I have trouble understanding why it bothers people so much that Linus is rude sometimes. You don't have to interact with him if you don't want. You can even contribute to the kernel without interacting with him. Whatever he's been doing has been working for going on 3 decades now, I don't see a burning need to change it because it bothers some outsiders.
There's this weird sense of entitlement. People want to elbow their way into this long-running and successful project and start telling everybody how they ought to behave. They think they have the right to contribute on their own terms without bothering to understand the project culture, and think it's everybody else's responsibility to make things easy for them and behave in a way they approve of.
If you really think the LKML is too toxic and hostile, to the detriment of the project, then feel free to fork it and start up a parallel project without the problems you see. Surely your friendly corporate-style culture will attract more contributors and soon you'll have the more successful kernel, right?
Personally, I like having somebody in charge of the core of the OS who's so concerned with correctness and hygiene that he gets upset when they're violated.
The main problem for me is the old "fish rots from the head down" effect -- when the rude and entitled behavior comes directly from the top, it's no surprise when everyone else starts acting like that and gets at each other's throats. It should be obvious by now where this weird sense of entitlement and refusal to understand other people's culture is coming from.
>feel free to fork it and start up a parallel project without the problems you see
Most Linux distros are basically already doing this. They all have their own patchsets. It's well beyond correctness and hygiene at this point, if you actually look at the changes that are being disputed, it already falls a lot more in the "cultural differences" category.
So the LKML has been rotting from the head down for...30 years? If the result of that is Linux, maybe the rot isn't as bad as you fear.
The cultural differences that cause distro forks are debates over free-vs-libre, what belongs in the kernel vs userspace, and standardization issues, not (afaik) "we won't submit this to the upstream kernel because we don't approve of the way they talk to each other there". And I think it's very important for the core kernel devs to hold the line on those issues.
I think the kernel developers got on pretty well for all those years and managed to put a pretty good product together, despite the big rotten head. And Linux distro maintain patchsets, but they're against mainline, that's a very salient difference here. They still start from whatever upstream publishes, they're not so upset by swearwords that they took a snapshot at Linux 2.4 and only add their own code on top of that.
The point there is, while some negative attitudes may not be preventing other projects from using the code, they do prevent the project from growing, and it leads to fragmentation, which I believe they are seeking to minimize. So something has to give.
Well...I like Linus just fine as kernel maintainer, but I remember a dozen times (over 2 decades, to be fair) when he was, uhh, very direct. It's often not as aggressive as people make out, but he can definitely get a bit mean when people keep making the same mistakes.
I have trouble understanding why it bothers people so much that Linus is rude sometimes. You don't have to interact with him if you don't want. You can even contribute to the kernel without interacting with him. Whatever he's been doing has been working for going on 3 decades now, I don't see a burning need to change it because it bothers some outsiders.
There's this weird sense of entitlement. People want to elbow their way into this long-running and successful project and start telling everybody how they ought to behave. They think they have the right to contribute on their own terms without bothering to understand the project culture, and think it's everybody else's responsibility to make things easy for them and behave in a way they approve of.
If you really think the LKML is too toxic and hostile, to the detriment of the project, then feel free to fork it and start up a parallel project without the problems you see. Surely your friendly corporate-style culture will attract more contributors and soon you'll have the more successful kernel, right?
Personally, I like having somebody in charge of the core of the OS who's so concerned with correctness and hygiene that he gets upset when they're violated.