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posted by chromas on Thursday September 20 2018, @03:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the Code-of-Conduct+Kindness dept.

The New Yorker has its own story about Linus Torvalds temporarily stepping down from his post as maintainer of the Linux kernel:

After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Aside (archive)

Torvalds's decision to step aside came after The New Yorker asked him a series of questions about his conduct for a story on complaints about his abusive behavior discouraging women from working as Linux-kernel programmers. In a response to The New Yorker, Torvalds said, "I am very proud of the Linux code that I invented and the impact it has had on the world. I am not, however, always proud of my inability to communicate well with others—this is a lifelong struggle for me. To anyone whose feelings I have hurt, I am deeply sorry."

[...] Linux's élite developers, who are overwhelmingly male, tend to share their leader's aggressive self-confidence. There are very few women among the most prolific contributors, though the foundation and researchers estimate that roughly ten per cent of all Linux coders are women. "Everyone in tech knows about it, but Linus gets a pass," Megan Squire, a computer-science professor at Elon University, told me, referring to Torvalds's abusive behavior. "He's built up this cult of personality, this cult of importance."

For a research project, Squire used e-mails from Torvalds to train a computer to recognize insults. According to Squire's tabulations, more than a thousand of the twenty-one thousand e-mails Torvalds sent in a four-year period used the word "crap." "Slut," "bitch," and "bastard" were employed much less frequently during that period. Squire told me that she found few examples of gender bias. "He is an equal-opportunity abuser," she said. Squire added, though, that for non-male programmers the hostility and public humiliation is more isolating. Over time, many women programmers leave the community. "Women throw in the towel first," she told me. "They say, 'Why do I need to put up with this?' "

[...] Many women who contribute to Linux point to another open-source project, Python, as a guide for Linux as its faces its #MeToo moment.

Two Linux kernel developers turned diversity consultants are quoted in the story: Sage Sharp and Valerie Aurora. The New Yorker points out that the Linux Foundation's ten-member Technical Advisory Board will hear behavioral complaints, and all of the members are male.

Meanwhile, many people in the Linux community are upset about the move to adopt a Code of Conduct (CoC). Some of that discussion is taking place on the GitHub commit page for the CoC.


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  • (Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 20 2018, @10:31PM (6 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 20 2018, @10:31PM (#737793)

    Time to suck it up and listen to your hero. Took him a long time to realize his behavior was not OK, and now it is time for all of you to re-evaluate your own behaviors and the validation you took from the creator of Linux itself.

    Which brings me to the *NOT* normal part of the last week: the
    discussions (both in public mainly on the kernel summit discussion
    lists and then a lot in various private communications) about
    maintainership and the kernel community. Some of that discussion came
    about because of me screwing up my scheduling for the maintainer
    summit where these things are supposed to be discussed.

    And don't get me wrong. It's not like that discussion itself is in
    any way new to this week - we've been discussing maintainership and
    community for years. We've had lots of discussions both in private and
    on mailing lists. We have regular talks at conferences - again, both
    the "public speaking" kind and the "private hallway track" kind.

    No, what was new last week is really my reaction to it, and me being
    perhaps introspective (you be the judge).

    There were two parts to that.

    One was simply my own reaction to having screwed up my scheduling of
    the maintainership summit: yes, I was somewhat embarrassed about
    having screwed up my calendar, but honestly, I was mostly hopeful that
    I wouldn't have to go to the kernel summit that I have gone to every
    year for just about the last two decades.

    Yes, we got it rescheduled, and no, my "maybe you can just do it
    without me there" got overruled. But that whole situation then
    started a whole different kind of discussion. And kind of
    incidentally to that one, the second part was that I realized that I
    had completely mis-read some of the people involved.

    This is where the "look yourself in the mirror" moment comes in.

    So here we are, me finally on the one hand realizing that it wasn't
    actually funny or a good sign that I was hoping to just skip the
    yearly kernel summit entirely, and on the other hand realizing that I
    really had been ignoring some fairly deep-seated feelings in the
    community.

    It's one thing when you can ignore these issues. Usually itâs just
    something I didn't want to deal with.

    This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person
    and that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of
    all me. The fact that I then misread people and don't realize (for
    years) how badly I've judged a situation and contributed to an
    unprofessional environment is not good.

    This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of
    not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been
    both unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I made
    it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me.
    I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry.

    The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat
    painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my
    behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal
    behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development
    entirely.

    I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to
    understand peopleâs emotions and respond appropriately.

    Put another way: When asked at conferences, I occasionally talk about
    how the pain-points in kernel development have generally not been
    about the _technical_ issues, but about the inflection points where
    development flow and behavior changed.

    These pain points have been about managing the flow of patches, and
    often been associated with big tooling changes - moving from making
    releases with "patches and tar-balls" (and the _very_ painful
    discussions about how "Linus doesn't scale" back 15+ years ago) to
    using BitKeeper, and then to having to write git in order to get past
    the point of that no longer working for us.

    We haven't had that kind of pain-point in about a decade. But this
    week felt like that kind of pain point to me.

    To tie this all back to the actual 4.19-rc4 release (no, really, this
    _is_ related!) I actually think that 4.19 is looking fairly good,
    things have gotten to the "calm" period of the release cycle, and I've
    talked to Greg to ask him if he'd mind finishing up 4.19 for me, so
    that I can take a break, and try to at least fix my own behavior.

    This is not some kind of "I'm burnt out, I need to just go away"
    break. I'm not feeling like I don't want to continue maintaining
    Linux. Quite the reverse. I very much *do* want to continue to do
    this project that I've been working on for almost three decades.

    This is more like the time I got out of kernel development for a while
    because I needed to write a little tool called "git". I need to take
    a break to get help on how to behave differently and fix some issues
    in my tooling and workflow.

    And yes, some of it might be "just" tooling. Maybe I can get an email
    filter in place so at when I send email with curse-words, they just
    won't go out. Because hey, I'm a big believer in tools, and at least
    _some_ problems going forward might be improved with simple
    automation.

    I know when I really look âmyself in the mirrorâ it will be clear it's
    not the only change that has to happen, but hey... You can send me
    suggestions in email.

    I look forward to seeing you at the Maintainer Summit.

    Linus

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Thursday September 20 2018, @11:42PM (5 children)

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Thursday September 20 2018, @11:42PM (#737862) Journal

    It means shit. IMO, Linux is tired of all the crap that goes with the job. No, there's little reason to re-evaluate my own conduct, because Linus is tired. My own regular introversion is quite sufficient, thank you. My introversive pondering, paired with the evaluation of SJW whining and moaning, and added to the CTRL-LEFT agenda satisfies me that more assholes like myself are needed in this world.

    • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @04:58AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @04:58AM (#737975)

      Wow, snowflake meltdown!!!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @04:57PM (3 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 21 2018, @04:57PM (#738226)

      Some real serious identity politics going on in here. How dare someone post something relevant and directly from the main person?? Continue being adsholes, just do not complain if you aren't able to keep a job because people don't like working with you, might need to move out of the "right to work" states.

      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday September 21 2018, @10:25PM (2 children)

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 21 2018, @10:25PM (#738390) Journal

        It's getting near to fifty years that I've managed to remain gainfully employed. You might keep that in mind, before presuming that people who disagree with you (and your politics) are unemployable.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 24 2018, @04:03PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 24 2018, @04:03PM (#739216)

          Lawl. I doubt you are actually as big a jerk as linus when you are at work. But go ajead internet tough guy, prove me wrong.

          • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 24 2018, @04:15PM

            by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday September 24 2018, @04:15PM (#739228) Journal

            Jerkiness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Me? I get shit done. Need something destroyed? I can usually do it. Need something built? I can build a lot of stuff. No particle accelerators, no nuclear reactors, but if you need something more mundane, I can probably handle it. I fix stuff, and move stuff. Funny that you mention jerk - have you ever pulled a shotgun tanker? If you say "yes", then I challenge you to pull that same tank with a co-driver sleeping behind you. Smmooooooth! If you can't do it smoothly, your co-driver come out of the bunk wanting to beat on your head with a crowbar.

            Have you ever thought about having your eyes examined? Maybe the jerkiness is on your end.