[Tfug] Alan Cox: "I've had enough"

[Joe Roberts]

It strikes me that most of the world takes verbal abuse too far.
Verbal abuse is always about the eccentricities and quirks of the
person dishing it out.  It never motivates people - it either makes
them defensive or spiteful.  It's why so much debate on anything
(politics, tech, whatever) on the Internet never goes anywhere because
it becomes a stupid mud-flinging contest.

I keep waiting for people to get tired of it.   But just like they
won't stop playing certain songs on radio I don't think anyone ever
wants to hear again, likewise, the kind of strident bullying
dominates.

In the mind of people who communicate that way, they feel like they're
laying a smackdown on whoever they're addressing, like a verbal
submission hold.  Instead it just makes people walk away, or curl into
a ball.

I would have hoped by now people would be over it, but they're not.  I
suppose you could point out that Linux has succeeded, but I would
suggest it probably succeeded in spite of, not because of, that kind
of leadership (I make no comments about Torvalds's other virtues - he
may have many.  I don't hang out on LKML or have anything to do with
development so I don't have an opinion on the rest.)

Professionally, I rarely run into people who have the minerals to be
like this in real life.  It's amazing how polite loudmouths get when
they're in a direct line of sight of people's fists.

Not to pick on St. Linus or anything.  He's hardly the worst of the
lot.  But I have to ask if anything constructive came out of this
incident, because I don't think it did.

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 1:29 PM, Eric Gearhart<eric at nixwizard.net> wrote:
> Maybe this discussion will carry over to the happy hour tonight....
> has anyone seen/heard about the Alan Cox "screw it I'm leaving"
> debacle?
>
> http://linux.slashdot.org/story/09/07/29/1925224/Alan-Cox-Quits-As-Linux-TTY-Maintainer-mdash-Ive-Had-Enough?from=rss
>
> "After a stern criticism from Linus, the long-time kernel hacker Alan
> Cox has decided to walk away as the maintainer of the TTY subsystem of
> the Linux Kernel, stating '...I've had enough. If you think that
> problem is easy to fix you fix it. Have fun. I've zapped the tty merge
> queue so anyone with patches for the tty layer can send them to the
> new maintainer.'"
>
> Reading over the thread (
> http://groups.google.com/group/fa.linux.kernel/browse_frm/thread/3c86e046663e163e/65ee5a5b49b5a596?tvc=1&pli=1
> ), it strikes me that Linus tends to take the verbal abuse a bit far
> IMO...
>
> --
> Eric
> http://nixwizard.net
>
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