Linus Torvalds taking time away from Linux to learn empathy

Linus
Torvalds, the creator of Linux, poses with a penguin — the mascot
of Linux.

Linux
Foundation

• Linus Torvalds, the programmer behind the free and open
  source Linux operating system, is taking some time away from
  the project to “get some assistance on how to understand
  people’s emotions and respond appropriately.”
• Torvalds has a reputation for being something of a
  brilliant jerk — he’s known for sending profanity-laden
  e-mails, and generally showing a bad attitude that’s turned
  women and underrepresented groups especially away from
  contributing to Linux. 
• 
  “My flippant attacks in emails have been both
  unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I
  made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made
  sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry,”
  he told the Linux community.
  
• While many have praised Torvalds for showing this new
  attitude, there’s some skepticism over whether or not this
  commitment will make a material difference after decades of
  this behavior.

There’s a strong case to be made that Linus Torvalds is the
single most important programmer on the planet. Now, he’s
temporarily stepping away from Linux, the software for which he’s
best known, to “get some assistance on how to understand people’s
emotions and respond appropriately.”

Linux, the free and open source operating system that Torvalds
founded in 1991 and still oversees, runs on many, if not most, of
the servers and data centers that power the internet. While it
never caught on for its original purpose of providing a free
alternative PC operating system, Linux is the underlying layer
behind Google’s ubiquitous Android.

Torvalds also created git, the technology that lets
huge teams of programmers all collaborate on the same piece of
software. Git is the technology that underlies GitHub, the
company that Microsoft snapped up for $7.5 billion earlier this
year, as well as smaller companies including GitLab. 

But Torvalds has another, less-flattering reputation for being,
to put it bluntly, a jerk.

The Linux creator has earned a reputation for being someone that
nobody wants to work with; a sender of expletive-laden e-mails
and a leader whose bad attitude has pushed away women and
underrepresented groups from the community of volunteer Linux
developers. In the past, he’s described himself as “not a people
person,” putting a fine point on it. 

“Linus Torvalds deserves a Nobel Prize for git, the Turing
Award for Linux and [a] swift kick in the ass for almost
everything else he’s done,” as Twitter
user GonzoHacker put it in July. 

So it came as something of a shock when a note from Torvalds to the
Linux kernel development community on Sunday about a new
update also included a lengthy note saying that he was taking
a break, so he could 
“try to at least fix my
own behavior.” He says that as the leader of the Linux community,
his attitude has gotten in the way of the work. 

“I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person and that
probably doesn’t come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of all
me. The fact that I then misread people and don’t realize (for
years) how badly I’ve judged a situation and contributed to an
unprofessional environment is not good,” wrote Torvalds.

Later, he writes: “My flippant attacks in emails have been
both unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I
made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense
to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry.”

He does write that he plans to come back to Linux, after he
gets that help: “This is not some kind of “I’m burnt out, I need
to just go away’ break. I’m not feeling like I don’t want to
continue maintaining Linux. Quite the reverse. I very much *do*
want to continue to do this project that I’ve been working on for
almost three decades.”

He even jokes that perhaps part of this process would be
creating an e-mail filter that simply doesn’t send any e-mails
out with cusses in them. 

A big reversal

This note from Torvalds is a stark reversal from attitudes he had
previously expressed. 

In January 2015, he 
infamously
remarked
 “I’m not a nice person, and I don’t care
about you. I care about the technology and the kernel — that’s
what’s important to me.” In that same talk, he said “all
that [diversity] stuff is just details and not really
important.”

Before that, in 2013, Torvalds landed in hot water when
high-profile Linux contributor Sage Sharp publicly took
him to task over his use of expletives in official e-mails,
calling them “verbal abuse.” In 2015, Sharp quit working on Linux
entirely, in protest of the “toxic” community.

In a 2016 TED talk, Torvalds said “I am not a people
person.”

Of note, however, is that Torvalds’ note announcing his
hiatus also comes right as the Linux kernel community adopted its

first-ever code of conduct — a set of rules for how Linux
contributors should behave with each other, including guidelines
around empathy and constructive criticism.

The code of conduct replaces the community’s older
“Code
of Conflict;” a looser set of rules that concluded “Try to
keep in mind the immortal words of Bill and Ted, ‘Be excellent to
each other.'”

Torvalds is getting mixed reviews

The unexpected double-header of Torvalds’ announcement —
that he apologized for his past behavior, and that he was taking
time off to fix it — was met to largely lukewarm reviews from the
open source software world. 

While many were happy to see Torvalds apologize and express
a willingness to change his leadership style, others were more
skeptical, and are waiting to see what comes of it. A common
sentiment is that apologizing now doesn’t necessarily negate any
damages he might have caused over the last few
decades. 

We’ve reached out to the Linux Foundation, which oversees the
Linux community, for comment, and will update if we hear back.