Video: Linux Kernel Developers Respond to Concerns About Community Culture

Shortly after a live Q&A with Linux creator Linus Torvalds at LinuxCon and CloudOpen Europe on Wednesday, the kernel developer panel took the stage for a roundtable discussion. LWN Editor and panel moderator Jon Corbet didn’t beat around the bush; he asked the panelists to first respond to systemd developer Lennart Poettering’s controversial post in which he called the open source community “a sick place.”The developers’ responses were varied, but Linaro developer Grant Likely’s thoughts perhaps drew the most audience applause.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time all of the conversations have been respectful and productive. The problem is when things do bubble to the surface, they end up setting the tone for the entire community, and I am concerned about this, it keeps some people out of the community that would otherwise be involved,” Likely said. 

“I don’t want to work in a community that will tear down other people or anger bubbles to the surface too quickly, or it devolves into attacks on a person,” he said. “If that happens in my communities, I’ll call you on it, and I hope that if I start to get emotional, you’ll do the same for me.”

For the full discussion, which largely addressed technical issues, see the video below.