On Wed, 2013-07-17 at 13:30 +0100, Ricardo Ferreira wrote: > Slashdot is just a cesspool of trolls, not a good comparison. Point taken. I posted this privately, and I think I'll repost it here. I need to modify it a bit as it wasn't meant to be public. When I started sending patches to LKML it was not the cursing I was afraid of, it was the possibility of top notch developers pointing out my flaws. Linux is intimidating not because it can be harsh, but because its the big league. You are posting code not only to the world but also to some of the best programmers on the planet, and frankly, that's really scary. And I think that's the real reason people who are shy tend not to want to participate. They use the harshness of LKML as an excuse, but I think it's really that they may be insecure about their own work and how it will compare with the best of the best. Both my wife and I have done karate for decades. My wife has even won a national tournament. She can do demos without a problem, but when she has to get up in front of other top black belts, she's a nervous wreck. She's her biggest critic, but she tends to know that when performing in front of people as good as she is, or better, they can see her flaws as much as she can. That is intimidating. The point I'm making is that we need to find out what is preventing good developers from joining the Linux community. Is it really the harshness of the project, or is it because we expect you to have the best code, and you will not be accepted if you are not that good. And I do not want people joining that are not good programmers. The answer is not to bash Linus into being a nice guy (which seems to be what Sarah's trying to do), but we can get mentors or even "scouts" to look for people of talent and help them get into the community. What those people need is not a nicer LKML that will let mediocre developers in, but someone that recognizes their talent and encourages them to join, by reinforcing to them how good of a developer they are. I've helped people this way. Talented programmers that were unsure of themselves, and they have done extremely well in our community. -- Steve -- 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