The concept of flame wars and public pie throwing is not new in the open source world, and the open nature of the projects make us – the audience – get to see everything. To read every upset word and get to point back to the mails in retrospect.<\/p>\n
I don’t think people in the open source community is any particularly more trigger-happy to start the flame wars than people are outside of the openness, but open it is and then we can see it.<\/p>\n
I’ve always disliked the harsh attitude and language that seems to have become popular in some circles, and I believe Linus Torvalds himself is part of that movement as he’s often rude, bad-mouthed and very aggressive in his (leadership) style. I think that easily grows into a hostile and unfriendly atmosphere where little room is left for fun, for jest and for helping out among friends.<\/p>\n
So even if that is not the reason for the recent developments, here’s two episodes from August 2009:<\/p>\n
A short while ago we got to see well-known kernel hacker Alan Cox step down as tty maintainer<\/a> after an emotional argument on the lkml. The argument there was basically Linus telling Alan he should’ve admitted his error and acted on it earlier than he did.<\/p>\n Nearby, on the mailing list linux-arm-kernel a long-going argument about the management of the actual mailing list itself again sparkled up a fire. The argument in this case have been a long going discussion whether the mailing list Russell King (the main ARM Linux maintainer) runs should be open to allow non-subscribers to post without them needing moderation or not. It ended today with Russell shutting down his lists<\/a>.<\/p>\n Right now, it seems the linux-arm-kernel list is being transferred<\/a> over to infradead.org<\/a> by David Woodhouse to continue its life there, but I don’t think we’ve seen the end of this yet so things may settle differently. There’s also this patch <\/a>pending which suggests using the linux-arm list on vger.kernel.org.<\/p>\n (Readers should note that I myself don’t take side in any of these arguments.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The concept of flame wars and public pie throwing is not new in the open source world, and the open nature of the projects make us – the audience – get to see everything. To read every upset word and get to point back to the mails in retrospect. I don’t think people in the … Continue reading kernel hacker foodfights<\/span>