Linus Torvalds in sweary rant about punctuation in kernel comments
Every time Linus Torvalds&#x27; rude behavior comes up on HN, people leap to his defense. Then, people leap on top of those people for leaping to his defense. Personally, I fall strongly in the &quot;he&#x27;s rude and annoying and should stop it&quot; camp. For the sake of productive discussion, I&#x27;d like to list a few things that are not valid defenses to his dickishness:<p>1) &quot;He&#x27;s a visionary developer.&quot; Yes, but plenty of visionaries are also friendly and polite. You can have a strong opinion and argue it strongly without descending into namecalling.<p>2) &quot;He&#x27;s built something millions use.&quot; That we live a world where having success allows you to be a jerk is a bug, not a feature. Respect for the Linux kernel would be respecting the people who work on it, which Linus rarely does.<p>3) &quot;Kernel developers are used to this kind of behavior and can take it.&quot; That doesn&#x27;t meant they ought to have to. And plenty of kernel developers have left. It feels like there&#x27;s a big to-do about somebody retiring from the kernel once every couple of years, at least.<p>4) &quot;It&#x27;s his project and he can do what he wants with it.&quot; Maybe. It&#x27;s largely the world&#x27;s project now. But even if it were totally his, having the right to do something doesn&#x27;t mean one ought to do something.<p>5) &quot;You couldn&#x27;t do it, so shut up and let Linus do his job.&quot; It&#x27;s not, and has never been, about me.<p>I hope that by listing these, I can short-circuit some of the repetitive arguments on this topic... or at least confine them to one comment chain.