14 DAY TRIAL // Linus Torvalds talked today at LinuxCon and CloudOpen Europe, a conference organized by the Linux Foundation that reunites all the big names in the open source world. He answered a lot of questions and he also talked about the effects of the strong language he uses in the mailing list.
Linus Torvalds is recognized as the creator of the Linux kernel and the maintainer of the latest development version. He makes sure that we get a new RC almost every week and he is very involved in the discussions that take place in the mailing list. He doesn't really choose his words and has been blamed for using strong language with some of the developers.
The latest problem of this kind, which surfaced in the news as well, was when he decided to block code from a particular developer, after making some very harsh remarks. He is known to be very abrasive, especially when kernel developers break user space to fix something in the kernel. The same happened in this case and he basically went mental on the guy.
This is the closest he's been to an apology
Linus Torvalds never really talked about that particular discussion since and people moved on, but recently a systemd developer talked about the strong language in the open source community and he mentioned Linus Torvalds by name. He's not known to apologize, so this admission of guilt during LinuxCon is a big step forward. The moderator asked him what single decision in the last 23 years he would change.
"From a technical standpoint, no single decision has ever been that important... The problems tend to be around alienating users or developers and I'm pretty good at that. I use strong language. But again there's not a single instance I'd like to fix. There's a metric [expletive]load of those."
"One of the reasons we have this culture of strong language, that admittedly many people find off-putting, is that when it comes to technical people with strong opinions and with a strong drive to do something technically superior, you end up having these opinions show up as sometimes pretty strong language," said Linus Torvalds.
He didn't mention anyone by name or any specific incident, but the proximity to the complaints issued by Leonart Pottering, the systemd developer, seems to point towards that issue.
It also looks like Linux kernel 3.18 RC1 will arrive later this week and we'll soon have something new to play with.