[ben0x539]

Torvalds ca. 2012, via callous and hyperbolically insulting comments, makes people feel bad to get what he wants. We can argue about whether he gets to do that because his job is very important, or because we also want what he wants (eg high quality commit messages), or because people shouldn't interact with Linux if they can't deal with that, or whether it's an effective way to get what he wants, but at the end of the day the mechanism is still making people feel bad.

I think the negative effect that has or could be reasonably expected to have on the subjects of his comments is enormous and fundamentally unjustifiable in the context of running an open source project or a community. I sort of get it when it's aimed at an adversarial higher-order entity like NVidia (or Github for not letting you turn off pull requests on your repos), but absolutely not with human beings, no matter how frustrating it is to have to work with people who aren't fluent in your processes.

I think we should try to be kinder than that, and I don't think being kinder would have stopped Torvalds from getting useful patches out of contributors.