Talk:Sage Sharp

Additional references

If useful for article expansion, here are additional references.

About calling out Torvalds from July 2013:

• "Linus Torvalds defends his right to shame Linux kernel developers", Ars Technica, July 16 2013
• "Linus Torvalds Defends His God-Given Right to Offend You", Wired, July 16 2013
• "Why This Hacker Stood Up Against ‘Verbal Abuse’ in Linux Land", Wired, July 19 2013
• "Linux Seeks Help From More (And More Diverse) Coders", Wired, July 19 2013
• "King Of Geeks Linus Torvalds Defends His Right To Code In His Bathrobe And Curse At Other Developers", Forbes, July 16 2013
• "Linus, Sarah and the Linux Civil Code", Linux Insider, July 22 2013

Unrelated to Torvalds or outside that news cycle:

• "Intel's USB 3.0 for Linux", Linux Magazine, December 15 2008
• "First Steps Towards USB 3.0 on Linux", OS News, December 15 2008
• "First Driver for USB 3.0", Linux Pro Magazine, June 9 2009
• "Linux-Powered Amateur Rocket Goes USB", Linux Journal, May 1 2009
• "Linux gets first driver for USB 3.0", Engadget, June 11 2009
• "These Women Are Building The Software That Quietly Runs The World", Business Insider, February 9 2014

Dreamyshade (talk) 19:05, 18 November 2017 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the sources! Enterprisey (talk!) 20:07, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Notability tag

Question: Should the article receive this tag? {{Notability|date=March 2018}} This article seems to exist for referencing against Linus's article, but by his own admission he has drawn criticism with regard to his communication style from many people. Is this notable, potentially notable, or CfD? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.162.245.221 (talk • contribs) 06:50, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

(Creator of the article, very biased.) I thought Sage Sharp was notable mainly for two reasons: the work they did on the kernel, and their departure of the kernel community. The latter received more coverage, but I had the opinion that they were a prominent member of the community before they left. The Linux.com profile and Business Insider article section (granted, one of nine profiles in the article) amount to some coverage that demonstrates that. You should get some more opinions, though, since as I said I'm quite biased. Enterprisey (talk!) 03:43, 20 March 2018 (UTC)

I have added the Notability tag since I've been following the development of the Linux kernel code base very closely for about 20 years and IMO Sage Sharp was never a prominent member of the Linux community. She (back then she still called herself Sarah and identified as female) was not even an actual subsystem maintainer, but just the maintainer of a driver whose code seems to have been mostly written by other people at Intel. I had never come across her name before the incident with Linus, which struck me as quite strange by that time. The same applies to the cited work on the GNU/Linux graphics stack (Mesa and X11 both don't have many important developers, Sage Sharp doesn't make my list) and Outreachy. Pretty much all involvement with the Linux community cited in the article seems to have focused on the 2015/2016 timeframe, nothing of importance seems to have happened before and after that. Compared to long-time contributors like Julia Lawall and many other important personalities from the Linux community who don't have Wikipedia articles yet, Sage Sharp does not make it over my notability barrier. 5.61.139.215 (talk) 18:37, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

Do you have any webpage or source that says that the driver code was mostly written by other people? There seems to be enough coverage that we can write a verifiable article on this person, so I disagree with the tag. I will ask for input from the WikiProject on computing, since as the author I don't want to remove the tag. Enterprisey (talk!) 19:52, 23 September 2018 (UTC)

Sure, thanks to Git we have a log of who contributed what and when. I took the time to do some statistics on drivers/usb/host/xhci*, the source code files for the xhci driver in question. All the source code files together currently weigh in at 23910 lines of code, of which 7850 can still be traced back to Sage Sharp using the "git blame" command. That's about 30 percent. This figure is most likely way too high since a) we don't know what happened internally at Intel before the driver was published and whoever merged it into Linux for the first time got the initial credit for all lines(!), b) there seems to have been a mixup in 2010 when someone renamed the file and the history was reset, attributing all existing lines to Sharp a second time. So the actual number is likely lower. We have consistent logs for several other Intel employees though: Lu Baolu (3074 lines), Mathias Nyman (2920 lines), Felipe Balbi (1244 lines). The remaining 8822 lines of the driver (~36%) can be attributed to 155 other authors. So even if you ignore all the uncertainities caused by the initial commit and lost histories, and assume Sage Sharp was actually the author of all lines present back in 2010, a third of the driver can be attributed to Sharp, another third to three other people at Intel, and another third to the rest of the world. IMO this is in line with the following self-description on Sage Sharp's LinkedIn page: "Led a team of two engineers and one QA person to support USB on Intel products running Linux". We pretty much know who those other three people at Intel are who contributed at least a third of the code (and keep contributing to this day).

If you don't feel like diving into the hard numbers, just go to https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/log/drivers/usb/host/xhci.c and browse through the years. I've seen drivers which have been developed mostly by one person, and this is not one of those. This was a team effort right from the start, when someone at AMD fixed a bug right after the initial commit.

I'm not fully against keeping the article, maybe the sections on outreach, activism, getting the awards etc. could be improved to the point where the article as a whole is notable enough, but Sharp seems to also have ceased most of that work. If we start writing articles about every developer who's code Linus has ever thrown a fit about in public, there is a long list. And yes, all those others also got their share of reporting in the news. Also Sharp was actually never Linus' target, but instead chose to deliberately misread a rather funny discussion to create a pretense for the attack on Linus. 5.61.139.215 (talk) 15:36, 25 September 2018 (UTC)

Is this a group of people?!

"They attended Portland State University..." -- Are bios now collectively refering to multiple people? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.182.48.107 (talk) 10:37, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

The singular they is not specifically supported or opposed by Wikipedia consensus. Nevertheless, I rewrote a few sentences to not use any pronouns. The pronoun is unavoidable in the sentence "In 2017, Sharp changed their pronouns to they/them" as far as I can see, so it will remain there. Enterprisey (talk!) 20:23, 20 July 2018 (UTC)

Why the deadnaming?

Why is Sage deadnamed in the very first sentence of this article? If the deadname absolutely must be mentioned, it should be much later. I was trying to locate an official statement of policy, but was unable to find one, except to confirm that the article should be titled "Sage Sharp". --Dylan Thurston (talk) 20:29, 14 December 2018 (UTC)