> That's a pretty shitty attitude to take.
Why?
The Linux kernel is mission critical, that means that tons of business and individual depend on it for all kinds of stuff that if it went down would be a major event with the losses likely hard to put a figure on.
Developing for such an environment tends to be a fairly harsh affair, Linus was not bred for this, he more or less accidentally found himself the leader of a substantial software effect, the likes of which had not been seen before outside of very large corporations. The fact that he managed to make this work and managed to get together a band of developers that work well with him - regardless of style - speaks volumes to me, I know I couldn't do it, work the best part of my life to give away my work and to be scolded for the form of my delivery would be reason enough for me to throw the towel in.
Personally, I've known bosses that were a lot less reasonable than Linus is who tends to simply be direct, to the point and sometimes (rare enough that people feel the need to point out their favorites) makes social faux-pas that I feel are minor issues, stuff that if it is part of someone's personality you can easily step over.
I've yet to be in a work environment where there aren't one or two 'hard cases' and typically they have their reasons for being short tempered, such as that when the shit hits the fan it is their shoulders that a disproportionate helping of manure will land on.
Being the maintainer of a large open source project has to among the the most thankless jobs in the world, being the chief maintainer of the Linux kernel is probably one of the worst of those.
The only other person in the open source community that gets such treatment is RMS and I really fail to see what the big deal is.