A lot of people tend to focus on the angry or inflammatory nature of Linus's patch reviews. I don't really understand why. From the reviews I've read, Linus a

A lot of people tend to focus on the angry or inflammatory nature of Linus's patch reviews. I don't really understand why. From the reviews I've read, Linus always comes across very high signal--he cuts straight to the big issues with a patch, and it usually seems sort of easy to separate that signal from something inflammatory. So far in my career, the people like Linus: very direct, high signal with lots of knowledge, perhaps a bit abusive (typically because they have to act as gatekeepers to keep bad code or features out) have taught me more than really anyone else. My feeling is that people nowadays put too much responsibility on the communicator and not enough on the listener. A good listener needs to be able to extract signal out of communications and put it in context (sort of like the classical meditation: being able to perfectly balance focus and mindfulness). It takes both a good listener and a good communicator for a good conversation: each person will often not be perfect and will rely on their counterparty to fill in the gaps.