> From a purely pragmatic point of view I don't see what his corrosive tone gets him. I don't know whether it actually, but I think Linus becomes "corrosive" t

> From a purely pragmatic point of view I don't see what his corrosive tone gets him. I don't know whether it actually, but I think Linus becomes "corrosive" to get rid of someone. Certain developers disappearing is not a side effect, it's the intended effect. If you have a "contributor" who keeps submitting the same faulty patch over and over, who doesn't listen, but keeps making a fuss about his "contribution" not being accepted, what can you do? You tell him that his code is no good and won't be accepted, and you tell him that his making a fuss about it is not welcome. But he doesn't stop, so now what? Block him from the mailing list? He just comes back with a new address. What's next? You decide to be so unpleasant to him that he leaves. Anecdotally, this sequence happened with certain engineers at Redhat, who kept dumping their bad code at Linus so that it may be maintained upstream. They could have cleaned it up, but that's exactly the maintenance cost Redhat wanted to outsource to the community.