Very true. I remember when one of the kernel maintainers announced why she was going to stop contributing, one of the reasons listed was "Linus has advocated physical abuse of kernel maintainers." Looking at the email that was given as evidence though, Linus told one of the maintainers something like "You're over 6 feet tall, if the contributors won't give you their patches in time to be merged, say you'll smash them :)" Hopefully Linus figures out a way to stop the over the top aggression while on break, but still keeps his no-nonsense attitude towards development.
Saying that "Linus has advocated physical abuse" based on that statement is completely disingenuous. It's an absurd interpretation. It was obviously humor and it wasn't insulting either.
There are several cases where Linus went way over the top with insults, but throwing him under the bus because of that statement is ridiculous.
That's the whole problem with these CoCs, if people get to apply the most uncharitable interpretation of any statement, we can't have anything but extremely formalized conversation, lest we run the risk of getting kicked out because someone who doesn't like us misrepresented our words.
There is a certain cost in time and energy required to separate yourself from harsh statements like that identify it as such. While it's pretty easy to say, yes he's not suggesting physical abuse, the statement implies this guy is not going to cut me any slack, I can expect to get verbally attacked for missing something in my code, etc.
Bad code has a cost associated with it as well, it takes time to reject it, explain why it's wrong, and deal with the frustration of someone less experienced. Unfortunately with some developers they want to push that off on the person writing the code and bear none of the burden.
I've seen the costs of the latter in open source projects I've worked on. People who feel encouraged stick around, support the community, and when given good feedback will often learn from it and submit better patches. Taking the time to communicate and make sure everyone feels included is part of the cost to get that.
> There is a certain cost in time and energy required to separate yourself from harsh statements like that identify it as such.
It's not a "harsh statement", it's a joke. If anything it's flattering of that person's stature.
> While it's pretty easy to say, yes he's not suggesting physical abuse, the statement implies this guy is not going to cut me any slack, I can expect to get verbally attacked for missing something in my code, etc.
I don't think it implies that, but that's besides my point. The remark was represented as "advocating physical intimidation and violence", which given the actual context is basically libel. You're free to interpret anything you want about the personality of Linus from him making such jokes, but misrepresenting it like that in public is dishonest and harmful to discourse itself.
For an example of what you're talking about, it's what diplomats do. Where a careless word misinterpreted across different cultures and languages could start a war, diplomats have learned to be, er, "diplomatic".
