The assholeness of Torvalds is oversold. Imagine that every conversation you had at work, and a good deal of your conversations with your friends off work, were

The assholeness of Torvalds is oversold. Imagine that every conversation you had at work, and a good deal of your conversations with your friends off work, were publicly available on the internet and routinely scrutinized by journalists and bloggers, and any time they criticized you it was newsworthy enough to make it to all the big social news aggregators. Now imagine that you worked a retail job, and not only dealt with professionals with a sense of propriety, but randoms with varying degrees of anger, malice, and incompetence.