Here's the thing though. People always make mistakes. It's an unavoidable fact of life. The more power you have the bigger the scale of your fuckup. The problem is the denial of a problem (which Intel did in some ways & didn't in other) & making misleading statements. Those were all decisions not made at an engineering level BTW so berating an engineer won't help.

Finally, reading that thread further, it does seem like Linus's rant was a little premature & mistaken. David really handles it well & explains in detail in what way Linus may be misunderstanding what's going on. It's hard to know if that response mollified Linus or if he still thinks it's bunk & that thread was just taken offline so that it wouldn't have the noise of useless spectators chiming in, but it seemed like Ingo was perhaps satisfied & moved the conversation back to a way to solve the Skylake problem in a maintainable & clean way without the undesirable implementation that was originally proposed (you know, the whole point of an RFC). An RFC typically means they were looking for feedback & discussion not getting yelled at, especially for things outside their control. That being said, I certainly understand how frustrated everyone is with this given the amount of work that's been put into this by everyone.

Engineering culture is fundamentally about learning from mistakes (either as a community or individually). We can't fear them & there are limits to how much you can go to prevent making them before you just get decision paralysis. For that reason mea culpas are also unproductive. You should acknowledge your actions & your role in it - if you think you behaved incorrectly then of course apologize if you want to - but the person would made mistakes is just as much a victim of their environment as others (i.e. if I threw you into their position without the benefit of hindsight, would you do necessarily do a better job?) Yes corporate America has issues (as does every human endeavour btw) but I'm not convinced that in any way has to do anything with this discussion.