Why should he? I'm not a massive fan of his outbursts and profanity, but he's head of the kernel, something which 'luddites' don't necessarily need to know abou

Why should he? I'm not a massive fan of his outbursts and profanity, but he's head of the kernel, something which 'luddites' don't necessarily need to know about. It's very unlikely they'd be reading these distribution lists (or even know what a distribution list is). The explanation is more the job of the distro maintainers than the kernel maintainers, I would think.