Way to go Linus... this is a great lesson for all of us!
It's easy to get caught-up in the heat of the moment and say and do things that we regret. We've all done it. It's part of being human. The key is to realize it, apologize and do better.
I have the impression that a combination of https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/764325/09702eb949176f55/ and some discussions on the Kernel Summit mailing list led to it, and almost certainly some private discussions as well.
You would think and yet.. Did none of John Lasseter's friends call him out and tell him to take the T down a notch over the past 20+ years?
I've pondered over this a bit and have come to the conclusion that a lot of people simply don't have close enough friends exposed to their work behavior, or they simply accept it.. Feedback from randos isn't the most likely to instigate big personal change and reflection.
I'm a SIGGRAPH rando who implemented a clone of RenderMan in 1992 or so on Sun Workstations. (It wasn't that great of an implementation (Pat Hanrahan helped me with one bit), but because of the Sun's networking capability - it could parallelize as well as anything else at the time).
I don't every recall seeing Lasseter doing anything inappropriate.
To your point: The company was going through a hard time, and randos would have been the PERFECT feedback to him. The company would have died without their support.
But, who could be there to tell him to take it down a notch[0], when he acted like a professional all day long?
Net-net: I disagree with what you just said.
[0] I generally know who was working on that project at that time, but I don't think it advances this conversation...
I call it the Impact Wrench[∆] theory of Engineer Management. It's widely practiced, sadly to modest success. This turns pressure into torque, so the harder you come down on your engineers, the faster they spin - right until they burn out.
It takes a lot of people in the community to have that frank discussion, "How do we tell the head of our project, in this non-for-profit/open source world, that they're a toxic asshole sometimes and should not be proud of that?"
I disagree strongly with his personal 'no BS' attacks. For some people, it's a huge deterrent to make contributions.
I've participated in a number of open source projects. I like to think that I've made useful suggestions and contributions, in addition to making dumb ones. When I make a dumb suggestion, I expect to corrected in a respectful way.
There have been cases where a project maintainer answered in an aggressive, passive aggressive or belittling way.
These kind of reactions stress me out, make me lose a night of sleep etc. I can handle a rejection on sound arguments, but I don't handle stress and confrontation well at all. I wish it were different, but that's just not the way I am.
They are sufficient to make me stop contributing to and leave a project.
A public rebuke by somebody like Linus is my worst nightmare, and I would never consider working on the Linux kernel because of them.
I image there are many more technically capable potential contributors out there who have the same reaction.
I also hate personal confrontation. In the past, I have even had my own sub-ordinates (I hate that word - but they were the engineers that reported to me) confront me, leaving me, from time-to-time to go home and vomit and not sleep. So - yes - I understand.
I've never looked at a rebuke from Linus in the same way. I don't know why. I guess I'll go think about that...
EDIT: After (very) short reflection, I think (for me) the difference is whether it is a close personal person rebuking me, vs. some sort of distant character....
> the difference is whether it is a close personal person rebuking me, vs. some sort of distant character
Yes, this is an important distinction.
Being verballed by a stranger (even a famous one like Linus) might be embarrassing, but it wouldn't hurt like being rebuked by some who actually knows me.
Well, it's certainly not my style, but I would generally take it as an expression of intense feeling about the topic.
If it were my wife or my child or my parent saying this, it would probably reduce me to tears.
If it were a community leader, it would probably certainly make me feel really really bad. But I wouldn't be suicidal over it. Depending on the topic, and how strongly I felt about my position (I have felt strongly about memory allocation approaches on certain 68K-based machines before), I might reply in kind.
It's easy to get caught-up in the heat of the moment and say and do things that we regret. We've all done it. It's part of being human. The key is to realize it, apologize and do better.