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This may be an unpopular opinion, but I WANT Linus to be "rude" to SENIOR devs who should know better, because it's better to be rude than to ship code that results in critical infrastructure getting pwned, or worse, somebody to die.

I actually fear the day, when somebody more polite gets in and lets it known, (unintentionally, of course), that shitty, rookie code is now fine, that being lazy and not treating the trust that has been placed upon you by being a subsystem maintainer for the most important software project of the 21st century - if you don't consider that an important enough responsibility and are willing to embarrass Linus, who put his trust in you, then yeah, I don't mind him being rude.

I would mind if he was rude to first time contributors fixing a typo, that's not who he's rude at.

He can't fire these people as such, many of them work for sponsors who pay his salary and he has no direct control over them, so being rude is one of his last resorts - especially since it's hard to express just how hardly displeased over email WITHOUT being "rude".



It's not a binary choice between being rude or shipping bad code. You can reject patches and give feedback without being an asshole about it.


> You can reject patches and give feedback without being an asshole about it.

He does give feedback, if you take a look at LKML he's only "rude" to the repeating offenders, not those who make a one-time honest mistake, but rather to those who got too comfy to actually review the code they're sending to Linus as "reviewed".

I am not saying Linus is always right, but if you actually follow his reasoning, it makes a great amount of sense.




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