Not really hardware, but this is the best place for this.
This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry.
I’ll be goddamned.
Linus is a god-king and Generalissimo all in one; with power and influence it is very easy to fall into acerbicy and sarcasm. Also he’s probably somewhere on the spectrum, like a lot of brilliant IT guys. If this pushed contributors away, that’s a strong argument to cool down a bit.
There have been a couple people that have left over the past couple of years, such as Sarah Sharpe, but this has been building for a long time. It probably has also deterred some from starting to contribute as well, as just doing kernel work is daunting enough without the added worry of how it will be received. I know it was a number of years before I ever submitted a patch.
I give it 3 months before the next rant.
He might not even be back to handling maintaining mainline in 3 months. He has stepped back, and handed things off to Greg for the time being while he works on dealing with this.
Gardening require pruning.
But is okay, theres more than one model that work.