Incidentally, this kind of incidents might slow down progress in the long term.
update: by this kind of incidents i mean him being an asshole, not people telling on him. update 2: i don't endorse his behaviour.
I don't think Linus or Theo are inherently dicks. They actually seem to be awfully nice guys for the most part. Unfortunately, we seem to have a generation of people that cannot take the hint that their code needs work or they just don't seem to pay attention to what is going on. I'm not sure if its a symptom of rapidly developing code and then fixing it later. Most BDFLs are under stress and need to set clear boundaries. It seems like people only pay attention to the bombastic and not the subtle.
I personally disagree with this definition; for me "end justifies the means" sounds like a perfectly rational conclusion, but not for humans - it's too common a failure mode for a man to follow this maxim, and it almost always ends bad; hence we have that saying.
> Unfortunately, we seem to have a generation of people that cannot take the hint that their code needs work or they just don't seem to pay attention to what is going on.
I agree. Moreover, I think we have a generation of people who like to take offense at anything and everything, mostly for signalling reasons. "I am offended by what you wrote, therefore I am a better person and you are wrong".
I have never heard a person use that phrase and not violate the rights of other humans and their own morality. It is the gateway phrase people use to justify some act that they admit, by using that phrase, is not honorable. It's the phrase you say right before walking on that road paved with all those good intentions.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/uv/ends_dont_justify_means_among_hum...
This post elaborates on the topic a bit more, and after reading it some time ago I ended up agreeing with its conclusion - that the phrase is OK from theoretical standpoint, for perfectly rational actors, but not for humans - hence the heuristic, "end does not justify the means".
Even if we're making this "the only thing that matters is how great the code is" argument, there are good arguments against allowing people to be hostile.
You never know whether the size of your developer community could be larger. If you're turning 10 expert but conflict-averse developers away for every one asshole genius, it is unlikely that your code output/quality is being maximized.
There's no shortage of people -- even people who are paid to hack on the kernel every day! -- who say that they refuse to engage with the upstream community due to the hostility they expect to receive or have received.
There's also the question of if the people to whom you refer would change their behavior if the item they point to was removed. As we all know, what people say they will do and what people actually do often diverge.
A community that is all those things is of immense social value to those who feel accepted as a result, but warm fuzzies aren't the same as working software.
I think censoring people like Linus when they are clearly using hyperbole or other figures of speech is rude and immoral.
Now what do we do?