I would love to get paid to work for Linus. I'd feel bad if I got fired, but I would not feel bad if he harshly criticized my shitty code. I'd be enthusiastic about the fact that my skills were about to be honed sharply because all the sudden the standards are raised extremely high. Insults don't really matter to me as long as a legitimate criticism is in there somewhere. If it was just "you're awful, go away" with no technical points, that's a different story. But in that event, it's easy to respond: "Did you have any actual criticism of my code? Pretend that I can't read your mind, and explain the problem to me."

Interesting. I guess it comes down to personal preference. Would you rather work with somebody exceptional but abrasive, as opposed to somebody average but nice? I think many people would choose the former.

I think the reason exceptional people are abrasive is that they are primarily harsh to themselves, and that's the reason of their success. Being harsh to others is merely a side effect.

And there are people like that in every profession, for example in modern magic Dai Vernon (one of the most respected magicians that ever lived), who was also infamous for being very critical to bad magicians.

> Abusive is when that conversation turns into name calling.

I don't think so; it depends on context. If someone calls you names in context of you doing something stupid, then it's not abuse, it's just being abrasive. Abuse would be had he done it without you giving a reason. And I think we should save the word abuse for the latter (and also perhaps for something where is a profit motive).

I mean, every post from Linus where he uses harsh words has some context like that. He just doesn't randomly throws insults to his colleagues. You can read the insults as an abuse or you can read them as a big yellow warning signs - your choice.

> When those complaints let fly to other ears, they should be phrased a little better.

Here the "should" is a cultural choice. It's a universal, safe option. It's like being polite to people you don't know, or being diplomatic in diplomacy.

But in the cultural context of kernel development, you're already part of the in-group. And in that particular in-group, being called names is normal and accepted by the insiders. That it happens on the Internet, for the outsiders to see, doesn't change the fact that the cultural choice was made freely by insiders.

And people who prefer the former to the latter (as per my previous post) probably don't care to much about being called names when they do stupid thing (being abused, as you call it, but they actually don't want to be really abused or tolerate it either) - because with that mentality, it's results or your own improvement that matters, not so much who is polite. I think Linus would be OK if other people called him names when he does something stupid, however it doesn't happen mostly because people respect him and he doesn't do stupid things very often.

Abusive can also be a result of continued and systematic unnecessary comments and critiques of irrelevant things. I agree that we should be tactful and careful with complaints and criticisms of others, it's very easy to say things without enough forethought and damage a relationship.

I agree with you 100%. I actually turned in my 2 weeks notice at the development shop I was at over this, yesterday was my last day. Systematic bullying of junior devs by the manager, a culture of "because I said so" from the top down (especially when the management was wrong and could have listened), and just general incompetence led me to get the hell out.

Developing software is almost always about building things for other people to use. It's inherently a social thing, and if you can't play nice with others, you will alienate and run off developers. Of course, there's a difference between getting your code critiqued in review and being treated like a child because you wanted to automate a build. I assume developers are smart enough to know the difference, though.