Not to excuse this, but this involved a person with a Finnish name who specifically CC'd Linus complaining about a perceived regression when doing things a wrong way. Note that there is even a phrase about a Finnish phenomenon, "management by perkele," referring to a militaristic managing style which steamrolls dissent with a lot of profanity.

Therefore, I doubt that a random person on LKML that wasn't CC'ing Linus to complain about the bad performance of doing things wrong would draw random fire from Linus about his ability to suck a tit.

Meanwhile, Steve Jobs was a total asshole to many people, including family, and this has been approved in his hagiography as a condition for his incredible inventions which revolutionized all mankind. If that is true for Apple then presumably it is also true for Linux?

Or maybe we should be more uniform in criticizing for people being assholes, rather than singling out Open Source with an implicit double standard.