> I cannot remember that I have ever been insulted in public, in fact I'm not used to getting insulted at all. And if people normally are able to say sorry. I and many others asked Mark to withdraw his comment and post an apology instead.
Ok, see here's the problem. The developer community, and especially the FOSS portion of the developer community, love to tout the fact that the community is a "meritocracy". But what does that mean? Certainly, insulting individuals (as opposed to their work product) is not in the spirit of a meritocracy.
...but neither is asking for an apology.
Ubuntu/Canonical/Shuttleworth have made a technical decision. If the FOSS community is a meritocracy, the fate of their products will be determined by the merit of those decisions. That they also spilled so many vitriolic words in the direction of the "competition" should matter not at all.
If the FOSS community is a meritocracy, then the appropriate reaction would be to continue making the best decisions possible, producing the best products possible, and ignoring anything anyone says that does not speak to the merits of those decisions or products.
...if this is a meritocracy.
Perhaps it's high time we drop the charade of "meritocracy" and admit that software projects, FOSS or otherwise, are run by humans with human emotions and human reactions, and that for better or worse, the majority of the developer community makes decisions based more on emotion than on a dispassionate evaluation of a project's merits.