Passionate, sure. Insulting, no. To be honest, I think Linux is successful despite Linus' temperament, not because of it. There are many counterexamples of successful open source projects that maintain a respectful tone: WebKit, LLVM, GCC, GNOME, KDE, Perl, etc.
This is a side-effect.
The unbalanced paren at the end of your comment really irks my OCD.
I read it as a "soft-smile".
this is russian smiley. usually used like that )))))