Due to his precipitous style and outspoken behavior, Linus Torvalds has often found himself in troubled waters more than once. This time too it’s no different. He has been in the news for all the wrong reasons after using some harsh language in the official mailing list.
E
ven though Linus Torvalds technically works for the Linux Foundation, he is still the undisputed leader of the Linux project. People end up doing one of the following three things when he says something: they listen, they do what they were supposed to do in the first place, or they leave the project. The latter actually took place several times in the past few months, so basically it is exactly not something that is not heard of.The major problem lies with the harsh language that he uses with the developers and not the criticism faced by them or the corrective actions suggested by him. The fact of the matter is that he comes down so heavily on them that it would be very difficult for them to forget they have been scolded by Linus himself.
Another powerful dispute is that is very difficult to argue to what he is saying, even if it is delivered with strong language, as most of the time he tends to be right about the technical stuff.
The Linux kernel is technically an autocracy
One cannot deny Linus’ role as a guide in the community and the project, even if this is a cloak that he doesn’t care about or actually want. He only cares about the code and nothing else, which has been reinforced by him time and again.
According to him, people’s technical contributions to the Linux project should be above their feelings, as this is where the problems begin. Here is one of this latest rants.
“Really. Give me *one* reason why it was written in that idiotic way with two different conditionals, and a shiny new nonstandard function that wants particular compiler support to generate even half-way sane code, and even then generates worse code? A shiny function that we have never ever needed anywhere else, and that is just compiler-masturbation,” said Linus.
Until what has been seen of him, this is supposed to be one of his more tempered reactions. He was speaking about a useless piece of code that was introduced to perform a function, which could have been done with the existing tools. When people add stuff to his kernel, he really doesn’t like it specially when they are inducted at a later stage in the cycle, which in this case was the Linux kernel 4.3 RC7.