Phew, buddy, don’t hurt yourself by grinding that axe too close to the handle.

It’s not at all. As a counter-example, in the 00s, open source rapidly coalesced to using git, which has been so incredibly successful that it has now been adopted for many private corporate proprietary software repositories as well.

I don’t think you can take a general lesson from any particular example here. Coordination of complex systems among thousands of competing and cooperative components is very hard and unpredictable, and why things happen depends on random events and personalities in ways that are not generalizable.

Many of the people involved in the history of Linux (and most software) are jerks, but when people dig up a “this jerk blocked X for 25 years” story, we aren’t seeing the 100s of other (mostly bad) ideas that same jerk also blocked that would have changed things in other ways (possibly for the worse).

My point being, not that the person isn’t a jerk or that the decision wasn’t wrong, but that one error by one jerk doesn’t tell us much.

50% chance of being right is equivalent to a coin-flip.

The quote from the Salesforce paper is important: “agents displayed near-zero confidentiality awareness”.