A request

And believe it or not, that sounds like 99% of the communication style on LKML. But that 1% is what gets the headlines.

Now, you said you employ people that you make these comments to. I'm sure you don't hire just anyone. You vet them out via interviews and such. You look at their previous work, and other such methods to make sure you hire a decent employee. In such an environment, I would hope that you would never need to be uncivil in your approach.

The fact is, Linux gets patches from *anyone*. Anyone can post patches to LKML and to the maintainers. There is no vetting process except for the review of the code. And sometimes, the civil responses to people just doesn't cut it, and it takes a stronger voice.

Now to be honest. I've been working in the Linux kernel community since 2003. Only once in that period did I have to insult someone, but that was after months of trying to explain why what they were doing didn't work.

I try very hard to be civil and "nice" in my replies. But sometimes, I'm a bit blunt in my review, just because I need to stress the way the code should not be changed. And saying something too nice where the developer doesn't understand my thoughts on it, may cause that developer to waste time in doing it. The term I used was "I hate this code here". "hate" was a strong word, but I really wanted to let that developer know not to continue with the approach they were heading. I pointed out the way I wanted it done, and they were fine with it. I'm sure some people may have been offended by my "hating" some of their code (Note, this wasn't the insult I was talking about above).