If you didn’t read all of this (I don’t blame you), here’s how I am reading it:
[Hector Martin] Rust devs, just submit the patch. Either Torvalds likes it or not. I assume that people against us are saboteurs. I know the future!
[Simona Vetter] You can’t eat your cake and have it too; either call it quits or try to change things from the inside, not both. Also stop creating drama, it affects me, and I’ve seen you creating drama for years, just so social media platforms can have their popcorn.
[Dave Arlie] Sima (Vetter) is right, stop creating drama. You are not helping [us? them?] this way.
[Martin] I feel tired and this justifies my behaviour. I also got deeply offended with the word “cancer” being used to refer to the Rust4Linux project. The process is broken. If my brigading doesn’t work then say what else would.
[Linus Torvalds] The process works dammit. Your brigading makes me not want to touch this shit. Patches matter, discussions matter, brigading doesn’t, you’re the problem here.
Personally I think that Vetter, Arlie, Torvalds are being spot on. It’s relevant to note that, based on the mailing list plus this blog entry, Arlie is at the very least sympathetic towards the Rust4Linux project, if not part of it.
The same people who might cheer you up, when you’re creating drama, are the ones who silently avoid you when it comes to working together. Because drama is only fun when it affects other people, not you.
And going by what Simona Vetter said in the mailing list, this is not the first time:
[Vetter] And this isn’t the first time or the second, by now it’s a pretty clear pattern over some years. And with the first I could explain why you [Hector Martin] react like that and you had my full understanding, but eventually that runs a bit thin as an excuse. Now I’m left with the unlikely explanation that you just like thundering in as the cavalry, fashionably late, maximally destructive, because it entertains the masses on fedi [Mastodon?] or reddit or wherever.
And being off social media will both decrease the odds Martin creates drama, and reduce the visibility of the drama he creates.
Alice and Bob are organising a party. Alice claims that they should serve cheap wine. Bob argues for cheap wine plus beer. Alice is rather stubborn on saying “no, we’ll get drunkards this way”; it’s a poor argument but it’s still about the drinks.
Then Charlie pops up out of nowhere. Charlie is not part of the party organisation, but he’s still planning to attend the party, and he’s a biiiig fan of beer. He picks a megaphone and says “Hey! Alice is calling every beer drinker a drunkard! As a beer drinker, I feel deeply offended by that. If I was Bob I’d simply buy lotsa beer and ignore Alice.”
Then you get a bunch of people, who’ll never attend the party, eating popcorn while they watch the “Alice vs. Bob+Charlie” fight. Except that there’s no fight; Alice and Bob are arguing about something, and Charlie is creating drama. And a few popcorn eaters are bound to exert pressure towards Alice to give beer an OK sign, without even bothering to hear her side of the matter.
That is brigading: regardless of his “intentions” Charlie is bringing random people into the discussion to exert pressure towards one side of the dispute. Including muppets that think that anyone trying to get what Alice says must be “illiterate beer haters”.
Now replace Alice, Bob, Charlie with Hellwig, Rust4Linux devs, Martin. Replace cheap wine with C and beer with Rust. It’s the same deal.
It’s brigading to go on social media platforms and complain about the people you work with in order to exert outside pressure on them. You’re bypassing the formal processes of discussion and consensus-building and trying to leverage informal power you have. This tends to make people very angry and reluctant to work with you no matter what.
Linux is an open source project, not a democracy. If you want to contribute you have to follow their rules.
Here’s the relevant kernel mailing list thread. There’s a lot of stuff going on before, mind you, but this part onwards is important.
If you didn’t read all of this (I don’t blame you), here’s how I am reading it:
Martin’s toot (mentioned by Vetter was deleted, but still readable from an archive link.
Personally I think that Vetter, Arlie, Torvalds are being spot on. It’s relevant to note that, based on the mailing list plus this blog entry, Arlie is at the very least sympathetic towards the Rust4Linux project, if not part of it.
Apparently, martin has in general nuked his socials? Im getting an error on mastadon
If that’s correct good for him. Seriously.
The same people who might cheer you up, when you’re creating drama, are the ones who silently avoid you when it comes to working together. Because drama is only fun when it affects other people, not you.
And going by what Simona Vetter said in the mailing list, this is not the first time:
And being off social media will both decrease the odds Martin creates drama, and reduce the visibility of the drama he creates.
What is Martin doing that makes it “brigading” instead of calling the community to express their opinion?
To add to what @chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world said, I’ll use an example.
Alice and Bob are organising a party. Alice claims that they should serve cheap wine. Bob argues for cheap wine plus beer. Alice is rather stubborn on saying “no, we’ll get drunkards this way”; it’s a poor argument but it’s still about the drinks.
Then Charlie pops up out of nowhere. Charlie is not part of the party organisation, but he’s still planning to attend the party, and he’s a biiiig fan of beer. He picks a megaphone and says “Hey! Alice is calling every beer drinker a drunkard! As a beer drinker, I feel deeply offended by that. If I was Bob I’d simply buy lotsa beer and ignore Alice.”
Then you get a bunch of people, who’ll never attend the party, eating popcorn while they watch the “Alice vs. Bob+Charlie” fight. Except that there’s no fight; Alice and Bob are arguing about something, and Charlie is creating drama. And a few popcorn eaters are bound to exert pressure towards Alice to give beer an OK sign, without even bothering to hear her side of the matter.
That is brigading: regardless of his “intentions” Charlie is bringing random people into the discussion to exert pressure towards one side of the dispute. Including muppets that think that anyone trying to get what Alice says must be “illiterate beer haters”.
Now replace Alice, Bob, Charlie with Hellwig, Rust4Linux devs, Martin. Replace cheap wine with C and beer with Rust. It’s the same deal.
It’s brigading to go on social media platforms and complain about the people you work with in order to exert outside pressure on them. You’re bypassing the formal processes of discussion and consensus-building and trying to leverage informal power you have. This tends to make people very angry and reluctant to work with you no matter what.
Linux is an open source project, not a democracy. If you want to contribute you have to follow their rules.