Re: Not a bible thumper. . .

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@cs.helsinki.fi)
Fri, 19 Jul 1996 09:24:39 +0300 (EET DST)


Ok, we've had enough discussion about the swear-words in the kernel,
here's my say:

a) Messages seen by users should be "nice", so the "Fucking sun blows me"
message should go, but I'll wait for patches from the _maintainers_ of
that piece of code first, because:

b) I _really_ hate "politically correct". I don't mean I find it mildly
disconcerting, I mean I _really_ dislike it. I find politically correct stuff
so tasteless that I'd rather shake hands with a whore with AIDS (yes, that
_was_ meant to be politically incorrect) than one of the "bible thumpers" (*).

(*) I'm not knocking religion, I'm knocking small-minded people who use
religion or any other "moral reason" to get involved in things they don't
really have anything to do with. If it doesn't hurt anybody else, it's
nobodys business what people do.

In short, in the _occasional_ comment it's perfectly ok to say "Fucking Sun
blows me", because that may actually tell something of the state of mind of
the person when he wrote that special case.. And let's be honest, writing
code is not all about "specifications", and comments aren't just "technical
explanations".

Now, I have to admit that the profanities seem to show up a lot more in the
sparc code than in the rest of the kernel, and Davem might want to clean some
of that up, but because I hate politically correct so much I will _not_
accept patches from others that just change this kind of stuff.

The reason the active kernel messages should be nice is that while I hate
politically correct, I do not believe in being actively offensive either
except when I _want_ to offend somebody. And there is no point in offending
the occasional user.

In contrast, anybody who gets offended by a kernel comment that says bad
things about Sun is either a sun employee who was part of the team who did
the f*ck-up (in which case it's ok to offend him ;), OR he is getting
offended for no good reason. People _do_ f*ck up, and it's ok to point that
out.

Linus "Better offended than bored" Torvalds