I'm very familiar with the disagreement between Linus and Mauro. Mauro messed up. When Linus called him out on it, Mauro claimed that it was the userspace application's fault (!!!). A livid Linus told him to shut up and follow the rules (don't break userspace!). Then this exchange continued a little more. Mauro is an example of a developer who pushes back against the rules even though he's been in the game long enough to know not to. Swearing at Mauro is one thing, I think Linus should have considered ignoring Mauro's contributions as he has demonstrated a clear lack of judgment.

If Linus wouldn't have been very clear with his frustration, how much longer would that exchange have been?

Here's the exchange: https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/48

Where did Linus say this? If you're going to associate him with it, you should be able to back it up.

Show me where Linus did any of what you're claiming. You've constructed a strawman and slandered him in your comment.

And it would do nothing to serve as a notice to others about the topic.

Linus has been doing this for a very long time during which Linux has grown from his pet project to a major OS, so you seem to be off base about the long-term cost. This same management strategy made Bill Gates the richest man in the world and MS the leader in the business and desktop. Apple is the most valuable company in the world because Jobs employed this approach as well.

Yes, but I bet she doesn't use "naughty" words.

Does it really matter if the result is that the team is better for it?

This is the nature of OSS because you cannot fire your employees. You see, as an employee if I don't like your work, I'll let you go. But as a OSS leader, if you constantly pester me with the way you think things should be, I will develop a lack of empathy and tell you to go eat it. Hopefully, you'll either behave as I need you, or you'll stop pestering me.

Take a look through the mailing list and see how many times someone tells Linus he's wrong because it should be in C++ or Python or some other language. See how many times someone wants to pollute the source with some hack or feature that belongs in user space. Linus cannot fire these people, and his attempts to reason with them only have them continually post to the mailing list. The only response is to ban them, or tell them harshly to go away unless they have something of substance to contribute.

You cannot decode 720p30 and 1080p30 on the CPU on these devices. The performance wasn't there. You need to take advantage of the bundled HW codecs like PowerVR and Nvidia Tegra, which were available but without a consistent API. Google said that fragmentation wasn't an issue, but you'd have to write the app for each handset you wanted to work with, while Apple had several applications capable of doing this.

You misunderstand, there needs to be HW support in order to decode 720p30 and 1080p30 on these embedded platforms. Your CPU cannot perform the task. Luckily, most of these devices ship with the associated hardware. Unfortunately, Android chooses (or chose in 2010) not to make this available to developers.

We developed during Android 2.2, when there wasn't all the support there currently is. Furthermore, the support we had access to involved playing URLs, well the transport stream we used does not have a URL. Furthermore, at times we may have to directly insert I-Frames into the stream, manually step the decoder, and insert discontinuities into the stream. The codecs did not support any of that.

No, that's not correct; the problem goes further. On some devices things display differently, even though they have the same version of Android. On some devices you have access to audio/video codecs that aren't available on others.

In the end, this lack of cohesion meant my company stopped developing their A/V application because there was too much variability, even when versions of the Android OS were the same. When this happens we lose out on a market, but the customers never get a chance to use and enjoy our applications.

Know all of those "Send error report to Microsoft" windows that pop up when an app crashes? I suspect that these dumps are making their way to these guys.

Basically, everyone who's ever clicked "send report" has been informing the NSA of exploit vectors and not letting the vendor know.

You're being rather sexist. You assume that the women you spoke to are hired booth workers, but my experience (having worked the booths, myself has been that the attractive, professionally dressed woman is actually the technically competent person is sales and marketing for the company. Times have changed, women can have real jobs, too!

BTW, IT folks don't work the booths. Booths and shows are for establishing contact with potential businesses. They're where the meeting and greeting, and the wheeling and dealing of business takes place. The people the booths want are the C-levels and the VPs who can bring in contracts; not Joe User who is wasting their time asking whether or not this widget is backwards compatible with their DB9 system from 1983.

You're mixing two different programs. There is the program to monitor Verizon and other carriers, but this involved a site-wide pen register system. Then there is PRISM, which gives direct access to the servers of Google, Facebook, and several other tech giants.

End-to-end encryption hides information that is not being collected in the former program as they are not wiretapping the phone's voice data. End-to-end encryption does nothing for the latter program as the endpoint (Google, Facebook, etc) are providing your data to regardless how hard you try to obfuscate it from prying eyes.