The reason people keep talking about those incidents is that a lot of people defend that behaviour (see other posts in this thread) or even promote it as the best way to manage a project and deal with 'inferior' programmers.

If everybody was just saying that those were unfortunate incidents where he lost his temper and agreed they were inappropriate then this debate wouldn't keep happening. Some people aren't prepared to admit that Linus is ever at fault in any way during these episodes. There is even a group of people who think that those episodes are examples of 'telling it like it is' and 'sticking it to the PC crowd' and thus should be replicated as much as possible to make sure your project isn't 'swamped by idiots'. Unfortunately some of the people with that attitude maintain open source projects (and have downvote powers on HN).

I have found buffer overflow bugs in widely used open source projects that I have not informed the developers about, because when I've made previous bug reports they acted like assholes. I don't feel inclined to open myself up for public humiliation just to contribute to their project.

> and deal with 'inferior' programmers.

Except the people he usually deals with in a harsh manner are not inferior, rather, from the examples, it is usually the top collaborators

> I have found buffer overflow bugs in widely used open source projects that I have not informed the developers about, because when I've made previous bug reports they acted like assholes

I understand, but did you follow the bug reporting procedure?

Also, some projects may act polite towards outsiders then direct criticism (and bugs) to /dev/null

We defend that behaviour because this debate keeps happening and people keep blowing his (few) outbursts way out of proportion.

I don't think it's the best way to manage anything, but I also don't think these outbursts are a big deal.

No, he's not a remarkable example of civility. He's just a realistic example of a person who manages others. The thing is, like you pointed out, he does it in public.

> What I find remarkable is that people always talk about the same half-dozen remarks - from an history of 20 years of kernel development completely in the open.

Your commend would be relevant if my comment was the top of a thread or something. Take a look at the context of the conversation. I wasn't popping in out of context out of nowhere and saying "Linus is an asshole, look at these comments!". I was responding to the specific assertion that these asshole-ish statements can be attributed to cultural differences. I in no way disagree with the idea that "Linus was being a dick in these cases" is very very different from "Linus is a dick".