On kernel mailing list behavior

As a follow up point; I can also say with some confidence that this behaviour would not occur in a professional environment in *most* businesses, not without significant consequences. Can anyone remember a time when they were allowed to call their co-workers a useless cunt? No and neither can I and it doesn’t matter how badly they have messed up. Workplaces have liability if their senior staff abuse their junior staff or vice versa (at least in any way that can be proven) and there are many, many lawsuits that have been filed for those reasons and Human Resources in any company you can think of will have policies regarding conduct between employees.
Oh I am sure there are exceptions and being the internet someone will no doubt cite them so let me head off the few I can think of:
Perhaps in the armed forces where lives are at stake you might be able to carelessly toss around the abuse but in context you are employed to kill people there so perhaps that might be an exception to a generalize rule of civility.
Yes in an impoverished 3rd world nation where much of the population is starving I am sure your manager can say whatever he likes about the quality of the shoes you are manufacturing and possibly even beat you if they are not up to Nike standard but again not a very good apples to apples comparison to the world of free and open source software development.

Secondly to all those who have made the most tragically weak apology for Linus’s behaviour that it preserves the delicate quality of Kernel code or even weaker that it reduces redundant traffic in the mailing list that ladies and gentlemen is a horrific fallacy with no supporting evidence.
There is no historical proof that abusive and ultimately childish behaviour and an inability to control your emotional state when talking to volunteers on a project improves the quality of the results. None, no I don’t care about that one time you observed it helped in one case that is anecdotal not empirical and not submissible as evidence.
I am of the opinion that if there is an issue of low quality patches being pushed through still after several years of Linus and others casting aspersions upon others intellect, breeding and bedroom preferences threatening them with beatings that they could never hope to carry out then I think the evidence would be closer to suggesting these practices haven’t worked as a code quality improver at all.
I can see no reason that you could not be direct in telling someone that their code doesn’t meet a standard that you are willing to accept but telling them that it is shit or stupid or that they themselves are morons not only insults them but has insulted their work too. Work that they may have put time into and further you should not make assumptions about the reasons as to why they have produced code not up so standard but you can ask if they are willing to re-write the code to a level you would accept.

Thirdly Linux is a free project the people submitting patches do not get paid for their work and hence it is the proverbial gift horse, you shouldn’t look it in the mouth and even if you don’t think it is a stallion you would ride at best you might turn the gift away and suggest that you would rather walk insulting the man or woman who has made this offer only increases the chance that it will not be offered in the future. Yes some companies are paying staff to develop for Linux but not a lot and most of them only have devoted small amounts of their resources to this effort since the gain in market share is tiny.
A little reality check; there is a very good reason that many hardware vendors don’t play with Linux, it has a tiny market share and can’t justify subjecting their staff to the poor attitude within the Kernel development community. There is no business case in saying: “because it is a better developed and maintained kernel than the abomination that Redmond has vomited into the world” The market has never cared about quality of code and businesses largely don’t either. Linux needs a much larger market share to swing its weight around and largely thanks to Android it is beginning to gain that. But it is still a drop in the ocean compared to Microsoft and hardware vendors still treat it accordingly.
It may help if the Kernel community was extending the olive branch towards hardware vendors and asking nicely for them to produce drivers or at least make available the documentation required for the community to take an informed stab at it ie ATI but if the attitude of the top Kernel developers is still aggressive, confrontational and generally insulting then I can’t exactly hold it against hardware vendors that they don’t feel compelled to try and get their drivers into the Kernel.

For the TLDR summary:
Linux is shooting itself in the foot with this childish attitude, its an operating system not a tree house and the only people who are hurt by a lack of vendor support and interest is the users. I am all for a code of conduct that requires Kernel maintainers to try playing nice with the patch developers.