Reading through the responses here, is seems that we're forgetting a. Torvalds' well known demeanor, and b. that he's protecting linux.

Yes, he's unpleasant much of the time. But he has to be. Imaging if he doesn't take this hard line and something broken worms its way into linux. You know how grumpy he's going to be when he sees the headline "Gajillions of linux servers suffer random lock-ups" on Hacker News?

He doesn't have the luxury of suffering fools. I'm generally considered a nice person - if you put me in charge of linux, it'd be a mess.