She's equating verbal intimidation "don't do this ever again/this should not have happened" with advocating "physical intimidation and violence", or advocating

She's equating verbal intimidation "don't do this ever again/this should not have happened" with advocating "physical intimidation and violence", or advocating "verbal abuse". On her blog, Sarah Sharp is "Standing up against verbal abuse". I feel that this is just as un-helpful as telling people "if you can't take the heat, get back in the kitchen". Let's start from the facts: LKML is (unlike Wikimedia, or Ubuntu, or other 'pleasant' places) fundamentally open, allowing everyone to open their mouth and potentially be heard. To make this possible, it's necessary for Linus and others to sharply rebuke those that do non-constructive things, be it well-intentioned or not. The desiderata here are: 1) the rules of what is considered constructive or non-constructive should be such that really everyone can follow them. 2) the people whose authority is trusted should be able to sharply rebuke those doing "shouldn't happen" things in a clear ostentative way, but without the whole thing into verbal abuse. This is clearly a cultural issue, and I feel that some people take reasonable feedback as intentionally abusive, and some people produce abusive language because of a lack of "stop for 10 seconds and let it cool down" when they feel their domain of operation has been encroached upon. Let's not make a war among cultural groups (be it male/female, small-town/big-town or whatnot, with the whole playbook of us-vs-them rhetoric creeping along) out of what should be a joint search for the culture and conventions that are most effective for solving the task at hand.