No. This isn't because Linus can't fire him. This wasn't Linus carefully picking his words to get his point across. This was an out of control rant and his explanations about that being his style are ones I do not accept as valid. They seem to be nothing more than excuses for a criminal lack of self discipline.

Mr. Chehab is either competent and made a mistake, or he is not competent and this is chronic. In the latter case, I can understand frustration, but this is exactly what self discipline is for. Because even if it was total incompetence, anger is not ever a valid response to incompetency. I bolded that because it's important. It's never appropriate in response to incompetence. Never. Not by anybody. Regardless of your self-professed management style. Regardless of the stakes. It is a failure of one's personal self discipline, and it is always... always self defeating.

Anger is a proper response in the face of willfulness or maliciousness. And looking at the thread, and in reading quite a number of other threads involving Mr. Chehab, it is clear that he was being neither willful nor malicious. Anger is part of the "fight or flight". It's an adjunct to combat, and the words Linus used were clearly combative. Combat is a response to combat - otherwise you are being an aggressor. In other words, Linus was being nothing more than a schoolyard bully picking on someone for no better reason than he could. It's that simple.

You can be stern, uncompromising, and even lay out consequences for ongoing failure without the anger and get the point across just as well. Here is how Linus' letter should have read:

Are you saying that pulseaudio is entering on some weird loop if the returned value is not -EINVAL? That seems a bug at pulseaudio.

Mauro, this sounds like excuse-making.

It's a bug alright - in the kernel. You've been a kernel maintainer too long to not know that the first rule of kernel maintenance is that if a change results in user programs breaking then it's a bug in the kernel. We never EVER blame the user programs. Don't do that again.

To make matters worse, the entire commit (f0ed2ce840b3) is substandard. You know that ENOENT is not a valid error return from an ioctl. Never has been, never will be. ENOENT means "No such file and directory", and is for path operations. ioctl's are done on files that have already been opened, there's no way that ENOENT would ever be valid.

So, on a first glance, this doesn't sound like a regression, but, instead, it looks tha pulseaudio/tumbleweed has some serious bugs and/or regressions.

I don't want to see this sort of excuse-making from a kernel maintainer again.

I'm going to apply Rafael's patch directly myself. My taking time and effort to apply fixes directly for problems you've introduced means your work has reduced overall efficiency. Make sure that doesn't happen again.

Seriously.

WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE!

I'm frustrated because your whole email was wrong, and the patch that broke things was substandard. The fact that you seem to try to make *excuses* for breaking user space and blame some external program that *used* to work, is just not how we work.

                            A Better Linus

I didn't say you get to use violence as a remedy, I'm saying that the reality is that people were using violence as a remedy and that Youtube did the correct thing. It's fine for some airy-fairy rights-obsessed intellectual in the EFF to say that all censorship is wrong, but there were real people with real guns at peoples heads. Which innocent are you willing to sacrifice for the ideal of never taking a video off of Youtube? A video made with the intention to inflame hatred.

I'll tell you what, hero... you want to stand up for rights? Get a nice big tablet, hang it off your chest, and put that video on it while walking around in Libya. I will seriously pay for the tablet and the plane ticket to Libya. You and I both know I will only be out for a one-way ticket.

If YOU want to make a point about censorship.... then YOU go make your point. Put your own life on the line. Youtube execs acted in good faith to save lives in a terrible situation. They decided they weren't going to play with other people's lives. And good for them!

Youtube's blocking of that video was an effort to save lives. I'm not convinced that the production of the "Innocence of Muslims" wasn't intended to have the effect it had. Perhaps as a people those who are murderously offended by such things need to grow up and get a thicker skin. I'll grant that. But any words, religiously themed or not, which are intended to offend are reprehensible. And I applaud Youtube for taking steps to mitigate the disaster that video initiated.

Beyond this, so many people (Americans especially) have this "I may not like what you say, but I'll die to defend your right to say it" attitude that sounds good on the surface, but which denies a basic fact, which is that words which are intended to be hateful do hurt. There is no place for any action which is intended to harm, whether that action is picking up a stick or a pen. There is a difference between an unpopular idea expressed in good faith, and one intended to offend. And while differentiating may be difficult, in an age of instant global communications, at least Youtube stood up and tried. They made a call with what they will allow on a network they own. No one should have gotten murderously angry over this video, but the fact is some people did. And you may not like suppressing ideas, but there may be some people alive today who wouldn't be if that video wasn't turned off for a time. Which of those people is the EFF going to tell shouldn't be alive today?

How is a company defending a legitimate copyright imply anything about the quality of their machines.

First of all, there is a difference between "defending" a copyright and using a copyright underhandedly. I could use copyright law to promote racism by including a license that forbids the reading of a book by a particular race or creed. The law would allow this, but I doubt many would argue that it is ethical. Toshiba has a copyright on the material and the law allows them do act as they did. Those are facts. But just because the law allows Toshiba to use a copyright in this way does not make it any more or less right. In fact, it is the use of copyright law for unethical purposes that prompted the FSF to use copyright law as a weapon to further a better purpose.

I see no obvious money-making possibility for Tim's laptop service manual site. I have advertisement blocked, so I don't know if the site has any, but even if it does, I highly doubt the revenue from that even remotely covers the site costs. So implying that the site stole Toshiba's manuals to make money from is disingenuous.

How does Toshiba's actions say anything about the quality of their products? Using copyright to suppress the distribution of technical material that most companies try to distribute as widely as possible... this can be taken to mean there is something in those technical materials that Toshiba does not want people knowing. Which can imply a poor product.

It doesn't matter if it shows incredibly low understanding of what a QR code is. Slashdot doesn't care about accuracy as much as it cares about what will stir up comments. Put in a story that has, like this one does, an error in understanding of the technology or risk of a virus, is poking a stick into a nerd's nest. They'll all come out buzzing angrily posting about it, and Slashdot is all happy because they get comments and clicks and interest.

There are a lot of this type of story with the kind of tauntingly inaccuracies that this one has posted to Slashdot recently. So many, I suspect their editors are making a conscious effort to do so.

For $150,000, I would take the time to make a "prototype" cartridge. Built with 80s technology, this would not be hard to make at home. The kind of price tag that is being asked for it is something that is reserved for items with verified provenance. And when I said verified, I mean something more than the seller saying "go google 'NES ZELDA PROTO'". Which, interestingly enough turns up a couple of forum threads debating whether or not it's genuine.

Seriously, making this thing would be an afternoon project. I hope someone insists on some serious background checks.

The company is presumably going to use the software in-house. Which means, until and unless they do at some point decide to release the software, there are no constraints. They can do whatever they want with it, including modify it without "releasing" the source.

I'm not sure what GPL-ing what will be in-house software gets you, the author.

qBitTorrent is a fantastic open source alternative to uTorrent.

I wholeheartedly agree. The whole point of Gigabit is that one computer can't saturate it. You don't want any one transfer saturating a network.