> (and taking it to a personal level such as killing people, thats just insane)
It's not "insane". It's a thing people do because they get the impression that it's socially acceptable, because see, everybody sympathizes with people griping about systemd, right? Everybody agrees that Poettering is the devil, right? He's bringing it on himself by sneaking into people's houses and installing systemd on their computers, right?
It's not insane. It doesn't stem from some imbalance in brain chemistry or some other mental issue. Labeling it insanity belies the community's responsibility for setting standards of acceptable behavior.
It's hardly an OSS problem though. It's practically a "western society and the internet" problem. Death threats are probably less common now then they were in the early anonymity days of the net, but conversely they're a lot less mundane.
But this a problem which turns up in every community where there are politicized issues. See: anything to do with women talking about video games.
We can take this problem even wider and start looking at say, American domestic politics and it's infatuation with "second amendment solutions". It's apparently socially acceptable to drop that phrase when discussing elections, policy and the president when you're a state or federal representative. Locally in Australia we've got an entire political party that carefully fans the flames of almost but not quite encouraging violence and intolerance.
You can certainly improve things at a community-by-community level, and OSS definitely should try to do so (and there should be support to do so in sensible, constructive ways). But this is a problem which goes a lot further then software development.
It's certainly a problem in a wider scope than just software development, and not really inherent to software development at all, but I think it manifests in open source communities in a particularly insidious way. Everybody thinks they're philosophically on the right side anyway, they're too smart for prejudice and too useful a community member to possibly be part of the problem.
Also I figure people rely on meritocracy being some sort of infallible system, in some sort of just-world fallacy where they figure if this guy who's screaming bloody murder on the mailing list were wrong to do so, surely someone would have stopped him, right...? But he's got all these patches in the tree, so that means he's correct by definition, and that's more important than "real-life" social norms anyway.
It's not "insane". It's a thing people do because they get the impression that it's socially acceptable, because see, everybody sympathizes with people griping about systemd, right? Everybody agrees that Poettering is the devil, right? He's bringing it on himself by sneaking into people's houses and installing systemd on their computers, right?
It's not insane. It doesn't stem from some imbalance in brain chemistry or some other mental issue. Labeling it insanity belies the community's responsibility for setting standards of acceptable behavior.