[Dru89]

Does the difference between someone thinking that I'm wrong 100% of the time vs. being wrong at one particular incident make it better? Certainly. It's still rude and childish, but I'd certainly rather have a singular incident stomped on than my entire character tarnished.

[FussyZeus]

If he's going to treat you as shitty whether you made a single error after a long, long time of perfectly competent contributions or you write code that reads like you typed it with your face all the time, then I really don't think it makes a difference.

[pm]

The classic Linus tirades I've read are the result of the person he's addressing, who knows less about the project at hand, not accepting his reason for a particular decision he's made and continuing to press the issue.

If you poke the bear, expect to get mauled.

[FussyZeus]

He's not a bear, he's a person, and should be expected to act accordingly. I have coworkers I argue with on a regular basis and yes, things get spirited, that doesn't give you license to be an asshole.

[msandford]

If someone makes repeated bad code contributions aren't they then actually hurting Linux rather than helping it by tying up a talented dev from being able to do actual useful work.

Everyone has this idea that all patches are beautiful snowflakes and everyone's effort is just as good as everyone else's and such. But there's no reason to suspect that there aren't some un-talented people that want to work on the kernel and that they could waste a bunch of time by demanding that everyone explain why they're wrong, politely, and at length.

Sometimes for volunteer projects to succeed, not everyone gets to participate. I think it's interesting that people who say "lived experience is the ultimate truth, full stop" then armchair quarterback another person's lived experience, without having lived it.

[FussyZeus]

I'm not talking about polite, sweet n pretty, hey buddy let me help you out. I'm talking base line, standard, up front and direct as the subject requires and as something like kernel development most certainly does.

However, you should be expected to be able to carry on a conversation that wouldn't be confused for a transcript of a 12 year old boy on XBox Live, calling people retards and morons.

If you find code of mine that's shitty, great. Tell me about it. You can even come up to me and say "hey pal, your code here is shit." Fine. You call me names, or you attempt personal shots at me over it, we're done.

This is true for me as a professional, and would be excessively extra true for open source. People contributing to linux are volunteering their time and talent to work on something they believe in, and quite frankly, that those efforts are met with attitudes like those expressed by Linus and Linux still having ANY contributors left is amazing.

I don't care how much you believe that talking like an adult doesn't matter, I would bet every cent I had that if he were at least cordial, linux would be far ahead of where it is now.

[msandford]

> I would bet every cent I had that if he were at least cordial, linux would be far ahead of where it is now.

Again, you're basing this on the assumption that the talented devs far, far outweigh the untalented ones and that you 100% want any and every contribution. I don't believe that either of those assumptions necessarily holds.

[pm]

Expected by whom, exactly? The targets of Linus' ire aren't his colleagues, they're developers with unfounded opinions and more often than not, little experience with the kernel. If someone publicly stated:

"Why did you use C for the kernel? You should've used C++.",

I'd probably call them a moron too.