About Linus, he takes a lot of shit for being abrasive, but he's a nice man. If he scolds you for bad coding, he's half joking (only half) and he'd help you. He's most often being jovial.

I followed the kernel mailing list back in the old days for years and read many of his interactions. He got involved in a discussion with me and a driver maintainer and was super good to me. Basically it went like this "Tell Gigabyte to fix your broken BIOS". Linus got involved, and suddenly that guy's attitude changed. I mentioned that the device worked correctly in Windows, and Linus told me to get the same info that lspci supplies, so they could see what resources the Windows driver was using. (board vendors tweak i/o and memory ranges etc.) So I found a utility that gave the exact info as lspci -vv, in almost the same format.

When I returned with that info, Linus gave me a huge lesson on why the problem was occurring. I'm not much of a programmer and I felt really silly that he was spending his time on me like that. The driver got fixed though. I appreciated the Hell out of that.

Linus is a good guy? I'm not surprised.

He tried pretty hard in the early years to establish himself as (his words) 'not a do-gooder. a fundamentally selfish person', etc. (I gather this from his talks and the occasional article; I haven't read the autobiography or anything.) -- Possibly to distance himself from diehard FSF people. Though pretty obviously he's of a different character altogether from both the old-school software tycoons, as well as (heaven forbid) the contemporary crop of so-called 'tech bros'.

btw - if a person is stupid, and *clueless* enough to call the NYT, of all publications—one of the premier 'consent manufacturing' organs of the US Empire & all the financial/military interests bound up with it—'communist', they deserve a much harsher response. You don't get to recycle alex jones level soundbytes to quarrel with Linus.