Linus is dead wrong here. When he says acting professionally means "fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords", he's attacking a straw man: none of that behaviour is professional, and to say that professional behaviour must degenerate to that behaviour is a stretch at best.

Aggression is not warranted in a professional environment; neither overt (a la LKML) or covert (passive). Lying is not warranted under any circumstance. Being professional means not calling people names.

All of this stuff is what you get taught in kindergarten, it's not rocket science. Mental abuse is no better than physical abuse, and given I don't buy that hitting developers with sticks makes them "better" somehow I'm also not going to buy into clue-by-four beatings being any better.

This is another great example of why you can't take successful people and distil them down to their base components and say "ah, this is what made him great!"

I believe being a loud-abrasive-dictator works for Linus because he is famous for being a loud-abrasive-dictator.

That's not important. What is important is the reader. Let's be clear on a few things

#1 - Linus doesn't run a business. He's the kernel admin, he's a popular figure, he manages millions of lines of code. That's an entirely different game than what is necessary to run a small/mid/large business. Comparing the two is an apples-to-hammers comparison.

In a business, or small open source project, you have to be willing to deal with what you get. You will make sacrifices, it wont be easy. You might have this great idea but only 2 people are willing to work the occasional weekend on it; are you about to start an email chain calling them all dogshit coders?

Linus doesn't have that problem. He's famous for being Linus. You are not famous for being you.

#2 - YOU need to know how to be critical and polite. I don't care what Linus gets to do. You as a developer, you as a person who isn't famous, you as someone working in a team must (MUST) learn how to give constructive criticism.

"Bob, This isn't up to our quality standards, here's an example (cite)".

Easy, no frills, no shit-sandwich, no sugar-coated-political-correct-everyone-holds-hands-and-sings-around-the-campfire filler text. It's clear and it gets straight to the point. Learn how to do this, or fight an uphill battle with diminishing returns.

Linus can start a project tomorrow and have a hundred developers working on it, you cannot.

#3 - I'd take Linus' opinion on business culture with about the same size of salt as I would when listening to Jonathan Ive's opinion on middle-eastern-politics.

Everyone gets to have an opinion on something. I'm sure Tim Cook has an opinion on healthcare, and Bill Gates has an opinion on footwear. This doesn't make them experts on the subject or even any more informed than your average person. They're famous for doing X, listen to their opinions on X, take everything else as amateur opinion.

Linus is the kernal admin. I want to know how he manages 15 million lines of code, I want to know how he forks/branches/merges this code, how he handles bugs, how he tests it, and how work is handed out. I want to get his opinion on managing code not managing people. He doesn't deal with payroll, 401ks, employee vacations or benefits, he doesn't care about retention, he cares about code.