Can we stop repeating this? Assertiveness and assholery are not one and the same. Linus has both in abundance, and we can decry the one without wanting the other to go away.
Linus "being an asshole" is what drew attention to this issue. His caustic nature is marketing of a sort.
It's clearly putting additional pressure on Intel. How you feel about that depends on how you feel about them furiously trying to sweep everything under the carpet and hoping nobody notices.
Personally I think his humiliation of Intel here is putting necessary pressure on them. If he couched his terms and tried to be "nice" about this they wouldn't feel nearly the same pressure.
See it from this angle: if Linus wasn't known for flipping his lid all the time, him flipping out _this_ time would be even more impactful. Overuse makes it progressively less remarkable.
I wasn't even saying that his tone on this particular instance was excessive. I was responding to the general accusation that "PC culture will silence him". There's exactly one sentence I have issues with here ("the whole hardware interface is literally mis-designed by morons"). The rest of the email is toeing the line, but manages to be forceful without being outright insulting.
Adding another perspective: as someone who follows kernel news very casually, it's pretty near impossible for me to determine which instances of "Linus curses something/someone out" are related to actual Serious Things Deserving My Attention. There's a bit of boy-who-cried-wolf to the whole thing.
>See it from this angle: if Linus wasn't known for flipping his lid all the time, him flipping out _this_ time would be even more impactful. Overuse makes it progressively less remarkable.
I don't. This is pretty much part of his brand. He's developed a reputation for flipping his lid and lambasting people who have always deserved it using entertainingly colorful language. That's why these rants still get to the top of HN.
>I was responding to the general accusation that "PC culture will silence him".
I mean, that seems to be what you're trying to do by demanding that he water his language down to something that has minimal emotional impact.
It's not like using the word morons is particularly offensive, either - except to the people who actually deserved it (Intel).
>There's exactly one sentence I have issues with here ("the whole hardware interface is literally mis-designed by morons").
Which is the sentence that got this rant on hacker news, which attracted all the attention which is necessary in order to put pressure on Intel to fix their shit.
> Which is the sentence that got this rant on hacker news
And yet the title of the submission is "Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons". That's a good suggestion that the moron quote is not "what got this rant on hacker news". Perhaps it's on hacker news not because the form is inflammatory, but because the content is insightful.
Maybe—just maybe—the fact that the Linux project lead publicly accused Intel of not having their shit together is newsworthy and would end up on the front page of Hacker News no matter what tone it was written in, because that is newsworthy enough in and of itself.
That's insane. That's effectively saying that we shouldn't be critical of other people because criticism has a chilling effect (unless you're Linus, in which case it's A-OK to be both critical and an asshole about it).
