Linus Torvalds to Hector Martin: 'Maybe the problem is you'
Linus Torvalds to Hector Martin: 'Maybe the problem is you'
Open source project chief hits out at 'social media brigading'
This makes me sad because I assume Hector is deeply demoralized. I've seen him as a hero since he started the Asahi project. I know nothing about him other than working on Asahi, Asahi worked when I installed it last year, and this blow-up last week or so and now. Maybe he's a terrible person. I just see his technical work (and all the other devs contributing to the project) and I know this would make me lose steam if I were in his shoes.
He didn't even say anything wrong. In all that discussion and whole thread linus could've said anything useful for either side or to help things move forward but chose to do nothing besides saying 2 things and they didn't address any of the concerns. He just contributed to the problem. One could've said that he didn't read or something, but no, he came, read everything, all the technical concerns, all the needs from the stockholders involved and decided not to address the elephant in the room!
I would've done much worse than hector and call half of the people there names.
Really people should go to the kernel threads and read all of them carefully and the links to the social media and read them careful too, it's not too big.
Anyway what matters is apple/arm work will continue out of the kernel tree, downstream.
And this could basically also lead the whole rust effort go the same direction by all the betweens lines we can understand in the whole discussion. Basically there are enough people that feel that no other language other than C should ever be in the kernel. Doesn't matter if it's rust or not. No other. Even if some people are supportive, there are enough in key positions that will fight to not include it.
Really people should go to the kernel threads and read all of them carefully and the links to the social media and read them careful too, it's not too big.
No, people who aren't involved with the kernel should not get involved with this, that's Torvald's point. You can't let a serious project like Linux be affected by social media uproar, let the developers sort it out amongst themselves.
Linus shouldn't have to get involved at all. Each part of the Kernel should be handled independently by the maintainers. Linus responding publicly to outside forces is fine but once he has to step in to handle public fights between individuals who are supposed to work together it is a problem.
Linux staying C focused is a valid thing to do. It is very hard to get folks to contribute to the kernel and if you cut out anyone who doesn't know Rust, a language with at best 5% the adoption rate of C, you will run into spots where sections of the kernel are unmaintained due to no willing and qualified person covering it.
Adding Rust based functionality and support is great. Changing APIs to require maintainers to learn Rust to continue to maintain the code they are experts in is unacceptable.
Martin was out of line.
Hellwig also was out of line and unnecessarily hostile.
Linus... Is the voice of reason? Though I would have preferred he rebuke Hellwig in the same breath.
It's a strange 2025.
Martin has nearly always been like this. Ive known martin from way way way back when he worked on the wii and he has always been a guy that just causes drama by pointing and saying "this is shit. Look at this shit". It isnt a bad thing to do, but the way he does it is basically going to somebody's home with a sledgehammer and smashing a wall without checking in. It turns people away from you even if youre right.
He had a beef and drama with me, devkitpro, gbatemp.
Then he stopped being on my radar, heard he was working on asahi, then heard he was causing drama between emulation devs, then luois rossman, and now bloody linus torvalds?sigh
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:
- [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.
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:
[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.
What is Martin doing that makes it "brigading" instead of calling the community to express their opinion?
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.
To add to what @[email protected] 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.
Why does your opinion matter? You're a chicken, not a pig.
Amazingly restrained on Linus' part. He has really grown.
Well, social media around him and us really hasn't. Torvalds is right to condemn the agitation, but Martin's case is just by-catch to the underlying technopolitical issue.
Claburn's article seems biased toward Martin's position in the disagreement, using the most forgiving language possible for his behavior while describing the opposing side with obviously critical language and insufficiently covering the reasons for it. Linus's response might be mildly interesting, but the article is disappointingly poor journalism.
Oh I expect absolute crickets from all the people who waded into this trashing Hellwig.
I expect you to have zero kernel commits to your name.
I will show you mine if you show me yours.
Not that number of commits has anything to do with calling out brigading which you still seem to be committed to.
What's with the quotes?
No amount of sabotage from old entrenched maintainers is going to stop the world from moving forward towards memory-safe languages.
Jesus fucking insufferable Christ... Saying shit like this, given C has been in use for 50 years and is still in very wide use today, and given the vast number of languages that have come and gone over this period, it's just incredible.
I do not agree with the Dev who stepped down.
But on the topic of C, I wouldn't measure the quality of a language based on its adoption. C is a relatively old language and therefore benefits from getting wide-use before other languages were born. It will never die because who would ever want to rewrite every project in existence in another language.
Memory safety is very important since it has consistently been one of the largest sources of vulnerabilities throughout software history.
C is not a bad language, but it has flaws. Performance at the cost of safety is not a good trade-off in most scenarios. There is no such thing as a "perfect programmer" who won't make mistakes.
I don't disagree with these points in general. However this isn't simply about the tools. Tools go along with people and their skill and experience. There are developers and developers. There are people with lots of experience who create much higher quality C code than others. Personally I'd never touch C if I can avoid it as I don't trust myself as much. I'd always go for C++ instead. Modern C++ with RAII is great. It's what most of the software at our corpo is written in. Maybe Rust would end up becoming the default standard at some point. Maybe something else would. I would never go shit on a coworker who has produced tons of well functioning code that they better reskill in something that may or may not stick around, or that they may not become as productive with for a long time. A team skilled in C or C++ may be able to produce higher quality software, quicker than a less skilled team Rust. Rust might be better for teams that just start in native programming. I don't know. If it grows enough in use, reskilling people and reworking software to cooperate with it might become an obvious choice. For now, as I see it, it depends on the team.
Memory safety at the expense of complicated interfaces is also not a good trade-off, even in terms of security.
Probably what all the horse people said when cars were invented.
I would't trade a good horse for an early car. Maybe a model T.
The horse-car analogies rarely achieve what you want them to, especially in situations where we don't have the benefit of hindsight.