I think one has to be fair about what sort of asshole Linus is. He is not like Steve Jobs, Balmer and Gates who could be vindictive and get personal.
For Linus it is more about being far too blunt. But you can clearly see Linus himself being aware of it and having some humbleness about it. Jobs in contrast would never admit his bad behavior.
As a fellow Nordic (Norwegian) I feel a significant component of this is simply Nordic cultural trait. We are quite blunt. We value honesty and directness. However Finns I believe are farther out on that spectrum.
The second parts is that I think he has probably mild asperger traits. I have that, my wife and oldest son. That does not make you an asshole. I don’t talk like Linus but it can mean you often are not able to pick up other people’s emotional state.
Keep in mind this is very different from being a psychopath. They can pick up other people’s emotions but don’t care of they are hurting them. Somebody with asperger don’t want to intentionally hurt others but may do so accidentally by not reading the person properly. Somebody with Asperger is willing to admit they have a problem that needs fixing just like Linus.
A psychopath does not think he/she has a problem that needs fixing.
I agree, he seemed to only get personal when he knew the developer, and it seemed like it was mainly because he knew that they knew better, but were still submitting bad patches anyway. I still remember seeing an email response to someone who was just starting college and was telling Linus that he thought the way they were using spinlocks in the kernel was wrong. Linus knew they didn't know any better, so he didn't insult them, and went into a lengthy email about why they were doing things the way they did, and how the student's professor had taught them wrong.
Even though Finns can be much more blunt than people are used to, I think he recognized a while ago that he was going beyond being blunt. During a conference in Australia, someone asked him about how people perceived his attitude and it's effect on the kernel community. He told them that he's not a nice person, he doesn't know why people think he would be, and that if people enter the community with that in mind, they'll stop feeling like they're being personally attacked.
Agree. I also think it's very important to point out that he has been doing an insane amount of work, under an insane amount of pressure (and not just external, also internal, by his own character), for decades. Anyone who is minimally obsessive and has been leading a project involving a lot of people for a while knows the feeling. Now, with open source it can get even trickier, and the scale of the work he has been doing is comparable to few other projects.
This is not to excuse him. But when he acknowledges it himself, I think everyone should be empathetic with that. I think that judging without taking the context into account is outright cruel. Universal morality standards are cool, but we shouldn't forget that in the end we are all still just humans. We all make unforgivable mistakes. Only some of us realize and admit them.
Have certainly experienced much more direct communication styles, e.g. in Holland, than are the norm in say UK.
I remember a seminar taught by US lady in Holland where at the end of the first day she said she had never experienced so much of what she perceived as aggression. We talked it through at the beginning of the second day and put most of it down to cultural differences.
I also got the impression from the way he described the situation about him not being good at reading emotions that it could be aspergers. That would be a good thing since there are many ways for him to mitigate issues around his emotional awareness, mostly by just understanding how he is different.
Here is an example that I believe is more than just "being far too blunt"[0], it's not the worst example I can remember but it is the first one I found. In my opinion his major issue is that he grandstands, he goes beyond being just blunt and becomes unnecessarily derogatory. If his issue was with being too blunt (and I suspect you'll find that most people don't consider being too blunt to be that much of an issue compared to his other faults) that email would look something like this:
> The conflict I get is due to stupid new gcc header file crap. But the
> reason I'm rejecting this is that I just don't think it brings in any
> positive value.
> This is the old code in net/ipv6/ip6_output.c:
> mtu -= hlen + sizeof(struct frag_hdr);
> and this is the new "improved" code that uses fancy stuff that wants
> magical built-in compiler support and has silly wrapper functions for
> when it doesn't exist:
> if (overflow_usub(mtu, hlen + sizeof(struct frag_hdr), &mtu) ||
> mtu <= 7)
> goto fail_toobig;
> The above code generates shit code
> <insert evidence that generated code is shit>
> and it's a lot more difficult for people to read.
> The code could easily have been done with just a single and
> understandable conditional, and the compiler would actually have
> generated better code, and the code would look better and more
> understandable.
> <evidence of this statement too>
> Why is this not
> if (mtu < hlen + sizeof(struct frag_hdr) + 8)
> goto fail_toobig;
> mtu -= hlen + sizeof(struct frag_hdr);
> which is the same number of lines, doesn't use helper functions that
> most people are unfamiliar with, and is much more obvious what it
> actually does.
> The second more obvious version is easier to read and understand. Does
> anybody disagree with this?
> Obviously you still could have overflow issues if the whole "hlen +
> xyz" expression overflows, but the "overflow_usub()" code had that
> too. So if that's the reason that this change was introduced then
> it hasn't actually fixed anything.
> I really do feel like this code was designed to use that
> new "overflow_usub()" code, it seems to be an excuse to use that
> function. Am I missing something here?
> Just to be clear I will always try to make sure that code which offers no
> positive value does not make it into the code base, regardless of where
> in the code it's being added.
> Linus
This is still just as blunt (I do think this would be more effective if it wasn't as blunt, I just wanted to try to show that being blunt wasn't the main issue), but it doesn't have the unnecessary grandstanding and derogatory comments. The main problem with the was Linus used to conduct himself is that he puts people on the defensive, and when people are on the defensive they have a much harder time admitting that they were wrong or learning anything.
I don't actually expect Linus to come back any less blunt, I expect him to come back less aggressive and derogatory.
For Linus it is more about being far too blunt. But you can clearly see Linus himself being aware of it and having some humbleness about it. Jobs in contrast would never admit his bad behavior.
As a fellow Nordic (Norwegian) I feel a significant component of this is simply Nordic cultural trait. We are quite blunt. We value honesty and directness. However Finns I believe are farther out on that spectrum.
The second parts is that I think he has probably mild asperger traits. I have that, my wife and oldest son. That does not make you an asshole. I don’t talk like Linus but it can mean you often are not able to pick up other people’s emotional state.
Keep in mind this is very different from being a psychopath. They can pick up other people’s emotions but don’t care of they are hurting them. Somebody with asperger don’t want to intentionally hurt others but may do so accidentally by not reading the person properly. Somebody with Asperger is willing to admit they have a problem that needs fixing just like Linus.
A psychopath does not think he/she has a problem that needs fixing.