Yes. Regardless what you, I, or Github thinks of him, as a company their best move is to issue a public apology over this.
Imagine they get into a spat with him -- they start calling him names, he fights back etc. Then some customer has to make a decision on whether they want to pick Github, are they going to like seeing and hearing public spitting matches between them and Zed, is that going to look like mature, reliable company to trust the crown jewels (source code) of one's company to? -- No.
rimantas, I think you're missing the point -- Zed knows that his "recommendation" holds relatively little weight; however, sometimes it's good to remind a company that they can still lose customers, and how easy it can be to do so.
Let's say I am having a dinner in a nice quiet restaurant but there is some noisy, aggressive drunk at the table nearby.
I'd be more than happy for the restaurant to lose that customer.
Was it Sprint who ditched 10% of their customers who used to complain the most so they could spend less time arguing with them and provide better service to the rest instead?
Note, this is not to say, that any of these examples applies there but just to illustrate my first sentence.
I'm having dinner in a nice quiet restaurant, but there's a table of noisy aggressive jerks at a table nearby, who happen to be restaurant staff and their friends, who're causing existing customers to leave and driving away potential customers.
Github lost me as a prospective customer (and I currently pay for multi-user accounts at both BeanStalk and Kiln).
They had an unhappy customer, and their staff felt the best way to handle it was to mock the customer publicly. That's juvenile bullshit, no matter what you think of the customer.
you're an idiot then because there is no verification that the twitter user is actually a github employee. zed should be the one apologizing here for just making bullshit up. at no point did anyone at github say anything bad about him.
I have reason to believe, aside from Zed's post, that at least one GitHub employee was involved in the harassment. I could be wrong, but my beliefs aren't based on nothing. The startup world is very small.
Thank you for the reminder that HN is now reddit.
P.S. Nobody's mind was ever changed by a sentence that begins 'you're an idiot'.
