That says more about Linus that anything else I've read.

I suspect it's more of a tongue-in-cheek self-reference to the Linux C coding style (http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/CodingStyle) where he suggests burning the GNU coding standards, using exactly the same phrasing.

Incidentally if you read the GNU coding standards I think you'll find they really ARE that bad (http://www.gnu.org/prep/standards/html_node/Formatting.html#...)

I was curious about how bad the GNU standards could be [they make so much great software!].

Holy crap. Function calls with a space? foo (x,y);

Braces indented halfway into the "else" keyword? Ugh. I'm no C guru but even has a freshman cs major I'd recognize that as ugly.