Having offended everyone else in the world, Linus Torvalds calls own lawyers a 'nasty festering disease'
Time for a compendium of abuse
Coding curmudgeon Linus Torvalds has gone off on yet another rant: this time against open-source-defending lawyers and free software activist Bradley Kuhn.
On a mailing list about an upcoming Linux conference, a discussion about whether to include a session on the GPL that protects the open source operating system quickly devolved in an angry rant as its founder piled in.
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Talking about "being nice," here is a quick and far-from-comprehensive compendium of all the times Mr Torvalds has spread his particular brand of niceness within his own community.
"The GNOME people claiming that I set the 'attitude' that causes them problems is laughable," he ranted in September 2012. "Some GNOME people seem to be in total denial about what their problem really is. They'll wildly blame everybody except themselves."
"Mauro, SHUT THE FU*K UP!" the loveable leader told one the maintainers of the Linux kernel back in January 2013. "How long have you been a maintainer? And you still haven't learnt the first rule of kernel maintenance? ... Fix your approach to kernel programming."
David Howells was informed that he was "*****ing moronic" in February 2013 when he suggested adding code to the Linux kernel that embedded an X.509 public key certificate.
In June that same year, he threatened team members that he would "insult you, your mother, and your deceased pet hamster" if they sent him details on any more "non critical" changes.
In July 2013, one developer, Sarah Sharp, had had enough of the abuse and warned she was "not taking it any more" adding: "You don't need to SHOUT, call me names, or tell me to SHUT THE FU*K UP!" Linus did not take the criticism well, claiming it would promote "fake politeness" and the very next day sent out another expletive filled rant: "This piece-of-**** commit is marked for stable, but you clearly never even test-compiled it, did you?," he encouraged his team.
That developer who had the temerity to stand up to Torvalds quit two years later, saying she was fed up with being abused. "I could not work with people who helpfully encouraged newcomers to send patches, and then argued that maintainers should be allowed to spew whatever vile words they needed to in order to maintain radical emotional honesty," she noted.
Then there was the time he threatened to murder hardware designers at ARM. "I still really despise the absolute incredible sh*t that is non-discoverable buses, and I hope that ARM SoC hardware designers all die in some incredibly painful accident," he noted in September 2013. "So if you see any, send them my love, and possibly puncture the brake-lines on their car and put a little surprise in their coffee, OK?"
Kay Sievers was dismissed as a "*****ing prima donna" in April 2014. "It's really sad that things like this get elevated to this kind of situation, and I personally find it annoying that it's always the same *****ing prima donna involved," Torvalds railed. "This really really doesn't make me want to ever work with Kay Sievers."
In July 2015, he unloaded on Google's Gmail team for marking some of his mailing list messages as spam. "You dun goofed," he wrote in a public post. "Badly. Get your **** together, because a 20 per cent error rate for spam detection is making your spam filter useless."
"Christ people. This is just sh*t," he urged on developers working on Linux 4.3 back in November. "A shiny function that we have never ever needed anywhere else, and that is just compiler-masturbation," he complimented. "An idiotic unreadable mess ... Get rid of it. And I don't *ever* want to see that **** again."
And then there was the time he decided that anyone who didn't follow his particular comment syntax style was "brain-damaged." Using an extra line to close a comment in code was "disgusting drug-induced crap, and should die," he reasoned in July.
Of course, there is still a glimmer of hope that Linus may recognize that firing off abusive emails and encouraging a culture of aggressive insults may not be the best way to get the most out of a largely volunteer workforce.
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People tried one more time in 2014 to get him to understand the value of not being an as*h*le, to no avail. Following a widely quoted piece by developer Lennart Poettering, who noted that the Linux community was "quite a sick place to be in," Torvalds had one more stab at introspection.
