It's essentially saying that not only should Sarah Sharp be willing to put up with all the hostility, but that the only reason she's complaining about it is to make a political point. It's a way of snidely arguing that she can't possibly actually care about the issue. That's far more dismissive of other people's reactions than anything Linus Torvalds is complaining about, and yet he's trying to claim that he has the inclusive moral high ground and Sarah Sharp is the one who's ignoring the fact that different people react differently.
I think what's being discussed is Linus' reaction to someone's patch on the lkml a few days ago. https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/13/132
Here is a preview:
>What the F*CK, guys?
>This piece-of-shit commit is marked for stable, but you clearly never
>even test-compiled it, did you?Date: Thu, 26 May 2011 00:04:50 -0700 From: Greg KH To: Sarah Sharp Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [RFC 0/3] xhci: Remove useless debugging
On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 04:28:51PM -0700, Sarah Sharp wrote: The xHCI driver is what, two years old now? It's high time it put on its big girl pants and stop crapping out useless debugging information.
You now owe me a wet-wipe to clean my laptop up from the coffee I just
snorted out my nose all over it.
The wind was probably blowing South East instead of North West or something on the day Sarah decided everyone needed to be more "professional".
"Hey! This is broken. It doesn't do X, Y, or Z. Please make sure to check code thoroughly (refer to $DOCUMENT) before committing." is direct, tells people what's wrong, and isn't hostile. People will be offended by it, but those people can be made to understand that they are being given useful direct advice.
Getting specific details - instructions or guidance even - is far better to solving the problem efficiently.
This is a "You know better than this!" rant, not an attack on some new guy.
Genuinely interested in this research. Care to cite?
Here's a quick example thanks to google:
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/02/70179
But this is a drop in the bucket.
Actually, this email is pretty polite and to-the-point. I don't know exactly what it is that he said that was offensive in private, but he's actually being pretty reasonable here.
The thing is, some people spend a lot of effort when writing to check that they don't accidentally leave "sharp edges" in their writing (and then they still fail to find them all) while others write the way they would talk and assume that their tone of voice is "obvious" when of course it isn't. I expect if you knew Linus personally (I do not) his most outrageous written comments would seem just fine.
There's a ton of research on how written communications (especially with relative anonymity, etc.) can lead to cascading flamewars and so forth without anyone setting out to troll or be outrageous. Linus lives in that world, so he probably offends a lot of people accidentally just as a matter of percentages.
> most successful open source project ever
Surely that would be BSD which, without Linux, would probably be Linux (and was Linux before Linux), and with Linux is still most of Linux and a good deal of Mac OS X and iOS, and without which Linux would be irrelevant.