On what seems the heels of talking about how developers “speak” in comments attached to repository submissions (taken from a sampling of GitHub commits that contain taboo language) comes another controversy from a different open source cultural facet: the Linux Kernel Mailing List. A post written by kernel developer Sarah Sharp, an Intel Linux developer, brought up her fears of the unprofessional nature of the lead of the project, Linus Torvalds.

If you’re interested in the flash-point, you can start reading in the LKML archives, but here’s the Sharp’s spark:

Seriously, guys? Is this what we need in order to get improve -stable? Linus Torvalds is advocating for physical intimidation and violence. Ingo Molnar and Linus are advocating for verbal abuse.

Not *fucking* cool. Violence, whether it be physical intimidation, verbal threats or verbal abuse is not acceptable. Keep it professional on the mailing lists.

Let’s discuss this at Kernel Summit where we can at least yell at each other in person. Yeah, just try yelling at me about this. I’ll roar right back, louder, for all the people who lose their voice when they get yelled at by top maintainers. I won’t be the nice girl anymore.

The post has presented a sudden upsurge in commentary through much of the forum and blog community about how different cultures interact—specifically how the work-from-home gritty developers work (such as Torvalds) and how died-in-the-code corporate developers function in their own environments (such as an Intel developer like Sharp.)

To drive this point home, is Torvalds’s reply to Sharp’s message about what she’s been seeing on the LKML:

Bullshit.

The thing is, the “victim card” is exactly about trying to enforce your particular expectations on others, and trying to do so in a very particular way. It’s the old “think of the children” argument. And it’s bogus. Calling things “professional” is just more of the same – trying to enforce some kind of convention on others by trying to claim that it’s the only acceptable way.

Because if you want me to “act professional”, I can tell you that I’m not interested. I’m sitting in my home office wearign a bathrobe. The same way I’m not going to start wearing ties, I’m *also* not going to

buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what “acting professionally” results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.

Torvalds’s full reply is somewhat longer and more contextualized, but it centers on the point that he lives in a space where he’d rather not see people restricted in their language and behavior by artificial (or external mores) that don’t have anything to do with the communication.

Many people writing about this subject seem to be focusing too much on the use of profanity or taboo language—which both Torvalds and Sharp engage in—but that’s obviously not at the core of Sharp’s problem with the behavior she’s calling out. I’ve seen commentary from spaces such as Slashdot, and reddit wend through conversations and try to pluck out the core of the issue and it seems to be thus:

Torvalds has generated around himself a culture of brash, fury, like Zeus on Olympus. He is in fact at the very top of a high mountain of code merging and maintenance. The top comments on reddit contend that for the most part Torvalds doesn’t engage with anyone new coming into the development process and largely only directs his fury towards his lieutenants; however publicly.

This does tend to make him (and by extension much of the community) appear to be filled with angry drill sergeants who boom, bluster, and threaten when they see something go wrong.  Sharp appears to be picking up on that in that those lower-down in the development mountain don’t want to engage with this sort of behavior and the fear is that this culture-of “I get to say it with as much violence as I want” might be suppressing otherwise good, but shy and introverted, developers from entering into the higher echelons.

Open source projects also have a public developer face

It’s my contention that while this does somewhat darken the external view of open source hacker culture—and specially those who belong to the LKML—there’s also to an extent an obvious limitation to the actual violence or abuse that can take place because much of the discussion happens on the open mic. Whereas the environment that Sharp is from, Intel and corporate, anything that happens to developers occurs behind closed doors and the public cannot plumb into it without a whistleblower, ex-employee, or other leak.

As a result, while Torvalds and other top-tier maintainers might run off at the mouth and yell (or throw thunderbolts) they do so largely in the open where their behavior is monitored.

According to long-time veterans who watch the LKML this discussion tends to come up about Torvalds personality whenever he goes off on a developer. So far, the abusive language hasn’t led to a full scale revolt or even enough media attention to make it worth intervening. Also: commenters have pointed out that it’s obvious that Torvalds is capable of and does engage in civil conversations outside of the group who engage in abusive corrective-behavior.