Yes it is possible to be so, however, it is not always possible to know if a friendly and polite person is a straight-talked or a bull-shitter - the advantage of Linus' personality is that there's is absolutely no question which one you're dealing with. I wouldn't recommend this as appropriate behavior when dealing with unknown people on a new project, but for a long-running project like Linux, I can't imagine most people can't unemotionally disregard Linus' language as "just the way he is" - if he was the type of person who if you were to disagree with him, he would then try to destroy your career to teach you a lesson, now then I think you'd have good reason to condemn him. I personally have no idea how he handles disagreement though. In my experience, I'll gladly take a harsh but righteous person over a polite politically-savvy self-promoting bullshit artist any day of the week....these people are a lot more common than many people think.

And I agree with him, there are so many nice bullshitters these days. Hell, most of these bullshitters seem worthless "professionals", while here we are talking about Linus.

Oh, and if you think politeness has anything to do with being inclusive... You should look at the real world. Lots of poor people wouldn't care about you being polite or not, they would care about you actually caring and helping them.