Comments like the grandparent are neither true nor false, but rather self-fulfilling.<p>If you believe that the open-source world is filled with mean people who will grind you down and the only way to avoid this is to give as good as you get, you will behave in a way that ensures that only people who are mean, aggressive, and tactless will gravitate to you.  Nobody wants to work on a project where the lead is looking for the slightest sign of misbehavior to jump on people.  So it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: people who can firmly but patiently &amp; politely establish norms of behavior that attract patient &amp; polite people, while people who believe it&#x27;s a Wild West where everyone&#x27;s out to get you establish cultures where it&#x27;s a Wild West where everyone&#x27;s out to get everyone else.<p>Most people would rather work in the former culture than the latter, and so in the interest of not establishing more cultures like the latter, they downvoted the grandparent post.