It would be quite sad if we've gotten to a point where saying "I think my patch is better than yours" from a domain expert to a newbie is considered humiliating and violating.
Talking about utilitarian consequences, Linus had been way worse and while I fully agree from a moral perspective that his most extreme behaviors were bad, from a purely utilitarian perspective that didn't prevent Linux from being one of the most successful OSS projects out there.
> It would be quite sad if we've gotten to a point where saying "I think my patch is better than yours" from a domain expert to a newbie is considered humiliating and violating.
Isn't this a little bit disingenuous? Do you really think the author of OP's blog post is upset simply because a Linux kernel maintainer has far more domain expertise than him and is in principle capable of writing a "better" patch?
I agree that Miculas (the submitter of the original patch) should not have chosen formatting typically associated with direct quotations, but now you're the one putting words in his mouth: he didn't say Ellerman said his (Ellerman's) version was better, he (Miculas) said Ellerman said he liked his (Ellerman's) version better.
Ellerman's actual words were "I wanted to fix it differently", so while I don't think Miculas' paraphrasing was entirely appropriate (why paraphrase at all?), I also don't think it was a misrepresentation of what Ellerman actually said.
Because it could be seen as communicating: "my ten minutes of coding around the array access problem is more perfect than your hours of investigation to root cause the issue plus your ten minutes of coding".
Talking about utilitarian consequences, Linus had been way worse and while I fully agree from a moral perspective that his most extreme behaviors were bad, from a purely utilitarian perspective that didn't prevent Linux from being one of the most successful OSS projects out there.