This post is heavily inspired by my experience over the last ten years participating in the open source community and eight years as a maintainer of Homebrew (which I’ve maintained longer than anyone else at this point).
He’s doing the right thing and softening his responses to be more welcoming to new contributors, but it’s still totally understandable when any open source dev loses patience. We have thousands of requests coming at us from all angles and no one has infinite patience.
Maybe instead of Torvalds taking lessons on how to be less of an asshole, he should be teaching developers how to be more like him.
He’s doing the right thing and softening his responses to be more welcoming to new contributors, but it’s still totally understandable when any open source dev loses patience. We have thousands of requests coming at us from all angles and no one has infinite patience.