You are 100% right about not wasting one's time with jerks. But I disagree that Linus regularly expresses himself like one. Really: open lkml.org and search for his posts. Most of the time, he's an ordinary project maintainer.
Sometimes, he's quite the opposite of a jerk [1]:
WARNING! I wasn't kidding when I said that I've done this by reading
gtk2 tutorials as I've gone along. If somebody is more comfortable with
gtk, feel free to send me (signed-off) patches.
Just as an example of the extreme hackiness of the code, I don't even
bother connecting a signal for the "somebody edited the dive info"
cases. I just save/restore the dive info every single time you switch
dives. Christ! That's truly lame.
One must remember that his role as maintainer of linux requires him to have ultimate, non-ambiguous opinion about a lot of stuff. He's the judge of what effectively goes into the "official" kernel tree. Moreover, most of the kernel contributors don't deal with him directly — git is the materialization of that modus operandi.
When he does express himself like that, however, it becomes news. He always has a reason, though. In this case:
Please don't talk about portability, it's BS.
Is this how normal people start a conversation? Who's the jerk, here?
Sometimes, he's quite the opposite of a jerk [1]:
One must remember that his role as maintainer of linux requires him to have ultimate, non-ambiguous opinion about a lot of stuff. He's the judge of what effectively goes into the "official" kernel tree. Moreover, most of the kernel contributors don't deal with him directly — git is the materialization of that modus operandi.When he does express himself like that, however, it becomes news. He always has a reason, though. In this case:
Is this how normal people start a conversation? Who's the jerk, here?[1]: https://github.com/torvalds/subsurface/blob/master/README#L1...