At best, people are imitating what they think Linus is doing. But most people miss out on just how rare Linus's rants are, how deserving his targets are when he does let loose and how much they should've known better, and most people aren't as authoritative as Linus.
> ...how deserving his targets are when he does let loose...
I think I see the problem here.
I don't follow the Linux community that deeply but I've read one of his rants which was belittling and insulting to a volunteer maintainer and the context behind it didn't justify the abuse in my opinion. If you don't appreciate their code, get rid of them. They're probably not trying to intentionally screw up. And if they are, tell them it's not working out and stop working with them.
P.S. Would be interesting if "Gaming is misogynistic" folks decide to focus on the Linux community. I can almost see the headlines: "Linux users are dead!"
So you're saying that a "my way or the highway" policy is more polite and better for the health of the project and developer community than the occasional bit of colorful language? It seems to me that the former is a much bigger insult in an "actions speak louder than words" kind of way, especially coming from people for whom the primary concern is producing working code, not politics.
1. I'm not complaining about colorful language. There's a difference between that and insulting people.
> I don't understand why it's so hard to fucking understand how Linus' behavior is abhorrent.
> wtallis, you've got to be the biggest fucking idiot to not understand how Linus' behavior is abhorrent.
See the difference?
2. I'm not familiar with the way the Linux kernel contributions are managed. I assumed from what I've heard that Linus is in charge and can reject patches. If that is the case, than a "my way or the highway" policy is the current policy. I may be wrong in this regard so please feel free to clear up any misunderstanding I may have.
For Linux, the "your patches will not be accepted" responses comes approximately after you've ignored a dozen or so Linus rants, each of which will generally first come after you've ignored advice and suggestions from dozens of other people and still insisted on submitting broken stuff. Probably, if you manage to get "banned", at least one rant about you will have featured on HN or Reddit.
Rejecting patches happens often, and usually for mundane reasons. Rejecting people is extreme, and something that's only happened a very, very few times. Off the top of my head I can only remember Kay Sievers [1]. Even then he left the door open ("Let distributions merge it as they need to and maybe we can merge it once it has been proven to be stable by whatever distro that was willing to play games with the developers").
It's hard to get Linus to rant at you in the first place. It is many times as hard to get him to refuse to deal with your code. Basically, you have to persistently be submitting code that the kernel team considers total junk and persistently refuse to acknowledge or deal with the suggestions given.
For your first point, the difference will only ever be very small when the topic of discussion is something that is inherently associated with a particular person, such as a patch with a specific submitter. The phrasing of the former example is more passive-aggressive, but usually no less targeted.
For your second point, you said:
"If you don't appreciate their code, get rid of them. [...] tell them it's not working out and stop working with them."
That implies more than just rejecting bad patches, it implies rejecting the developer himself. That's extremely rare. The Linux kernel developers are very forgiving of mistakes: your patches will get rejected if they're bad, but they'll still get looked at until you establish a really bad track record of not learning from your mistakes.
