| It is very rare to see him treat people like they're idiots. There's a very fine but very clear line in a lot of his rants between very harsh language used against solutions he doesn't like, but without making it personal, like in this case where he's attacking the rationale, and attacking the C standard, but is very explicitly avoiding attacking the people (even taking pains to point out he's not suggesting people on standard bodies in general are incompetent). The closest he comes to attacking people directly here is when he calls people who use -fstrict-aliasing "fcking morons" when* they use -fstrict-aliasing, so even that is conditional on behaviour rather than assigning a trait to the person in general. You'll sometimes see him making wide-ranging accusations about general categories of people (e.g. I remember a rant about people who think it's a good idea to do reads a byte at a time), but rarely about specific people. On the rare occasions when he attacks people directly, I have yet to seen an example which doesn't fall in the category of either attacking persistent repeat offenders who has refused to listen to more polite rebukes (his attack on Kai Sivers being the most obvious example [1] - notably while very direct and personal, that rant was also comparatively civil in terms of actual language), or attacks that fall in the "I know you know so much better, or you wouldn't be in the trusted position you're in" category (his attack on Mauro Carvalho Chehab for a change that broke userspace [2] falls in that category; Mauro has contributed to the kernel since 2005, and have worked on it as his job for years - in this case Mauro took it on his chin, apologised for the breakage and the discussion remained strictly on topic on the technical issues afterwards). Frankly if I'd gotten a dressing down by Linus in that category, I'd print it out and frame it, because harsh as they may be, I don't know of any case of people having gotten those without having demonstrated time and time again that they should know better first. You don't see him ranting like that at beginners. You see him ranting like that when he's disappointed because he has high expectations of you. Doesn't mean people can't get upset by them, of course, but it changes the nature of it quite a bit. Note that I'm not saying that it's a good thing- I'm sure there'd be more civil ways to express that too -, just that I think the importance of these rants is exaggerated. [1] http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1404.0/01331.html [2] https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/12/23/75 |