Speaking as someone who at work (big corp) has to do semantic loop-de-loops and contortions to sugarcoat even the mildest criticism of sometimes utterly stupid ideas, just to avoid ruffling feathers and be politically correct, I find this refreshing. It seems to me that the kernel developers plain and simple fucked up, and grsecurity people are right to call them out on this.

I don't find anything but objective summary of what happened in their post. No hostility at all. But that's just me.

They are often in the "very correct, but unnecessarily mildly hostile" area. I wonder if they could gain way more public support just by having someone moderate their posts for PR.

That is kinda their business model though, isn't it? I mean, they're trying to sell you their added security patches, so it's in their interest to convince you that they alone know what they're doing and everyone else incompetent.

Thank you grsecurity for the patch. They provided a valuable fix.

If they consider some chest bumping helps them to get more business to support their future freebie bug hunts, I'd call it fair.

Also, I think bragging rights motivate a lot of white hats doing valuable work for free. Would we be better off without them?

That said, I'm not saying being impolite is ok.

But they are correct.

Correctness should forgive any amount of "tone", if indeed we care about correctness.