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Linus Torvalds is back in charge

by on23 October 2018


We don't know if he is back to being Mr Sweary

After taking some time off to figure out who he wants to be, the creator of Linux is back.

A little over a month ago, Torvalds appeared to be having a moment of self-crisis when he realised that people really didn't like to be told to fuck off. 

He stepped back from running the Linux development community. In a note to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), Torvalds said: "I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove people away from kernel development entirely. I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately."

It is unclear if he'll be a kinder and gentler Torvalds. Personally we hope he met his future self during a moment of profound meditation who promptly told him to stop being a wimp and fuck off.  The industry has enough insincere people who spout management bullshit and there are a huge number of people who desperately need to be told to fuck off and preferably punched in the face too. Nvidia, Intel, Apple, Donald Trump, Alessandro Borghese and Justin Bieber are on our list.

Now in a Linux 4.19 announcement, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Linux's temporary leader and maintainer of the stable branch, wrote: "Linus, I'm handing the kernel tree back to you. You can have the joy of dealing with the merge window :)"

Torvalds is not scheduled to make any public appearances at Open Source Summit Europe. He has also not made any remarks on the LKML yet.

Simultaneously, the revised Linux Code of Conduct has been approved as part of Linux. The new Linux Kernel Contributor Covenant Code of Conduct Interpretation states: "It is a reasonable expectation to have maintainers lead by example."

Jon Corbet, kernel developer and editor of LWN, thinks the Linux community will become less of what was once a "Wild West world with dueling developers and more of a professional developer community".

Somehow we feel that will be a bad thing.

Last modified on 23 October 2018
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