At Open Source Summit Europe in Scotland, Linus Torvalds is meeting with Linux's top 40 or so developers at the Maintainers' Summit. This is his first step back in taking over Linux's reins.
A little over a month ago, Torvalds stepped back from running the Linux development community. In a note to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), Torvalds said, "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 people's emotions and respond appropriately."
That time is over. Torvalds is back.
He's a quick study if it only took him a month to learn how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately.
See also: Linus Torvalds is back at Linux while GNU's Stallman unveils a "kindness" policy
Previously: Linus Torvalds Taking a Break From Linux Kernel Maintainership
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(Score: 2) by theluggage on Monday October 22 2018, @07:37PM (3 children)
It doesn't take an uber-hacker like Linus a month to re-implement the "Moodwatch" system that Eudora featured 18 years ago [metafilter.com].
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday October 22 2018, @10:42PM (2 children)
Real question -- how long should it take? Seems like you could come up with some kind of class containing *basic* training on how to do this, at least for the mores of the last, say, 20 years, rather than relying entirely on a person's innate observational skills and trial-and-error. If not, how the hell do we expect that we'll be able to train AI [theguardian.com] to do this?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 22 2018, @11:12PM (1 child)
Time to practice.
You need time to go out and _practice_ these skills. Learn by demonstration, learn by doing. You need to have some dinners with groups of people. You need to attend events that aren't yours. You need to socialize with people you don't know, and you also need to practice _conflict_ with people that you don't know, which is something that others often strive to avoid. You need to let things sink in, and resume practicing. All of this is done over time. Self-reflection over the day before you go to sleep.
I'd honestly be surprised if anyone could develop any significant social skills in under six months, probably closer to a year.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 23 2018, @01:21AM
Linus is pretty fucking smart. I bet he could do it in less than a month if he wanted to.