The reason people keep talking about those incidents is that a lot of people defend that behaviour (see other posts in this thread) or even promote it as the be

The reason people keep talking about those incidents is that a lot of people defend that behaviour (see other posts in this thread) or even promote it as the best way to manage a project and deal with 'inferior' programmers. If everybody was just saying that those were unfortunate incidents where he lost his temper and agreed they were inappropriate then this debate wouldn't keep happening. Some people aren't prepared to admit that Linus is ever at fault in any way during these episodes. There is even a group of people who think that those episodes are examples of 'telling it like it is' and 'sticking it to the PC crowd' and thus should be replicated as much as possible to make sure your project isn't 'swamped by idiots'. Unfortunately some of the people with that attitude maintain open source projects (and have downvote powers on HN). I have found buffer overflow bugs in widely used open source projects that I have not informed the developers about, because when I've made previous bug reports they acted like assholes. I don't feel inclined to open myself up for public humiliation just to contribute to their project.