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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.


And I've yet to see someone single out a particularly nice and constructive comment and use that for a counterpoint.


I suppose I'll bite:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/9/924

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/8/873

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/8/855

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/8/760

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/6/209

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/6/219

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/6/322

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/4/634

https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/8/3/919

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.




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