How you treat others says everything about you and nothing about the other person.

In this case, the unnecessary insults detract from the otherwise important message, and reflect poorly on Zig. They were right to edit it.

>Is political correctness necessary to have a thriving community / open source project?

Not at all, but this reads like childishness rather than political correctness.

What does any of this have to do with political correctness?

Not being a dick is quite a different thing than political correctness.

Makes me wonder how much to the mass strife and confusion of the internet is simply down to people not knowing what the words they use mean?

Hmm I don’t think any of the revisions are about being PC but rather not making juvenile comments. Linus has definitely made a lot of harsh inflammatory comments to others, I don’t think it’s the right thing to do and shows his character but at the same time for me at least it comes across as a smart pompous jerk who says things in the wrong way but at least usually has some kernel of a point.

The Zig comments come off has highly immature, maybe because they are comments made to unknown people, calling folks losers or monkeys just crosses some line to me. Telling someone to stfu is not great but calling groups of people monkeys feels worse.

Linus famously was quite strict and cursed quite a bit when somebody pissed him off with stupidity.

Even Linus doesn’t act that way anymore. Here’s him a few years ago:

> This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for.

> Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry. The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely.

> I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately.

He took time off and he’s better now. What you call “political correctness” is what I and others call “basic professionalism”. It took Linus 25 years to understand that. I can only hope that the people who hero worshipped him and adopted a similar attitude can also mature.

there's a big gulf between being politically correct and not being a jerk. In this case the community reps can present their concern, motivation and decision without insulting people. It's also not a smart or valid comment; give me any organization over 100 people and I can find something deeply flawed that it hase produced or a very bad decision. Do I then tag everybody who currently works for that organization as "a brain-dead idiot" or similar?

> "eager to inflict"

Eager to do what? If it sucks it sucks, but that's a very childish way to frame it, no one did anything on purpose or out of spite. That kind of silliness hurts the image of the project. But bad translation I suppose.

One can avoid being asshole even if it is not strictly speaking necessary. In fact, if you are an asshole when it is not necessary, then you are an asshole.

Not calling other software engineers 'losers' is not about political correctness. They're "losers" because they take their product on a path you don't like? Come on. Linus can be emotional in his posts because Linux is his "child".