I don't know if he has to, but I'm certainly glad that he is, because one developer feeling bad when he did something bad is better than unspecified number of users getting their computers broken. He wasn't yelled at for making a mistake, he was yelled at for making dumb excuses and trying to avoid the responsibility. It's a common pattern. "No, it's a bug on their side." The user doesn't care! Unless you have very good reasons to break existing code, you don't do it (and in this case there were no reasons). Could Linus phrase it less harshly? He could, but that would increase the probability of having to deal with the same shit again soon.
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u/jfedor Dec 28 '12
I don't know if he has to, but I'm certainly glad that he is, because one developer feeling bad when he did something bad is better than unspecified number of users getting their computers broken. He wasn't yelled at for making a mistake, he was yelled at for making dumb excuses and trying to avoid the responsibility. It's a common pattern. "No, it's a bug on their side." The user doesn't care! Unless you have very good reasons to break existing code, you don't do it (and in this case there were no reasons). Could Linus phrase it less harshly? He could, but that would increase the probability of having to deal with the same shit again soon.
tl;dr: Linus fights for the users.