On 10/01/16 22:55, John R Pierce wrote:
On 1/9/2016 11:57 PM, Gavin Flower wrote:
I was at the 2015 Australian Linux Conference (held in Auckland, NZ),
when Sarah Sharp harangued Linus Torvalds for over 20 minutes. Linus
remained calm and polite throughout, yet most people would have been
obviously annoyed within the first 5 minutes.
(total outsider here, looking in)
some people are just toxic. psychic vampires. They can suck all the
energy out of something while contributing little or nothing.
OTOH, she seems to have done some seriously good work, hard stuff like
pioneering the linux framework for USB 3.0.
The more I read, the more I'm at least somewhat on her side, Linus
does not need to be as much of an a**hole as he comes off as. For sure
dealing with an environment like that you need to be really thick
skinned. At times when I read about Linus and the whole kernel
environment I think he's a vampire, but he's taking the power he's
sucking up and building something, so maybe thats excusable... does he
really need to be /that/ big of an ahole? I dunno.
entirely on the other hand, I note that FreeBSD development has a
whole lot less drama, and at least in my opinion, the kernel is a
whole lot more stable. hmmmmmmmm.
I sometimes look at the kernel mailing list:
https://lkml.org
Linus is normally very mild tempered, rarely do I see him lash out, but
I've only seen that against people who are competent, but doing/saying
something Linus strongly disagrees with. Most times he disagrees in an
almost boringly mild way.
I would be quiet chuffed if Linus was rude to me - as that would mean
that I'd met a fairly high standard. If I sent in a really stupid
patch, it would simply be ignored. Though I must say, I've not, and
almost certainly never going to, send in a kernel patch!
In the early days, Linus would quite readily admit to doing something
stupid & suggest that he should wear a brown paper bag in shame! He has
a wonderful sense of humour, especially apparent in the early days of
Linux - but his kernel release comments now appear far too professional!
Linus had said that one time he was too polite, and a developer
persisted wasting a lot of effort before Linus could get through to
him. So Linus is now a lot more direct.
Sarah is an extremely brilliant and very productive kernel programmer,
out classes me many times over in all programming metrics of any value -
it is a grave pity that she takes comments as personal attacks.
I have immense respect for Linus, and I understand where he is coming from.
I unexpectedly had about a ten minute one-to-one conversation with him
at the 2015 conference. He is aware that he is far from perfect. I
would be very happy if I was at least 1% as he is, in terms of effective
ability and contributions.
I suspect that Linux is more capable and growing a lot faster than any
of the BSD's!!! Though the BSD's may be more stable.
Cheers,
Gavin
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