[georgeorwell]

It's fine, I'm not offended. The thing is it's very clearly not a meritocracy. There was a comment recently about how Linus got about $1M out of his RedHat shares, and how this seems totally unfair next to someone like Zuckerberg or even say GitHub. The easy money flowing around this current startup bubble is what's attracting the frat boy mentality. As far as empathy is concerned, I think it's pretty much a write-off when mediated by technology. Hell, we can't even get the tone of each other's posts right. And to generalize quite a lot, empathy and making money are just sort of fundamentally odds with each other. I'm sure you'd never see booze bitches (their mindset, not mine) at a free software hackathon.