[PaulCarrack]

What he said wasn't even nearly as bad as what I've seen Linus say in other threads over the years. Is / was Linus Torvalds ever subject to a "tribunal" like Kent just was?

In the end, it's the users that end up suffering. The guy (Hocko) kept making mistake after mistake and Kent struggled to get him to do anything remotely net positive with regard to the issues in that original thread.

I'm not arguing that what Kent did was right or wrong, but I would be curious to hear what other ways people work with remote developers who are awful, especially when they work for other companies. You can't just fire them, so I understand the frustration here.

[jitl]

Yes, Linus took some time off to “learn empathy” https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...

And I would say on a whole his behavior after 2018 has been less rude although he is still quite frank when necessary. I think it’s a positive change.

I think Linus’s message from 2018 is good perspective here: when someone behaves in a way that harms the mission of the kernel it’s better to try to change that behavior at the expensive of that person’s contributions for a limited time, rather than having the bad behavior negatively impact all other contributors forever.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/9/16/167

[KennyBlanken]

There is a huge difference between "frank" and "abusive."

One does not need to be abusive to "tell it like it is" (the most common phrase I heard people utter in defense of Linus's abhorrent behavior toward developers.)

Linus was a bully who let authoring the Linux kernel go to his head and inflate his ego.

[Twirrim]

The current CoC came out from a particularly bad incident with Linus, which he signed off on at the same time as he went into therapy and started working on himself. There is a remarkable difference in the before and after.

> I'm not arguing that what Kent did was right or wrong, but I would be curious to hear what other ways people work with remote developers who are awful, especially when they work for other companies. You can't just fire them, so I understand the frustration here.

They absolutely can "fire" them, by making a decision not to accept any contribution from them.

[RandomThoughts3]

> I'm not arguing that what Kent did was right or wrong

You are actually arguing that it was right.

> The guy (Hocko) kept making mistake after mistake and Kent struggled to get him to do anything remotely net positive

That’s not really an excuse for abuse. This kind of comment is why we need a CoC committee in the first place. There is something deeply wrong when community members openly state that insulting other people is ok because they are not productive.

> You can't just fire them, so I understand the frustration here.

You can and should just ignore them. It is not mandatory to engage with people you disagree with and find unproductive especially on the internet where filtering them out is not that difficult.

Less extreme but also working is to just engage them less often. If you slow down the conversation, there is less space for them to annoy you.

[neycoda]

But he's not arguing that it's right. That's a proactive action, not a default reaction to not arguing it's wrong.

Kent's comment is on the line, but it doesn't look abusive. Frankly I'm more curious about the assertions rather than the phrasing, which I think is only the offensive part.

Did Michal make mistake after mistake? Did he assert that crashes are better than error handling? Did his comments or actions logically lead to that happening? That does matter in system robustness.

It seems the meat of the statements Kent made were not explored, merely that he said them harshly. Holding back development because someone wouldn't apologize publicly seems pedantic. If Kent is being hyperbolic, ie inaccurate, that's the bigger concern.

[uluyol]

Around the time the CoC was being established, Linus went to therapy. If I recall correctly, some people had spoke to him about his behaviors and he decided to do something about it. I think it was done in private so it's unclear how much of it was pressure vs his own decision. His tone has become much less aggressive since.

[LtWorf]

He's been unpleasant also after he came back. Not as extreme maybe, but certainly not nice.

[unsnap_biceps]

Linus did take a break to work on his anger issues and he has been very noticeably improved these last 6 years. While I don't think it was due to a tribunal, but I think enough other developers told him in private to work on it.

https://www.theregister.com/2018/09/17/linus_torvalds_linux_...

[Filligree]

Came a bit too late for me; I spent some time fixing bugs in an ISDN driver in my teens, but Linus’ reputation prevented me from ever trying to upstream it.

[NewJazz]

The CoC is new, so no Linus wasn't subject to it in the past.