> This sort of response seems like it only inhibits people's desire to get involved.

How many projects have had as many people involved as the kernel? Not just software, any project. With people coming and going and working on whatever they want. For 20 years.

It's hard to fully articulate how wrong this and so many other comments in this thread are.

People have the right to be offended, they however DON'T have the right to not be offended.

Linus is a nice guy, he works well with others and has built some of the most amazing software in the world today. I work on the kernel and other system code on a day to day basis and have participated in threads with Linus before. When you are wrong he tells you so, in a very clear manner that outlines exactly WHY you are wrong.

Sure, he isn't always concise and succinct but that isn't really the point. If he wants to interject a few choice "swear words" to describe how badly you did something that's fine by me. As long has he describes exactly what is wrong and how to fix it.

People need to get a lot less wrapped up in HOW something is said and focus on WHAT is said. The essence of Linus's comments on this pull request can be summarized easily. GitHub's pull/request features are inadequate for kernel goverernance - and as the creator of git and designer of the inbuilt pull-request functionality he thinks this is subjectively retarded.

If you read past any of that and start saying crap like "he could have been more polite" to him then you have obviously missed the point. It's not his (or anyones) job to cater to peoples inability to grow a skin.

Yeah this is exactly what I thought when I read this. There's no excuse to act like a dick, and he totally is in this thread - name calling and being super angry when nobody else is. I'm a little disappointed.