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Re: Code of Conduct: Is it time?

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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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