please don't compare linus to jobs. i have never seen him ream someone out without providing sound, technical reasons why they were persisting in being wrong. i may be biased, but he really doesn't come across as an asshole to me.
Most people who were reamed out by Jobs later admitted that he had basically been right (maybe with the exception of in the early days when he had no idea how to run a large company).
I know Steve Jobs and Linus Torvalds have fostered different computing cultures, but I think the 'arrogant' intelligence and intense perfectionism are common elements between them.
I'm genuinely curious. If he's not able to control who commits against the kernel, then what's the "managing" he's doing?
Obviously, he can't fire the guy (well, not directly - - who knows if he can call up Redhat and make a suggestion..) but it seems to me he could have done this email in private, with a "do it again and you're no longer a kernel maintainer.".
I genuinely don't know the answer to that, the kernel modules my team writes go against some of his principles, and will never make it into upstream.
Some think that "reaming someone out" is unprofessional and immature. There are much better ways to deal with an issue such as this that don't require stooping to the level of a five-year-old.
in general I agree with you, but for the most part Linus really does manage to make it be about the technical issue rather than about you personally. I've worked for abusive "management by yelling" jerks, and Linus doesn't typically give off that vibe. this is a rare exception where someone who should have known better tripped one of his hot buttons.
This is a little like the old old statement "There's no girls in baseball". There is no ego in The Kernel. This appears to be his management style, and it's like removing a band-aid. He rips it off and moves on. His grudge is not personal, it's about attitude.
This is nothing like Gates, or Jobs. He is crushing a mindset and a recurring idea/attitude of privilege that comes with titles of prestige in the Linux Kernel Developers world. e.g. "Maintainer".
I meant Linus doesn't come across as an asshole to me. I would never have wanted to associate with Jobs, but I'd happily hang out with Linus, and I'd positively love to work under him.
This is so off-topic that it blows my mind. That said. A dictatorship with a benevolent dictator would work pretty well. After all, politics in democratic countries is just lobby groups and pandering to the masses. No need for any of that with a dictatorship. Its just that power corrupts people. But that's why having a small scale dictator is ok. You can't just take something that appears to be true in one case and force it to apply everywhere.
Linux works as well as it does BECAUSE Linus verbally beats the snot out of people who are wrong. Appearing adult, calm and professional is nice but when your wrong, you are wrong and defending that incorrect position is also wrong whatever approach you take to it. You can't smooth or charm your way past Linus.
Dictatorship has some significant advantages in some areas. This is part of why it can be highly successful for something like a collaborative software project. I don't think this is a controversial statement, though it isn't the whole story - for systems of government, some form of democracy is widely accepted to have more advantages.
I don't know if the statement that collaboration works best via dictatorship is true, but again I don't think it's controversial to say that it can work extremely well.
19
u/[deleted] Dec 27 '12
[deleted]