I have contributed some trivial commits (so far) and though I encountered some harsh comments it was nothing I felt was overly personal. But of course, my experience is pretty limited at this point.

I get the impression that the level of these issues varies wildly depending on the subsystem in question. For example, Greg Kroah-Hartman is friendly and helpful to a ridiculous degree, I literally don't understand how he gets so much done and maintains helpfulness (and he's working on the staging drivers with some of the roughest code in the entire kernel.)

I feel sorry that Sarah has had this happen, and it's sad that this could happen to anyone, but in particular it's sad that it's happened to a woman when we have such a massive under representation of women already in our industry and probably even more so in the kernel.

I don't know what the answer is, but for those areas of the kernel that are a problem a balance needs to be found between directness and talking to somebody like a human being.

As for Linus, I think he gets somewhat misrepresented in many places. His vitriol is reserved for senior kernel maintainers who should know better and do things which (in many cases) could very negatively impact users, I've seen a number of threads where he's been let's say, less than civil, which were all about kernel code breaking user code and the subsystem maintainers saying 'well they're doing it wrong so let's just break their applications'. In those kind of circumstances you're glad that Linus strongly objects.