The talk organizers were faced with a dilemma: either keep Crawford and lose a bunch of other speakers or lose Crawford but keep others
I do think clarification is needed, but I could see "being a jerk " as a legit reason to not want to associate with someone. People do the same with people like Torvalds
Being unliked is also a reason that people won't want to associate with you.
Additionally, in my experience Linus Tovalds is not a jerk. Is this something you sense you get by reading email threads?
Perhaps you associate a lack of politeness and deference with being a jerk, but it really isn't the same.
I would certainly associate those two attributes with being a jerk.
I would contrast this with jerk as being someone who deliberately disregards the comfort and feelings of others to satisfy themselves: the queue jumper, Steve Jobs, someone who humiliates people on minimum wage, who doesn't re-rack the weights at the gym, who parks in the disabled car park.
(And no, Linus tends not to flame people he doesn't know.)
I'm unsure as to who the "jerks" really are in this situation.
Not a good reason.