others) is all the same? That doesn't make sense. And then you lump up the Balkans and others as if somehow that's another group with a single culture?

kryptiskt is right and not nitpicking. You are trying to take widely diverse people groups and lump them all together based on a general ignorance of the places you are talking about.

> You are saying the cultures of Spain, France, Germany (and many others) is all the same? That doesn't make sense

Of course it doesn't make sense, that's why I never said it, but the cultures share some traits, even across language borders.

Having lived in more than one country in Europe I think I know something about the differences (and similarities) between them.

It makes less sense if you've lived here. Then you ought to know "European Culture", "Continental Western European Culture" and so on are nonsense labels. It would be like talking about North American Culture.

I have no clue what you mean, other European OSS contributors don't have that reputation, and they're legion. It's a just-so story made up to excuse Linus behavior. It has nothing to do with Europe. Or your imagined "European" culture that doesn't exist.

Dane here. The stereotype here is that Swedish people, much like the British, never say directly what they mean, are very polite, politically correct and generally much more orderly and conflict averse than us. My own experience with interacting with Swedes confirms this, as much as such things can be confirmed.

Linus is of course from the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland, and I don't know if it translates. But anyways, like others I find it a little weird that you speak of a singular European stereotype. It's not something I can understand at all, really, but I suppose yours is an outsider's perspective.

Linus has a sense of humour that is often misunderstood, especially by the PC crowd. Abrasiveness is an innate Finnish quality. Just think you're in a Monty Python sketch.

What are you proposing? Because if it involves preventing him posting to mailing lists or restricting his contributions to kernel development I'm against, and on pretty fundamental ethical principles: you appear to think there's a deontological injunction against permitting someone to do harm by disrespecting others, whereas I think that harm should be weighed against the benefits that would be lost thereby.

I also think that your opinion on why Linus behaves as he does is wishful thinking, sorry. There's a decent chance he'd take his ball and go home if the above were done. That would be bad.

It's also a mass communication strategy. Concise and harsh. No time wasted.

I think you should treat Linus with more respect.