I agree in part, as much as someone can hate Linus' style, it's worthwhile to have a toolset to work with people that operate on slightly different social scrip

I agree in part, as much as someone can hate Linus' style, it's worthwhile to have a toolset to work with people that operate on slightly different social scripts [0] that you want to. You call this having a thick skin, but I think there is a distinction between not taking offense when directed your way, and not finding the statement offensive in the first place. There is a sliding scale of what levels of language imply what levels of offense and it changes depending on context. And this is just one of many properties in evaluation of environment. I've started thinking participants in social environments have an at-least-4-tuple for every context: their desired, expected, perceived, and actual social setting. And a tuple exists for every possible context. The thing that makes for a hostile environment isn't that Linus' posts are "No Big Deal" or a "Big Deal, Indeed", but that people disagree in their desires on how the setting should treat a Linus rant. Especially when there are people that not only expect their opinion to win, but make it imperative to their politics that the culture adapt to them rather than the other way around. Programming is the most tame, calm, and soft-spoken professional environment I've ever been in. I'm used to adjusting my expectation for social scripts for different environments. I've learned to be comfortable in environments with innocuous swearing and ranting elsewhere, I can take it here too. In the end I don't really care which way we go, but the fighting is certainly getting on my nerves. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_script http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_script