On Tue, 16 Jul 2013, Steven Rostedt wrote: > On Tue, 2013-07-16 at 16:49 +0100, Stefano Stabellini wrote: > > > I have been hacking in several different Open Source communities during > > the last few years, including qemu-devel, xen-devel, linux-arm and the > > lkml of course. > > > > The etiquette on the lkml is by far the roughest of them all. It's the > > It's also the largest of them all. > > > "bad neighborhood with guns" of the Open Source world. You never know > > when you are going to get a bullet, but sooner or later you'll get one. > > It just seems that way as it is so large. LKML has the most people and > will also have the biggest conflict in personalities. It just goes with > the territory. Even though the LKML is probably the largest Open Source community, there are other groups out there of similar size. I don't believe that in order to scale up we need to be like this. > > I think that it's hurting Linux and in particular it's hurting > > attracting new talents. > > Then why do we have the largest # of developers than any other Open > Source project? Because Linux is the most widely used kernel, it's everywhere from embedded devices to supercomputers. Many different companies make a business on Linux and pay people to work on it (not FreeBSD or NetBSD). But that's different from what I was saying below. Also not all the sub-groups within the kernel development circles work this way. Or maybe there are just enough brilliant kernel developers that don't care. > > Not just devs for hire but people passionate > > about what they do and eager to become more involved in the project. > > I met more than one good ex-Linux hacker that decided to move to do > > other things because of this. > > Honestly, I think LKML over the years has become more tame. Yeah, back > in 2005 it was rather harsh, but I don't really see that anymore. I > don't see the nasty flame wars going on. Everything seems to be focused > more on the technical side, and there's really very little personal > attacks out there. Sure, with 15,000 emails a month, you get a few. And > Linus will get fed up and burst. But they are really few and far > between. And sometimes, a Linus burst gets things moving along much > faster than being "professional". You think ARM would have gotten their > act together as quick as they did if Linus didn't curse them out and > threaten to stop pulling their crap? I think there is a way to get the point across without cursing. One can be clear and decisive without "bursting". It's easy to mistake cursing on the quality of the code for a personal attack. When HPA wrote "I find it utterly impossible to be offended by it", that might be true for Linus' rants and I also find them humorous sometimes. But unfortunately this kind of behavior is by no means limited to Linus and it's easy to misunderstand, especially when you don't know the person. -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe stable" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html