I think he has known about his behavior for a long time, and someone with influence has explained the impact.
I changed my HN handle from Mz to this one after more than 8 years and only after hitting the leaderboard. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard. It genuinely took me that long to conclude that my handle was a real problem in part because I was so dramatically outperforming other women in terms of being accepted here that, for the longest time, it honestly wasn't clear to me that it particularly mattered.
Changing my handle was so very well received that I'm sure I did the right thing. But, no, I honestly didn't see it as a big issue until after I hit the leaderboard. A few weeks later, I changed it.
Linus is a man with no real peers and there are few people who are anything close to a peer. It is hardly surprising to me that he lacks perspective on some details. It would be quite shocking if he didn't lack perspective about some things, given the path he has walked.
With regards to not having perspective, because he's so unique (or doing something unique), you may be right. I wonder if in fact he has been enabled for many years by his closest collaborators. People who should have said, "Hey Linus don't be a dick".
There's a debate going on in Australia, about whether it's ok to bully a bit, in parliament, because it's that sort of place. It's also a workplace and bullying is illegal in a workplace.
It's ok to be a dick if your a successful, influencial genius, not ok if your not successful, not influencial or not a genius. Maybe. He's a member of a broader community, where norms exist, and courtesy costs very little.
https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
Other lists:
Leading people?
Fair enough, he ceated something remarkable, but at the end of the day people have been leading others for literally millennia. So I'm not willing to cut him slack on that account.
(Having said that, I'm deeply impressed by the step he took in that email, and did it publicly)
When most CEOs have a cow, a few people witness it and then they sanitize the message before releasing a PR statement of what the CEO would like to see happen. When Linus has a cow, it can end up on the front page of Hacker News with everyone talking trash about him.
As far as I know, he actually handles that piece of it remarkably well. Most people would not cope too well with such a situation. I have never heard of him then going on a screed about "assholes on Hacker News" or whatever. Instead, what I have seen is "polite" and "well behaved" people nastily referring to it as "the peanut gallery," which is incredibly insulting and dismissive. I have yet to personally see Linus do such a thing.
Given how much people here like to talk trash about him, I infer this suggests it is something he doesn't do.
It wouldn't be in my personality (I think) to lash out at people publicly like that, precisely because it's a public channel. It is in his personality, however, and I think it's fair to observe the negative aspects of this behaviour, and call him out on it.
And I particularly dislike the "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" apologist crowd (which you are not part of, I know). Not sure if I'm blowing this out of proportion, but to my ears it sounds not very different from "if you don't want to be sexually assaulted, you shouldn't have dressed like that".
Having said all that: I'm actually really impressed by Linus' email. Proud of him, even. Like all of us he has his vices, but he has become aware of them and tries to improve. What more can you ask.
To me, this has pretty much taken all of the negativity out of future blowups he might (will, probably) have: because he's now on record for not intending to be this way, I personally could overlook any personal attacks and filter them as unintentional, reacting only to the factual content.
Let me just discuss the argument about being this way in public vs. in private. IMO even traditional CEOs shouldn't be that way, whether it becomes public or not. For one thing because it's "not nice" (which they might not care about), but for another because it might foster a climate that is detrimental to the company.
A good example might be VW, whose exhaust cheating fiasco seems to have come about in part because engineers didn't dare push back against impossible demands from top management.
When you live in a fish bowl, it gets much harder to figure out where to draw that line. Big celebrities can't take a piss so to speak without the rumor mill going crazy. They do not have the kind of privacy ordinary people take for granted. If they eat dinner with someone, all the gossip rags explode with speculation that there is a business deal in the making or this is their new love interest.
If everyone talks smack about you for taking a piss, "just hold it" isn't actually a solution. You will eventually explode.
I suggested elsewhere in this discussion that he would probably benefit from a creative outlet. I'm very sincere about that and I have good reason to think it would actually help him.
But, hey, my name is mud and I'm a big fat nobody. So I won't be wasting my time or his by trying to track down his email address and shoot him an email.
Enjoy your day.