I wish more comments engaged his actual argument. Here, there's a lot of "Torvalds is a jerk and unprofessional" versus "Blunt is good, and screw the PC police

I wish more comments engaged his actual argument. Here, there's a lot of "Torvalds is a jerk and unprofessional" versus "Blunt is good, and screw the PC police talk!" That's not his argument. Torvalds is saying, "Some people think there SHOULD BE a universal 'professionalism' that 'we' can haggle over in the public sphere and then enforce on bystanders in local contexts" and "Other people think there are just local relationships in groups to be negotiated ad hoc in those local contexts." And he works as though the second statement is more credible. Saying "we" should be "professional" is actually assuming a bunch of very contestable propositions from the first word. There absolutely ends up being a bullying component when you invent a broad "we", declare other people to be members of it, and then try to enforce norms on that imagined "we". And I say all this with the caveat that Torvalds is probably too blunt for me. But that doesn't make him wrong.