I know how it feels to be a benevolent dictator. I am one myself on my jOOQ User Group. Supporting Free Open Source Software isn’t always easy. Sometimes you get demanding users, sometimes you get grumpy bugfixers. And the occasional troll. You try to be nice and sometimes, you make mistakes, too. But hey, even if it’s free and Open Source, that’s not an excuse for being rude towards your users (= customers!). Except, of course, for The One Great Benevolent Dictator. Everyone should know by now who I’m talking about. But not everyone accepts his rudeness. As seen on the Linux Kernel List:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/15/427
Enjoy!
> that’s not an excuse for being a rude jerk towards your users
The recipient wasn’t a user, it was another kernel developer. Linus got upset because the other developer said it was ok to break user space.
I recommend reading the whole thread.
Of course, you’re right about users vs. kernel developers. However, I’m mostly referring to the tone of voice, not the message content. I’m sure Linus is right, technically. But there’s always various ways of communicating “being right”.
It’s actually a coincidence that I’ve stumbled upon this thread shortly after having been silenced in an H2 User Group discussion by Noel Grandin, who explicitly said to have taken inspiration by Linus Torvalds… :)