You realise that there are large, commercial projects that are just as high stakes as the Linux kernel or arguably even higher stakes, and they manage to operat

You realise that there are large, commercial projects that are just as high stakes as the Linux kernel or arguably even higher stakes, and they manage to operate with reasonable team dynamics? I wonder about those projects sometime. If we took all of the conversations that ever took place at their office and stuck them online and in public. What would that be like? How many journalists and bloggers would find inflammatory quotes that can be published out of context to shame the person who spoke those words? How would Linus stack up next to John Doe of the Foo project? Or, think about everything you read, said, wrote or heard at work over the last month. Now imagine hand wringing blogposts about all of it. Especially the things that you want to exclude from this thought experiment because they would have never been said if your only communication method was a public mailing list.