" Linus' rants on the Linux kernel lists are almost cookie cutter copies of Theo's."
Linus is a jerk towards experienced maintainers. Theo is a jerk towards everyone. There is a big difference.
I can't be bothered to look for it right now, but there was an email on lkml where an inexperienced contributor basically asked "should i just give up?" and Linus chipped in with quite a friendly manner and mentioned how important contributions from everyone were to the project.
I get the feeling the people Theo yelled at are the same people Linus would yell at. Given Theo's behavior when RMS was trolling the misc list, Theo seemed quite calm.
There's a lot of fuzzy thinking in this thread. The idea that the emails which somehow come to our attention because they appear on internet blogs or something due to their OMG WTF value are representative of their author's normal, everyday output has as much merit as assuming, for example, that that photo of rackmounted OpenBSD computers on the openbsd.com page represents the entirety of the project's electricity usage.
Linus is a jerk towards experienced maintainers. Theo is a jerk towards everyone. There is a big difference.
I can't be bothered to look for it right now, but there was an email on lkml where an inexperienced contributor basically asked "should i just give up?" and Linus chipped in with quite a friendly manner and mentioned how important contributions from everyone were to the project.