Comment by jdoliner

What makes you think Linus would be more effective if he used a different tone? That seems like a tough argument to win given how tremendously effective he is. It doesn't seem like an exaggeration to me to say that Linux is the most successful opensource project of all time and among the best managed of all time in terms of the number of use cases it's managed to address over time and the number of people who have contributed. Not, I will grant, in terms of number of people whose feelings have been hurt. But I fail to see the evidence that Linux would actually be better off if Linus behaved differently. If we had good Linus and bad Linus we could A/B test, but sadly, we don't. We just have the one Linus, and he's been more effective than anyone in opensource over the last 20+ years. So it seems a lot more likely to me that his behavior is part of that effectiveness, not in opposition to it.