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Maybe not polite, but plenty would read it for what was meant? I'm not saying it's not unprofessional (and "the community" is probably better off without it) but perfectly healthy environments can include that kinda talk.

Plenty of friend groups cuss each other out in good fun.

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Fine. I didn't specify context.

As you and @kingofhdds pointed out, it's OK to call someone that if you are a close friend or somehow trusted not to literally mean it, but we are talking about a mailing list that's a professional exchange for one of the most important software projects in history, that's read by thousands of people and its messages will be archived probably forever.

We can do better than that.

It's still an absolutely monocultural view. Indeed, in anglophone cultures "professional" = more formal, and restrained. In many other places it works like that: professional community means reduced social distance means LESS strict mode of communication, then you would use with people at a bus stop. Personally, I think in some cases it really makes sense to accept a compromise set of rules when communicating internationally, but they must be flexible, dynamic, as much informal as possible, not punishing, and not hindering efficiency. And swearing Linus could be quite within such a compromise. Btw, no formal CoC I ever read represent a compromise, and all efforts to enforce industry-wide CoC is obviously goes against the very idea of compromise.

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