Just over a month ago, the creator of the most successful open source project, the Linux kernel, announced his decision to take a break from managing the project. In particular, he left the linux-next management for a while, leaving it to the second person in the project, the maintainer of a stable series of kernel releases, Greg Kroy-Hartman.

The past month has been rich in a variety of comments, forecasts and events. What has changed in the project, while Linus was not and with which he returned to the captain's bridge?

Brief background

Habr's readers could follow the developments. For the first time, I mentioned Linus’s unrestrained manner of expressing criticism to developers in a post about email as the main tool for developing the Linux kernel. It was more than 2 years ago.

The second time it was already a question of the whole scientific research of the author's style of Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman on the basis of LKLM messages. Linus’s authorship was easily established by a set of specific, sometimes not quite literary words. Greg's style was much more polite, this difference was significant.

Finally, a month ago, Linus announced his decision to take a break from the waterfall of patches and letters, after working on the communication culture and development tools. Also before leaving, he accepted a new code of conduct for the project participants, aka CoC, into the main branch of the kernel.

If everyone reacted to the first decision mainly with understanding and sympathy, the second point caused lively disputes in the community. If for Linus himself the decision to change the style of communication was organic, then for the community as a whole the adoption of a more regulated code of conduct was of dubious value.

Among the critics of the CoC were such heavyweights of the open source community as Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman . By the way, the Open Source Initiative and the Free Software Foundation differ ideologically. Eric Raymond is the founder of OSI, and Richard Stallman is the head of the FSF. The latter are more ideological, more strongly defend the fundamental freedoms of software code and consider the former to be soft-bodied, often criticized for their lack of principle.

Almost immediately there were reports that some developers intend to withdraw, or withdraw their code from Linux. There are legal disputes over whether their threats are legitimate. There were different opinions on this subject, on Habré also dealt with this question.

Now what?

At the notorious summit in Scotland mentioned in the previous article, Linus took part and announced some results of his time off.

The main thing is that the linux-next branch will not be ruled by Linus anymore, but together with Greg Kroa-Hartman. Perhaps there will be another assistant.

The second is that it’s decided not to touch Wonderful CoC and leave everything as it is. According to Linus, the CoC is not intended to determine the tone of the discussion at LKLM, the main control mechanism is still self-regulation. Linus asked the maintainers to write to him, in cases where he is still too harsh.

Greg Kroa-Hartman spoke about Coc in the spirit that they say let's not discuss it endlessly, but solve problems as they come. If that we can always then change and fix it.

It is clear that there can be a situation in the world. environments). We will address you.

It turns out the email filters were not a joke ; indeed, the email client will block outgoing with obscene expressions. If, however, Linus does not begin to express himself also sharply, but using literary images, or even Emoji characters.

Linus also resorted to the help of a professional, who meets weekly. I am somewhat skeptical about gaining control over emotions after a session with a psychologist, yet this shows the seriousness of intentions.

At the moment, it is immersed in the thick of the turbulent initial phase of the release cycle, when initial requests for code changes are accepted - the merge window .

Bottom line : the worst predictions did not come true; Linus’s time off was not an excuse for a permanent departure from project management. there is no reason throw down give up and go to experimental OS.

Nevertheless, there are still some doubts as to whether the “new” Linus will still be able to resist in two ways.

• Break user space under any pretext.
• Arrange a security theater in the project, giving an unjustified priority to security patches.

Time will tell, I hope that the optimists will be right.

UPDATE : Linus' first polite refusal on the BigBen game controller driver.