A day in the life of the CentOS team

A day in the life of the CentOS team

Posted Mar 27, 2006 21:56 UTC (Mon) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216)
In reply to: A day in the life of the CentOS team by clump
Parent article: A day in the life of the CentOS team

>Posting his words, knowing how wrong he was from the start, serves only to
>humiliate him,

Yes, and why is that bad, in this context? The attitude displayed in his emails, as someone has posted elsewhere in this comment thread, is essentially "I'll yell at you until things work, and then blame you for the problem--since you know how to fix it, you must have caused it in the first place."

Just like a con man depends on people's nice natures to exploit them financially, people with this kind of attitude depend on the victim's instinct to be polite to be able to steamroller their way into getting what they don't deserve. The victim feels guilty standing up to them because it's Not Nice to interrupt, to insist upon proper treatment. There's no repercussions for the bully's behavior, and so he goes on doing it.

This public posting is an example of repercussions for one's uncivil behavior, and I believe it was well-deserved and probably long overdue. (I have a suspicion that a few people around Tuttle might inwardly be grinning if they hear of this, as this kind of behavior doesn't pop out of nowhere...he might well behave like this in other situations too.) Too bad the Tuttle Times is probably not going to do any reporting on the issue, being a small-town paper and not having the leverage of a large media organization to risk angering the local tribal chief, so to speak--since he's a public official, the people of Tuttle, Oklahoma deserve to know how they're being badly represented.

>invite others to humiliate him,

Same as above...

>and does nothing positive for Linux or anyone involved.

No. It does in fact do something positive. A bully got some payback, and I for one (and, it seems, quite a few others) are quite pleased about it. And if it gets around enough, it might prevent a few similar incidents in the future. The one thing I would say on the other side though, as others have, is that the first line of Johnny's first response was probably a poor choice of words to start out with, even though it rings true in light of subsequent events.

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