Well, that's just it. Equanimity in the face of psychological pressure is a valuable skill to have. But it is a skill, it's not free, and the military spends a lot of effort on weeding people out who cannot develop that skill by the end of basic, intermediate, and advanced training schools.

And for those of us on the outside, we wouldn't tell a random developer that he should crank out 40 push-ups to prove his worth, like we might in the military. In the military there is what we'd call a bona-fide occupational qualification behind assessing the psychological durability of recruits.

Is there such as bona-fide requirement to develop software patches? Should there be?

I'll give Linus a pass on this much; his behavior here is well within the norms of the Linux kernel development community and his own previous behavior. He's the Captain of that particular ship and he's not doing anything illegal, nor does he intend personal injury, so at some point it's easier to concede that he will run that ship the way he wants and put on asbestos underwear, than to try to change both his behavior and the resultant mailing list culture.

But I think it's important to keep in mind that his kind of behavior must be very much the exception to the rule for software development, open or otherwise. If you breed a culture of aggressiveness then you must be ready to handle the people you draw in from that. It works for the military, it seems to work for the LKML, but I would be hesitant to hold it up as a general model.