That's simply an expression to emphasise on current feelings and to add tone to the text. The rewritten text is clearly overly bland and on the edge of being ap

That's simply an expression to emphasise on current feelings and to add tone to the text. The rewritten text is clearly overly bland and on the edge of being apologic and doesn't reflect the anger and annoyance that Linus most likely felt at the time of writing the mail. It seems that people do not realize anymore that languages exist not only to pass the point along but also to express yourself (including emotions and feelings). Further more I think that thanks to Linus being "abusive" it makes contributors think twice before they submit code and making sure the code is mostly valid, which in turn, results in higher quality code landing in the codebase and decreases the risk of potential bugs. Does that make some people "scared" of contributing? Sure but that's a whole different story.