Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there's another facet to the argument he made that he didn't make. When you're in a position of power and you have to deal with the work of other people you want to waste as little time as possible on people making stupid mistakes that shouldn't be made in the first place. You want to bring the quality of your contributors up. One way of doing this is making people fear making mistakes. Society does this all…
Fear, as you seem to realize, is a crappy motivator. It only work in limited circumstances and for limited periods of time. It doesn't really change behavior permanently. That "society" does it doesn't make it any better (and when was the last time a judge cussed out a defendant for receiving a guilty verdict?) But I would argue that motivating through fear isn't even relevant to this situation. Is making death threa…
I don't remember Linus ever sending death threats to anyone. As for the people who did send it to the OP, I think most people agree that death threats are not OK under any circumstance and that whoever did do it is an outlier and not an example of how the community behaves.
>Is cursing somebody out on a mailing list really all that terrifying?
I think it is since public shaming tends to be effective in preventing whatever behavior was shamed, as per the racist/homophobe/sexist argument.
>If it is, is that the reason Linus, for instance, does it?
I can't speak for him but if I were in charge of an important and sizable project I can see myself doing it for that reason.
>But is it really appropriate to do this, to this extent especially, to programmers who wrote bad code? Programming relies on rational, careful cognitive consideration of problems. That's the opposite of what fear inspires. Fear-based "motivation" is lousy in general, and doubly lousy for open source software.
I don't follow why it's doubly lousy for software in general. Software has its fair share of opinionated debates that are more about differences of philosophy rather than careful cognitive consideration of problems. And as for it being the opposite of what fear inspires, I'm not sure I agree. The educational system world wide uses fear effectively and it seems to mostly work (despite whatever problems you may have with it), so I don't see what would make programming special in that regard.