this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2025
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So if you're important you can be an arsehole.
Whether or not Linus saying this makes him an asshole is completely irrelevant, he was critiquing his code, not the developer himself. His statement about making the world a worse place to live is not even hyperbolic considering how much technology plays a role in our lives. I don't understand this insane obsession with civility especially when the stakes are so high. As jerakor said, we cannot substitute code quality for being nice.
It's not his role to be nice, it his role to be right. If your technical leader is more concerned with keeping people happy than keeping the technology good you are going to end up screwed.
These are not mutually exclusive things.
They both take effort. People act like being nice is free but forget how intensely challenging it is for some neurodivergent people to try to comprehend people's feelings in a situation. Add to that the layers of language barrier and insanely diverse social structures and attitudes of something as massive as the Linux Kernel.
This guy made a pet project and accidentally became the one non corporate owned backbone of modern society. Maybe he doesn't owe us niceties. If being nice to contributers is a critical thing you expect of your release repo maintainer you can always go find a different project to contribute to.
You don't have to be super nice, are you trying to tell me a multi paragraph rant is less effort than:
Rejected
His pet project is huge, no doubt and we owe him at debt. You don't get to stack up all the good things and all the bad things and say the good pile outweighs the bad, therefore this person doesn't behave like an ass. Many of the other contributors make significant effort, are not paid for their work and spend their free time doing it. They deserve respect as a bare minimum.
"If you don't like it, get out" has this ever made anything better?
Some people behave like assholes and hide behind calling everyone else snowflakes and thin skinned when they can't handle the response.