He should only be thanking them for that if git uptake around a mutilated version of his tooling is something that Linus wants. I suspect very strongly that he doesn't want that. In fact, if GitHub were a less popular service he wouldn't need to spend nearly as much time dealing with people who don't RTFM and submit GitHub PRs despite Linus' objections to them.
> In fact, if GitHub were a less popular service he wouldn't need to spend nearly as much time dealing with people who don't RTFM and submit GitHub PRs despite Linus' objections to them.
Does he even bother reading them nowadays?
If anything, I would say that if git were less popular, its developers wouldn't have to deal with constant complaints that their UI scares noobs.
I don't much care whether Linus individually has the justification to be an asshole or not. The problem is that Linus being an asshole causes many other engineers to think it's ok/expected/encouraged to be assholes. All the non-assholes quietly disappear and we're left with a room full of assholes.
The whole "Linus is an asshole" is well overplayed, though. The guy's been developing Linux for 25 years, with most of his communications in the open. The kind of outburst he has once every few years, and which gets extensive coverage and discussion, is a weekly occurrence in many offices. It's just that we'll never hear of those.
If you didn't notice from the dates, those are all (Literally all, I didn't leave any out) of Linus's emails from the past week or so. The only one that even really has a complaint in it is the ext4 one that you've likely already seen, and the rest are extremely helpful and include detailed descriptions of what he was thinking or what he'd like to see.
Seems like those people are just assholes trying to justify their behavior, anyone actually trying to emulate Linus would see thousands of helpful messages for every outburst.
Most of the times Linus is an asshole are completely justified. Being rude to groups like Nvidia isn't hindering progress.