Agreed. I suspect he was always an easily-frustrated, OCD, crabby hacker.

And those aspects of his personality would be exaggerated by the level of communication and questions and input that he's come to receive over the years.

Doesn't make it 'right', or 'kind', but I suppose it gets things done.

You may be interested to peruse some of the dialog of the "Tanenbaum-Torvalds" debate (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum%E2%80%93Torvalds_deba...). Basically, Andrew Tanenbaum, creator and advocate of the MINIX operating system (from which Linus drew some inspiration) got into a debate with Linus in 1987, claiming that the monolithic kernel design was inferior to the microkernel, and that Linux was obsolete from launch. Linus's responses throughout the debate strike me as some of his more respectful and thoughtful rhetoric. (http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/appa.html)