I'm reading this because you rattled my chain, but I'm sharing it because it's interesting. The crux of the issue, as you pointed out, is:

Because if you want me to "act professional", I can tell you that I'm not interested. I'm sitting in my home office wearign a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm also not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what "acting professionally" results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.

"Professional" environments are all that and more. However, so are "unprofessional" environments. The single advantage engendered by "professional" environments is STRUCTURE. In other words, all the Kabuki, all the pomp'n'circumstance, all the hokey-pokey exists for the sole purpose of providing a methodology for assholes to be assholes to each other and still allow the system to function.

Orson Scott Card made a point in Songmaster that the greatest invention of the Romans, who are rarely credited with inventing anything, was bureaucracy. The Roman Empire took centuries to die long after Vandals sacked Rome simply because there was so much calcified redundancy in place that cutting the head off the beast only caused a million lizard brains from the neck to the tail to keep the heart pumping, the legs waddling and the tail twitching long past the point where anyone gave a shit about Caesar.

That is what "professional" environments bring us - a codex by which shit can get done between people who hate each other and, left to their own devices, wouldn't piss on each other if they were on fire.

Stepping out of the "professional" frame, then, is basically an act of war. I've done it. It causes excitement. It has always been deliberate and it has always reflected that the glacial changes possible within the "professional" environment have stagnated to stalemate. So when you "tell XX to pound sand" (the description used of my actions by someone up and to the left on my org chart at the time) you are basically saying "open the blockade or we shall sack the harbor." The trick is in knowing how to do it, knowing when to do it, knowing when not to do it, and knowing what to do when it is done to you.

Linus Torvalds knows how to do it. I doubt he puts it in these terms. I get the sense that he's fairly intuitive about this stuff, rather than cerebral. Sarah does too, I think, but I think you missed it.

Reading between the lines of this email, which has one name I recognize in it, which discusses a subject almost completely alien to me, I see the following:

LINUS: I'm Rick James, Bitch.

SARAH: Yeah, but we all have to work with you.

LINUS: But you're not Rick James, Bitch.

SARAH: No. But this isn't about you and me, this is about every troll and piker that will comb through this discussion looking for nuggets to take out of context and it's fucking tiresome. So do you want to explain who the fuck Rick James is, why he matters, who reports to him, why he gets in moods, and otherwise expound on the context of why, exactly, Rick James is a SuperFreak? Or would you like to take it down a notch?

To me, that's the take-away. Textual conversations are not at all contextual. Context is built up by the participants and right or wrong, that context is 100% missing for any third party. And if a third party is going to see you take it up the ass because Linus Torvalds is in a mood, you either need to accept that you look like a little bitch to the entire internet or you need to come up with a way to tell Linus Torvalds to STFU in front of the entire internet without stooping to his level.

Politics. It works, bitchez.