I have to agree with Linus on this and it's nice that he's taking time to write out his thoughts in public.

GitHub commit messages can be really ugly. I'm guilty of this and it's not something I'm proud of. I think the small improvement they did a while ago with the display of commit messages is a step in the right direction, I wish they would apply that same style to the web interface when composing commit messages.

edit: A good fix would be a way to turn off pull requests for projects or at least redirect users on how to send pull requests.