On Wed, Jul 17, 2013 at 09:03:35AM -0400, Steven Rostedt wrote: > 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. +1 Willy -- 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