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Re:"Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be ... by gambiting on Monday October 06, 2014 @11:31AM (#8416388)
I work on a project which sells millions of units each year. You could also argue that idiots committing code to the code base should be stopped. Yet I am very certain that if my manager started calling anyone an idiot and telling them they should have been aborted, he would very likely end out of work very quickly. Yet somehow it's acceptable of Torvalds? How? Good quality work can be done without telling people they are pieces of shit.
Re:"Open Source is awful in many ways, and people should be ... by drzaiusapelord on Monday October 06, 2014 @02:06PM (#8417209)
I think another issue here is that those who idealize the Jobs/Torvalds way of doing things automatically assume that they're going to be on the "good side" of things. The same way people who idealize things like eugenics know that their genes will, of course, be allowed to spread.

What they don't seem to realize that its more likely they'll be on the receiving end of the negative traits they applaud. Either by an occasional screw up or because Mr Bossman is having a bad day. To be humiliated in public like this is often very painful, even for the thick-skinned. The day that happens, they're lawyering up and getting HR involved because, how dare someone yell at them. In their minds, the yelling only happens to someone else, the imagined dumb peons they see themselves as being above.

I think way too many techies seem themselves as John Galt-like supermen, and that the negative consequences are for the sub-humans. There's a real dynamic of here of dehumanizing others that's often swept under the carpet. I think this dynamic is sociopathic.