He's still an asshole, though. People like him are the reason people don't like to get involved in open source projects. It seems like only in open source communities you are expected to eat shit and say, "Thank you, may I have some more?"
Linus's actions in mailing lists (independent of any code he writes) are actually a good advertisement for open source. The time people most need support is when they start to engage with a project. If you ever see Linus dealing with such bug reports by relative outsiders, he invariably treats them with kid gloves. Even here what you're seeing is him being super nice to the outsider who reported the bug report. He's sending an unambiguous message: We don't break user code. And: this is a meritocracy; it doesn't matter who you are, if you fuck up I will not be shy about letting you know. Yes, there's the occasional exception, like the time some noob brought up why linux isn't written in C++. But even there, it serves a purpose. The kernel mailing list is for discussing kernel issues, not sitting around mouthing off. So I suspect he's very happy discouraging further programming-language discussion. He could use less profanity, yes. That's always a little insane. But his flames are poles opposed to all the little projects that reject your first pull request out of hand. Or the crotchety guy you're guaranteed to find anytime on #lisp. Or Ullrich Drepper.
I think you can keep crap out and not be an asshole; they're not mutually exclusive.