barsoap, 9 months ago

“being a dick” and “assertive” are weasel terms which do a hell a lot of lifting in your argument there. I have no idea where your line for behaviour to be deemed acceptable actually is.

IMO, no, Linus wasn’t a dick. He called out a specific attitude and behaviour which Mauro is not supposed to show in his role as maintainer. What about Mauro being a dick because he went in all self-righteous like “this is a bug in pulseaudio”?

If you were a restaurant manager, and a server told a customer that he’s not going to serve beer with steak but only wine because “drinking beer with steak is obviously wrong”, what would you do? Chew them out, of course. It’s way out of line. This isn’t Linus exploding over nothing just to bully someone, that’s a thing he has never done.

If you want someone toxic to complain about in the FOSS space pick Lennart Poettering, the kind of guy who replies to “We’d like to be able to disable various features to keep things small” with “why do you hate disabled people they need accessibility”. More generally speaking: Focussing on tone never ends up well. You can be incredibly toxic in the most flowery of idioms.