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Lumifer comments on Rationality Quotes August 2013 - Less Wrong
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Forking is pretty easy -- it's getting people to follow your fork that's hard.
Well, there are certainly enough programmers who prefer to discuss code in terms of "only a brain-dead moron could write a library that does foo" or "why is this retarded object making three fucking calls to the database for each invocation", etc.
And while people generally don't find it fun to be on the losing side, this does not stop them from seeking and entering competitions and competitive spheres. Consider sports, e.g. boxing or martial arts.
Steelman this. I am pretty sure that in the North European culture being "subtle or nice" is dangerously close to being dishonest. You do not do anyone a favour by pretending he's doing OK while in reality he's clearly not doing OK. There is a difference between being direct and blunt - and being mean and nasty.
As I said, Linus' style is proven to work. We know it works well. An alternative style might work better or it might not -- we don't know.
I suspect you have a strong prior but no evidence.
I don't understand what you're saying here. Are you saying that anyone is proposing that Linus to act in a way that he would see as dishonest? Because I don't think that's the proposal. Consider the difference between these three statements:
The first one is rude, the second one is blunt, the third one is subtle/tactful/whatever. Linus appears to think that people are asking for subtle, when instead they're merely asking for not-rude. Blunt could even be:
So he doesn't even have to stop cursing.
There are many FOSS projects that don't use Linus's style and do work well. What's so special about Linux?
I've run a free/open source project; I tried to run it in a friendly way, and it worked out well (and continues to do so even after all of the original developers have left).
I can also point to Karl Fogel's book "Producing Open Source Software", where he says that rudeness shouldn't be tolerated. He's worked on a number of free/open source projects, so he's had the chance to experience a bunch of different styles.
We keep hitting the Typical Mind Fallacy over and over again :-)
Let me offer you my interpretation: the first one is blunt and might or might not be rude, depending on what the social norms and context are (and on whether thinking about frobnicating the beezlebib does provide incontrovertible evidence of severe brain trauma). The second one is not blunt at all, it's entirely neutral. The third one is a slighly more polite version of neutral. Your fourth example is still neutral, by the way -- there's nothing particularly blunt about explaining why something should not be done (or about using four-letter words, for that matter).
To contrast I'll offer my examples:
It's only the most successful open software ever. Otherwise, not much :-P
I recently came across this, which seems to have some evidence in my favor (and some irrelevant stuff): http://www.bakadesuyo.com/2013/10/extraordinary-leader/