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Most of the hits for Linus being brutal on Google are him dressing down someone doing something arrogant and/or stupid. Generally he seems relatively pragmatic

• ChuckMcM 11y ago
  And that is the problem in a nutshell. Imagine you want to be part of that group, so you google the leader of the group and all the top hits are him dressing down idiots. You say to yourself, "Ok then I see how this ship is run." and you take on the same modus operandi. It doesn't matter if 90% of the interactions are civil and supportive, those top links "set the tone". The only way to fix it is to have Linus disavow the behavior, call it out as bad in forums, and have the top 10 links when you Google him be him dressing down kernel maintainers who treat others like children to be scolded and shamed. The behavior of his followers will change to mimic that instead.
• deelowe 11y ago
  And the only reason he can act like that without consequence is because he's Linus. Anyone else who tries to mimic him (and they do, often) will see the conversation quickly spiral into hateful comments and insults. There's never a good reason to not be civil with someone (stupid or not). While we are on the topic of stupidity... Do people really believe there are that many "stupid" and "arrogant" people contributing to Linux? Seriously? Because, ya know, FreeBSD doesn't seem to have that issue. Odd... Maybe there's something else going on. No?