The Linux project is probably not the best place to look for this sort of thing. It&#x27;s <i>huge</i>. It&#x27;s completely plausible that a project big enough to have multiple layers may have different optimal levels of politeness in those different layers.<p>It&#x27;s also plausible that larger projects may simply not be able to function with total politeness, as they face threats that smaller projects can only dream of facing. Even if you&#x27;ve only followed the kernel development via HN over the years, you&#x27;ve heard of any number of instances of someone who has a very strong opinion about where the kernel should go, and basically can only be fended off with a flamethrower. Sometimes the fault lies not in the person wielding the flamethrower, but in the person who would not be dissuaded by anything less. (That&#x27;s a general comment, not about any specific controversy.)<p>It&#x27;s also possible that Linus&#x27; attitude is a complete disaster, that the only reason the project is successful is a major case of right-place-at-the-right-time, and in the parallel universe where Linus is a perfectly polite person Linux is much farther along.<p>Again, my real point is that the outlier projects may not be the best places to look, because they intrinsically live in environments very unlike the environments most open source projects live in.