Wow. I don't know what to think about this.

Saying a mean thing every once in a while doesn't make you a mean person. He was just frustrated, he gets frustrated often and does not practice enough self control when venting his frustration. That's not the same thing as consciously setting out to be mean to someone, at least, that's how I would define 'being a mean person'.

Maybe what he said was mean, maybe imprudent, rude, crude, etc., but also: Maybe he was mostly just trying to get his point across -- with what he said, it would be tough not to get his point!

And maybe clearly it was important for him to get that point across, to have people consider it; or, of course, reading one byte at a time via a system call is dumb: Since that practice had been going on for a long time, apparently he felt he needed to work hard actually to get the real and meaningful attention of people.

Another way to put it might have been, "What needs to be done, to go around with a 20 gallon barrel of ice water and one person at a time dump it on them to see if they are just asleep or really dead?". When seeing something clearly bad going on for a long time and still little or no outrage, or even effective attention, to improving the situation, can get frustrated and then be crude, rude, etc. if only just to get people shocked enough actually to pay attention.

Maybe I'm not the only one to "feel his pain", and maybe such a statement, under such a circumstance, does not make someone "mean".

Contrast the support for Linus "just getting his point across" in the other responses to you, with the downvotes another person got elsewhere for calling something "retarded." I find it interesting.

I'm sure Linus didn't meant that person to actually die. This is his style. Calling out undesirable behaviour with a dark humor. It not "mean".

Which is a pile of complete BS. If all actions were fully justified simply because the person doing the deed felt a certain way, then we would need no laws nor rules of conduct because everyone would always show the correct behavior. He's more than old enough to know that the kind of language he uses is meant to be insulting. He's a jackass.

The distinction I'm drawing is that Linus Torvalds' insults are so obvious and over the top that they are a greater risk to his reputation than to the feelings of the insulted. Whereas with genuine meanness one says things that a. one can claim weren't meant to hurt and b. make the victim worry that there is some truth to them.