- Linus and co. made a lot of news recently about how Greg KH should be tougher on people who contribute patches to -stable:
So Greg, if you want it all to change, create some real threat: be frank with contributors and sometimes swear a bit.
You may need to learn to shout at people.
Now, I understand that Ingo Molnar and Linus Torvalds have a lot more experience in open source development than I do, but we can learn about this from scientific studies and statistics, rather than depending on unreliable personal experience.
In my experience, different people need different motivation. Using any one tactic brings us back to that old chestnut about having only one tool in the tool box and that tool being a hammer and how one will then begin to see nothing but nails. Being a jerk is not the same as being tough and being in control is not the same as leading. I have found that once expectations are negotiated, then they can be fulfilled and managed.
I think this was the post that set things off. If you want to parse PE binaries, go right ahead. If Red Hat wants to deep-throat Microsoft, that's your issue. That
has nothing what-so-ever to do with the kernel I maintain. It's
trivial for you guys to have a signing machine that parses the PE
binary, verifies the signatures, and signs the resulting keys with
your own key. You already wrote the code, for chissake, it's in that
f*cking pull request. Why should I care? Why should the kernel care about some idiotic "we
only sign PE binaries" stupidity? We support X.509, which is the
standard for signing. Do this in user land on a trusted machine. There is zero excuse for
doing it in the kernel. In the end it's Linus's baby and if you followed the whole Sarah Sharp back and forth with Linus you can be sure that Torvalds isn't about to change how he runs his fife.Guys, this is not a dick-sucking contest.
Pretty over the top. I don't think I'd be brave enough to make a meaningful contribution to something (something completely voluntary) if there was a chance I'd get dressed down like this. On the other hand there are evidently lots of people who are more than willing to accept this kind of treatment for a seat at the table. Linus