Thursday, 03 January 2013 04:40

Linus Torvalds won’t tolerate lousy work

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The famous adage that the customer is always right can also be applied to open source software, that is, in relation to the Linux kernel and user software. At least that is what we hear when we ask for the opinion of Linus Torvalds about his creation; Linux.

The distributiuon list for the development of the Linux kernel was an unusually stormy place, after Linus Torvalds very sharply explained to one of the kernel developers that some principles should be kept. Although most of the discussion was quite funny, Mauro Carvalho Chehab probably was not too happy. The mentioned "kernel maintainer" recently introduced a bug in the code thus preventing the proper work of PulseAudio.  After that he blamed the software for the problem that occurred.

This procedure angered Linus Torvalds, who then “shouted” at Mauro in the distributiuon list using very juicy expressions to describe Mauro's incompetence and faults. In his reply Linus got quite mad while explaining to Mauro that the patch he made is obvious trash and that he completely missed the point, by explaining to him that the first rule of kernel development is to never blame client software and that such mistakes should not happen. He called Mauro's code complete garbage and asked that he stops creating problems for user software; he also released a patch for the problem personally. Most feel that Torvalds did this because he felt that Mauro is not capable to do the job properly.

[Ed- Linus Torvalds is an interesting and flamboyant person. After giving nVidia the finger during a Q&A session he has spoken out about issues with Microsoft and other software companies. It is not surprising to hear that Torvalds reprimanded someone in a semi-public distribution group over what he felt is incompetence. Although Torvalds does have a point this little outburst also comes at a time when  most see Linux as an actual rising competitor to Windows due to Windows 8 and the somewhat limited consumer acceptance of the new OS. This all could be a nice PR move to show how much better Linux is than Windows…]

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Read 8401 times Last modified on Thursday, 03 January 2013 04:50

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