I actually loved (I mean really loved) reading the response as it not only was encouraging but also highly respectful and almost glowing with a trained sort of nuance! Just wow!
It's just that on occasion he would rant and rave to people and call them retards or whatnot. People get a bit of a skewed perception because only those messages make the news and are famous, but that's not really representative of all the messages.
And when he did rant and rave, it was pretty much always towards established contributors who had screwed up somehow; people who in his opinion ought to know better, and most of the time he did have a good point. I don't approve of his style, but it's not like he would randomly call people idiots. It's not as if you ever ran the risk of being scolded by Linus if you were a new contributor sending a patch or anything.
tl;dr: Linus has always been like this, and was just occasionally an asshole.
Quite frankly I consider most of the news to be worse than useless and actively harmful (and news is different from journalism; journalism is great).
(also, I see now I misspelled constructive as "constrictive" in my previous comment do'h facepalm)
Honestly it's really impressive, IMO, that someone could take a look at how they act and think "I should change this," and then actually do it.
I agree that I found his messages here to be quite pleasant.
As with most human beings Linus is a person with different responses to different things and is generally not a complete lemon.
The persona of Linus you get from following LKML has always been different than the persona you'd get from internet gossip.
Also, I think what's really interesting is that with his feedback, could the language be actually be adapted to the kernel?
This would be fascinating because traditionally the code (the kernel in this case) has to adapt to the foibles of C. This could be the reverse, where not only could the language adapt, it might make the kernel technically better, and easier to read and modify.
Indeed, and I hate it. It's actually very scary, a creepy change in personality. Like the last scene in "one flew over the cuckoo's nest", where the main character is lobotomized and loses the spark on his eyes. Deeply, deeply troubling to behold. I wonder if the real Linus still exists behind all this or he's gone forever.