James Bottomley: The Linux Kernel Mailing List Behavior Isn't All That Bad

Sarah Sharp stepped down as a Linux kernel developer this week over what she feels is bad and toxic behavior on the Linux kernel mailing list with a lack of respect and colorful language. Her announcement sparked a lot of people to come out with polarized views and Matthew Garrett also ended up stepping away from making mainline kernel contributions. Well known kernel developer James Bottomley has now published a blog post expressing different views.

Bottomley, maintainer of the kernel's SCSI subsystem and other code, argues that things on the Linux kernel mailing list aren't all that it's talked up to be. He wrote:

So, by and large, I’m proud of the achievements we’ve made in civility and the way we have improved over the years. Are we perfect? by no means (but then perfection in such a large community isn’t a realistic goal). However, we have passed our stress test: that an individual with bad patches to several mailing lists was met with courtesy and helpful advice, in spite of serially repeating the behaviour.

In conclusion, I’d just like to note that even the thread that gave rise to Sarah’s desire to pursue a code of conduct is now over two years old and try as they might, no-one’s managed to come up with a more recent example and no-one has actually invoked the voluntary code of conflict, which was the compromise for not having a mandatory code of conduct. If it were me, I’d actually take that as a sign of success...

You can find the rest of his comments via this blog post.