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Lumifer comments on Rationality Quotes August 2013 - Less Wrong
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Creating projects is easy; forking is hard. And nobody wants to create a new kernel from scratch. Kernel hackers don't really have a lot of options. So I don't think your theoretical world has anything to do with the real world. Also, it seems to me that culture doesn't end up contained within a single project; Linux depends on GCC, for instance, so the Linux people have to interact with the GCC people. Which means that culture will bleed over. I was recently at a technical conference and a guy there said, "yeah, security is perhaps the only community that's less friendly than Linux kernel development." So now it's not just one project that's off-limits, but a whole field.
I also don't think there are necessarily any actual roar-and-smash types. That is, I think a fair number of people think it's fun to lay a beatdown on some uppity schmuck. I've experienced that myself, certainly. Why else would anyone bother wasting time arguing with creationists? But I'm not sure there are a lot of people who find it fun to be on the losing end of this. This is an extension of Arguments as Soldiers. When you're having a knock-down, drag-out fight with someone, it's harder to back down.
Notice that the original example of a person in that category was Mannie O'Kelly -- a fictional character.
[Linus]:
(later in that email, he does give a nod to effectiveness, but that doesn't seem to be his primary motivator).
I think it remains an open question whether Linus's style is in fact better than the alternative from the "get shit done" perspective. And the original quote implied, without evidence, that in fact it is. Not really sure why this is a "rationality" quote.
Forking is pretty easy -- it's getting people to follow your fork that's hard.
Well, there are certainly enough programmers who prefer to discuss code in terms of "only a brain-dead moron could write a library that does foo" or "why is this retarded object making three fucking calls to the database for each invocation", etc.
And while people generally don't find it fun to be on the losing side, this does not stop them from seeking and entering competitions and competitive spheres. Consider sports, e.g. boxing or martial arts.
Steelman this. I am pretty sure that in the North European culture being "subtle or nice" is dangerously close to being dishonest. You do not do anyone a favour by pretending he's doing OK while in reality he's clearly not doing OK. There is a difference between being direct and blunt - and being mean and nasty.
As I said, Linus' style is proven to work. We know it works well. An alternative style might work better or it might not -- we don't know.
I suspect you have a strong prior but no evidence.
I don't understand what you're saying here. Are you saying that anyone is proposing that Linus to act in a way that he would see as dishonest? Because I don't think that's the proposal. Consider the difference between these three statements:
The first one is rude, the second one is blunt, the third one is subtle/tactful/whatever. Linus appears to think that people are asking for subtle, when instead they're merely asking for not-rude. Blunt could even be:
So he doesn't even have to stop cursing.
There are many FOSS projects that don't use Linus's style and do work well. What's so special about Linux?
I've run a free/open source project; I tried to run it in a friendly way, and it worked out well (and continues to do so even after all of the original developers have left).
I can also point to Karl Fogel's book "Producing Open Source Software", where he says that rudeness shouldn't be tolerated. He's worked on a number of free/open source projects, so he's had the chance to experience a bunch of different styles.
We keep hitting the Typical Mind Fallacy over and over again :-)
Let me offer you my interpretation: the first one is blunt and might or might not be rude, depending on what the social norms and context are (and on whether thinking about frobnicating the beezlebib does provide incontrovertible evidence of severe brain trauma). The second one is not blunt at all, it's entirely neutral. The third one is a slighly more polite version of neutral. Your fourth example is still neutral, by the way -- there's nothing particularly blunt about explaining why something should not be done (or about using four-letter words, for that matter).
To contrast I'll offer my examples:
It's only the most successful open software ever. Otherwise, not much :-P
I recently came across this, which seems to have some evidence in my favor (and some irrelevant stuff): http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/10/extraordinary-leader/
A more direct approach might be: "no patches which frobnicate a beezlebib will be accepted".
I would say the size (in terms of SLOC count), scope (everything from TVs to supercomputers), lack of a equivalent substitute (MySQL or Postgres? Apache or Nginx? Linux or... BSD?), importance of correctness (its the kernel, stupid), and commercial involvement (Google, Oracle, etc.) make it very different from most FOSS projects. Mostly I'd say the size, complexity and very low tolerance of bugs.
I have no idea if Linus's attitude is helpful or not. I tend to think he could do better with more direct, polite approaches like the above, but I don't hold that belief very strongly.
Posts like this encourage me to remark that I want to have a website where I feel free to respond to others' actual words, not by how I'd rationalize those words if I were personally committed to them.