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Bullying in Open Source Software Is a Massive Security Vulnerability (www.404media.co)

submitted 7 months ago by toaster@slrpnk.net to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 22 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Years ago, Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, was notoriously mean to people who submitted bad code.

Like he would straight up call it absolute dogshit and say they should feel ashamed, he'd call them fucking morons, on one occasion I believe he even told someone to kill themselves.

In the years since, though, he's said that he's found the abrasive authority figure schtick doesn't really work and has the unfortunate side effect of making others involved adversarial too, or will hasten the notorious FOSS developer burnout, and he has changed to a much warmer and friendlier way of working, and been quite apologetic about his past attitude.

[–] barsoap@lemm.ee 12 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Oh he's still perfectly blunt about code, and even about people if need be but he makes sure he has a good night's worth of sleep before he does that to not do it in anger. Which means dress-downs are now of the "I'm not angry, I'm disappointed" type. I'm not aware of him ever telling people to kill themselves, just erm "wondering":

Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F*CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f*ck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?

(And to be fair, yes, reading things one byte at a time is fucking stupid. Not something you'd ever expect in a kernel)

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 5 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

I'm not referring to that incident, I'm referring to his criticisms when he was using OpenSUSE and became frustrated at having to use the root password to do basically anything:

"If you have anything to do with security in a distro, and think that [users] need to have the root password to access some wireless network, or to be able to print out a paper, or to change the date-and-time settings, please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place."

And just as with you said above, yes, he is right, but it was completely uncalled for and unprofessional to go about the criticism in such a way.

I do find his quips funny, and in some workplaces it'd just be behind-closed-doors banter, but it's right that he doesn't go on mean rants anymore. Publicly humiliating devs and wiping your hands clean of the situation while your fans continue to harass them is not optimal.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, he has to deal with a lot of nonsense in his job. A lot of companies try to push utter crap through, and if his subsystem maintainers miss something, it makes his life much more difficult. He's merging tons of changes every day and doesn't have the time to review everything.

So I think some righteous anger is justified here. His subsystem maintainers should know better, and his anger was usually directed at them, not some random new contributor.

[–] TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 4 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Absolutely. His workload was insane and unending, and if crap code made its way through, he'd get a portion of the blame. It's very human to lash out in the way he did, particularly when he frequently saw the same mistakes over and over again.

But it's right that he made steps to not act in that way anymore. Linux developer burnout is bad enough even without Linus and others publicly calling you a shithead or telling you to kill yourself when you fuck up.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Yup. My point was that it's not necessarily autism or bullying that brought us here, but years of dealing with people who should know better. I'm glad he's toned it down though, but I did secretly enjoy reading his creative insults (and wouldn't want to be on the receiving end).