I agree about the general point of being cordial, but there is an exception for Linus. Linus is purposefully positioning himself as the top-of-the-heap asshole

I agree about the general point of being cordial, but there is an exception for Linus. Linus is purposefully positioning himself as the top-of-the-heap asshole. You should be scared to submit code to Linus. It's just his position in the whole environment. Contribute to smaller projects and the subsystem maintainers for your introduction to open source contributions.