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.
