What are some examples of him insulting people (as opposed to their work/code)?
To be fair, he has incredible judgment and we defer to him when it comes to being the road block to merging bad code.
He doesn't seem to hesitate to get extremely personal.
Show me an instance where his cursing is not related to kernel code.
I think I and many others are reading your statement as:
"Hey, as long as the person wrote horrible code, it's OK to call the coder anything we want".
The whole discussion isn't about how he behaves outside the kernel development. It's about how he behaves within that context.
That's objectively not true. He may intend to curse the code, but he is clearly cursing the coder.
He wrote:
>I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F*CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted
"retroactively aborted" is a dark joke, if you have a sense of humor, and conveys how bad a decision Linus think is to make a system call to read each byte.
saying "should die as a baby" is a spin. To be precise is important.