Excuse typos from phone...A quote from Randy pausch (0) last lecture(1)
"And he put his arm around my shoulders and we went for a little walk and he said, Randy, it’s such a shame that people perceive you as so arrogant. Because it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish in life. What a hell of a way to word “you’re being a jerk.” [laughter] Right? He doesn’t say you’re a jerk. He says people are perceiving you this way and he says the downside is it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish.
the situation here is a mentor told this to Randy. In that context, this conversation probably has more of an effect. in any situation I think the lesson still applies, a person will be limited if they continue their behavior no matter how much success they have, they could have accomplished more if they had dropped the attitude problem.
> it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish in life...
Sure. But the counter point is that it is also going to limit what you can learn (and hence achieve) if you are only willing to take lessons wrapped in fancy paper..
the last lecture is a good lecture Randy Pausch gave after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at Carnegie Mellon University, check the video out, I first watched it while in college and found it inspirational
what my point was here, is in this situation I think it is difficult to argue if Linus (And our IT community at large) had more of an attitude like the 'Lucky Ten Thousand' [0] not only would I think that have a much more positive effect on our code, it would in all aspects of technology and culture. yes you can easily have success with arrogance (I certainly have the problem every once in awhile albeit I usually vent when alone not at others unless it was started by someone else) that is not the point, the success could have been bigger and better if people worked together. personally I would like to see true open source GNU/source-phone(pardon the name) installation on smartphones so we stop having to sell our souls to apple/google/other major player and see solutions like that could be obtained with more cooperation and well reasoned and calm debate rather than inflammatory remarks.
##this part is a rant and can be safely ignored.
just to add one more note, compare reddit and HN. I think you will find people solving more complex issues and having more elegant solutions and discussion on here rather than Reddit... I find it is unfortunate that we sitll need to censor ourselves here because there are some topics that generate very emotional responses (my opinion) rather than being able to have constructive conversations, in order to keep the beauty we have here we have had to self sensor some topics and that makes me sad, I love this community and the discussions we have here, but if we cannot figure out a framework to have healthy debates about taboo topics, how can we expect others? I realize that is an elitest comment but there are a lot of smart people here and we still struggle.
Sure. But sometime, you can take away only that. but the loss will be all yours.
I mean, somebody can give you a block on gold unpolished and unwrapped. Sure, you can say, "How dare you give me that gold unwrapped! There is no way I am taking it. I demand you give that wrapped up property in fancy paper and tied with a ribbon." Sure you can say that. But the loss will be all yours. You got the shit anyway and gained no gold...
So the point is, if it the speaker who has to gain something by getting their point across, sure. They will have to be diplomatic. But when someone, halfway across the world is teaching you something from their ridiculously singular experience, seemingly in a rude way...
I'm not sure gold is the right analogy in this case.. I think that is holding grsecurity's work in higher esteem than is necessary. Don't forget, the code is just part of the work. Ones attitude in contributing that code is another large part of what makes the work "gold".
A better analogy might person A be handing person B back an improvement on person B's own recipe. However, the improvement is written on a piece of paper drenched in piss.
Don't forget, the entire reason grsecurity is able to exist at all is because the Linux kernel is open source and because countless of volunteers and companies have dedicated their time and energy doing exactly what grsecurity fails to do, contributing back in a manner which makes live livable for the maintainers. Each and every one of them could've decided to not bother properly splitting up patches, to not bother documenting their changes properly, and they personally wouldn't have been worse off in a lot of cases. However, because they decided to use proper communication skills (eg. not be a dick), everyone wins.
I think the gold in the parent's analogy is Linus's criticism. And people want it wrapped up in kinder words.
> Ones attitude in contributing that code is another large part of what makes the work "gold".
Even if the analogy meant we were talking about the code being the gold, this wouldn't make sense. The machine only executes code, regardless of the attitude of who wrote it.
I don't think so. If you read uhhfcuvv's post it is about "the other guy", to which Diederich replies and speaks about the "toxic communication", to which babyrainbow seems to take offense.
If you can't handle the truth, then every truhful communication can be "toxic" to you.