>1 byte reads with sys-calls is a beginner mistake. Kay was/is not a beginner. He also had at that point had repeated complaints from Linus about the quality of his code, and showed no sign of listening. This conflict eventually culminated in Linus making it clear he'd had enough, and will no longer merge code from Kay until he cleans up his act

Then this is all Linus had to say. This, exactly, is a great sentence on why you'll no longer be accepting code from a party, and sums up both what they can do to get back in, and what other developers can learn from this. There's no need to sink to insults, especially at the level Linus can dish out.

We have to deal with clients so clueless, I don't know how they manage to even email us with the stupid questions. But we're polite to them and when speaking about them publically. We keep the abortion-comments private, between the developers whenever we go out for happy-hour. It's not very hard for the open-source community to do the same. (I know the majority of the open source community does not do this. But a vocal minority do, and the rest of the community seems to be okay with this, when it's not okay).