I know what "rock star" and "cowboy" mean, thanks. In fact, I think they have very different meanings, and only the latter means what you described. But that doesn't really matter here; you don't want either around on your project if you can help it.

Regarding your later comments, I don't quite understand your final question if by your own admission you haven't bothered to read the entire thread. Please do so, and then see whether you still think the guy who made the mistake is some sort of arch-villain who should be banished for all eternity by Linux's resident hero figure.

But this is the problem. If you take an attitude like this that potentially scares contributors away, what proportion of the people who are left are only there because they are either paid to be there (and even then they can quit) or they are exactly that kind of rock star/cowboy persona who wants to contribute primarily so they can tell their geek friends they are a Linux kernel hacker?

I'm still trying to figure out why so many people here think he needs to learn that lesson. He acknowledged the error and apologised in his very first response to Torvalds.

And you don't see any possible connection between having a guy like this running the show, and the fact that most of the people who will go anywhere near his authority these days are paid to do it? Really? I wonder how that 75% statistic compares to OSS as a whole. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess it's way on the high side of average.

Linus also famously thinks that sticking with C is a good idea because it keeps the C++ programmers out, and he dislikes those people for reasons that seem to be nothing more than petty ignorance and bigotry. The world's C++ programmers have, obviously, produced vastly more useful software collectively than Linus Torvalds ever has or will, including plenty of system-level code, so I don't really care what opinion he might have on who are "good people" with scare quotes attached. I think good people are defined by the results they achieve, and good leaders are defined by their ability to form a group and help them achieve better results, and it's really as simple as that.

Actually, I read the entire thread before I started posting here, and contrary to numerous posts in this Slashdot discussion, I didn't see someone who was trying to claim what he did was correct or who refused to apologise. In fact, he acknowledged the problem and apologised in his very first response to Torvalds. He just also seems to be concerned that there is some wider issue that might require investigation and could be leading to bugs, unlike Torvalds, who seems to think anything beyond his initial objection is irrelevant. He also seems to think the most effective way to motivate people working with him is through the use of four letter words, a stage that most people move beyond by the time they leave school. It's rather depressing to see so many people here defending his appalling behaviour.

There is a limited pool of people out there with the time and talent to help with FOSS projects. Why do you think any of those people would favour a project where they'll be treated as shamefully as this if they make a mistake over one with a more constructive approach to reviews and collaboration where you learn from mistakes and move on?

So why did you bring the employment parallel up in the first place? Clearly this situation is different to what happens to employees who make mistakes in a company. The criticism of Linus in this Slashdot discussion hasn't been that he identified a mistake or wanted it fixed, both of which are obviously reasonable. It's the way he did it that is objectionable.

As I noted in a reply to another poster, it is unfortunate that the first response to criticising someone for making overly personal attacks appears to be receiving overly personal attacks myself. Particularly so, when that attack is saying I'm disconnected from reality, where it's management 101 that cultures like hero dependence and blame assignment are horribly counter-productive in the long term even if they sometimes achieve useful results for the immediate future.

Interesting interpretation. It seems to me that in his very first reply to Linus, he acknowledges the error in this case and apologises for it. It also seems like he is concerned about a wider issue that is why this problem arose in the first place, and wants to get to the bottom of it. That doesn't seem like "making excuses" to me, it seems like responsible software development. If Linus doesn't want to spend time on it, that's fine, but there's no need to chew the guy up for trying to make the software better.

Outside of geeks, Linux has never been in favour, despite many years of being probably the most high profile and well supported OSS project in the world. Even among geeks, it is mostly in favour as a server OS or a way to stick it to proprietary software makers like Microsoft; as an end user platform, Linux on the desktop is literally a running joke. Google, a commercial business with actual management, were more effective in developing an end user OS using a Linux foundation in a couple of years than the entire Linux community had been in well over a decade. You might like to think about that for a while.

Yes, it's interesting that in response to a post criticising someone for being hostile and making overly personal attacks, the best multiple have to come back with is... more overly personal attacks.

Interesting choice of wording. Managers run things through collaboration. Leaders run things by example. Dictators run things through fear.

In any case, I don't accept your premise. The software development world is full of examples of projects (open and proprietary alike) where having a single dominant person at the helm causes problems and holds back progress, even if the original vision was good and the project so far has been useful. Linus is merely one example. A less sinister one would be Guido van Rossum, whose dislike of basic functional programming techniques that have been spreading through the wider programming world has hurt the expressiveness of Python significantly. And of course looking more widely we have people like RMS, whose histrionics and unrealistic extremism probably do more to damage the FOSS movement today than any other single factor.

I'm not sure what you meant by some of that, but if you're suggesting that any software project without a single strong leader will fail, I strongly disagree. This isn't the military. Some of the most successful software projects in history were the results of collaborations. One good example is UNIX, so any attempts to argue that Linux needs such a structure are going to sound pretty weak. More generally, good projects employ all kinds of review processes today, in part to weed out nasty hacks. In fact, that's exactly what happened here, once you cut away all the melodrama.

And who, exactly, was being adamant about that? The unfortunate victim in this particular case agreed that it was an error, and apologised for it, in his very first reply to Linus. But he also seems interested in knowing whether there is a broader problem that needs attention, unlike Linus, who seems to consider things like finding the root cause of any wider issue to be "irrelevant".

That is debatable, but even if true, nothing says the punishment needs to be having daddy throw his toys out of the pram like a five year old, in full view of the Internet.

You didn't actually read the thread, I assume. If anyone was trying to sweep something under the rug there, it appears to be Linus.

Don't be silly. It is extremely unlikely that an employee would be fired for a single mistake like this.

For one thing, if you read the entire e-mail thread, it seems there may be a wider issue, where the "employee" in question is genuinely concerned with identifying the root cause, while Linus seems to be more concerned with shouting at someone and brushing the whole thing under the carpet. That hardly suggests that, as Taco Cowboy put it, "the top priority of Linux is to *NOT INTRODUCE ANY USERSPACE BUG*".

However, if you want to consider parallels with an employment scenario, that sort of over-the-top, public criticism would be grounds for a formal grievance, and persistent treatment of that kind could lead to a constructive dismissal case.

No, instead he apparently creates a contributor-hostile culture based on blame assignment and supported by a hero model. And that is far, far more dangerous, because when your hero isn't there (and he can't be everywhere, and he won't be around forever) you have pushed away good people who could have stepped up to take over the job. Internet-famous celebrities like Torvalds are toxic to a constructive development culture that consistently makes good products over the long term.

No. There's no excuse for being rude to someone in public like that, ever.

I think you found the problem right there: management should be impressing the shareholders/private owners by generating good returns. You can do that by reducing costs, or you can do it by generating more revenues, or both. But you can only reduce costs so far and still get the job done, while if you do a good job the increase in revenues can be almost unlimited in many industries.

In my experience, the kind of management team who think of their staff as interchangeable components and understand their business as cells on a spreadsheet are rarely able to conceive ways to significantly increase revenues, so the only tool in their box is cutting costs. These people are toxic. They can only sustain a business (maybe), not develop it. Development comes from the people building better products and services and from the people who go out to market and sell those products and services to paying customers, not from management or Finance or HR. If the productive people are artificially restrained, the business is already dead.

Fortunately, all my companies are privately held and we've always made a point of bootstrapping without taking on formal investors (and the interference that inevitably results), so generally the shareholders are the people who founded the business and maybe a few key contributors as well. And I think those of us who double as the management teams all share a common view on these kinds of issues: spending money to make good people as productive as possible is an investment almost guaranteed to yield excellent returns, whether that is getting someone a third monitor and a high-end graphics card to drive it, sending someone on a good training course (which many aren't, but that's another post), or buying a top-of-the-range chair for someone who's had back problems. That is why it's baffling to me that professional investors and executives used to dealing with them so often seem to pull in the other direction...

Surely the difficult thing is figuring out whether the complaints are valid?

I don't want to hire someone who is going to make mountains out of molehills and whine about every little thing [he said slightly hypocritically, having probably been guilty of that plenty of times himself in his early career]. But on the other hand, if there is a real problem, even a small one, that is unnecessarily interfering with someone's ability to get the job done or their satisfaction with how they do it, then I want to hire the kind of people who will flag it up in some constructive way so we can deal with it.

If that means someone in management has to put up with a stream of minor complaints from each new starter for a while because it turns out that our management processes suck in a lot of silly little ways, then so be it.

100% agreed.

The thing that really gets me is that the word "resources" feels like staff are a commodity: all drones are the same component, necessarily interchangeable, and if you need more done then you hire more drones and/or hire more expensive drones.

In reality, acknowledging the individual strengths (and addressing the individual weaknesses) of the real people working for an organisation is one of the biggest motivating factors there is. In contrast, and counter-intuitively to some people, just offering more money doesn't actually make that big a difference as long as you're paying a decent rate to start with.

I've always said that if any of my companies ever grows to the point that we have to bring in dedicated people to handle this sort of thing, we'll go back to the old name "personnel department" or some other less offensive/patronising description than "human resources".

As an side, whether it's "HR" or "IT" or anyone else, the default answer to questions for the form "This would help me do my job better, can the company please buy it for me?" will be "Yes". I never understand places who hire programmers for (in US terms) a six-figure salary, but then balk at dropping a few thousand more every few years to get them a state-of-the-art PC, whatever software tools they most prefer, the most comfortable chair/desk/lighting, and so on. And I never understand places who make it unnecessarily difficult for someone good to combine working for them and meeting their family care obligations. Obviously there comes a point where someone can no longer do the job effectively for one reason or another, but until you reach that point, don't you want to hire the best people you can and then make the most of them once you've got them?

Exactly. If there's a good working relationship with the PM, an honest and open conversation with them about why these recommendations/decisions are being made is almost certainly the best place to start.