Do you know what my entire experience with the programming community has been? It has been every single asshole in a mile-radius telling me I am an idiot for some ridiculous reason that serves only to demonstrate how utterly retarded they are and how little they understand about my profession. I've had networking programmers try to tell me I'm writing my graphics engine wrong. It would be comical if it wasn't so incredibly aggravating.
So until other programmers stop being giant assholes, I find the rhetoric surrounding Linus' impoliteness to be ridiculous at best, and hypocritical at worst. Linus is simply doing what is necessary to get brick-headed morons to listen to him.
If that is your entire experience with the programming community you, my friend, landed on the wrong side of town for some reason. I have never had even a small sliver of that experience, and I've worked with hundreds of people.
This is not about not being polite. This is about PUBLICLY deriding people. That's bad manners, to say the least.
So until other programmers stop being giant assholes, I find the rhetoric surrounding Linus' impoliteness to be ridiculous at best, and hypocritical at worst. Linus is simply doing what is necessary to get brick-headed morons to listen to him.