This is not a minor mistake, to go with the company analogy, this is a kind of mistake that would fire you instantly if you did it. There are few worse things to do in the kernel than breaking user space. Would you prefer being fired for incompetence rather than being insulted?
If you fired every programmer that ever introduced a regression into bleeding edge pre-release code, you would not have very many programmers left. I don't think that is a realistic mode of operation.
Bugs happen, that's a fact of life. How and why they happen is what drives the reaction. For example, a bug caused by a simple typo is nothing to sweat over, whereas a bug caused by lack of attention to quality or by ignoring the established procedures will normally result in a 'talk'. LKML 'talks' just happen to be public, and everyone knows that going in.
Complaining about analogies is like complaining that the morphism between (Q, +, ✕) and (R, +, ✕) is not a good example because there's no √: Q -> Q. That's simply wrong, it's a very good example. They are both vector spaces and the morphism, the analogy, captures the essence of the similar behaviour in the context required.
The analogy was not between introducing regressions in open source vs. commercial software, it was between introducing this particular regression, in the way that it happened, and the abstract idea of doing something so severe in an arbitrary abstract company -- not software company -- any company; something so serious that it warrants immediate dismissal. Surely anyone can think of something that satisfies the above criteria in whatever field they are working without having to bound the free variables and twist the analogy in a way that it fails just to complain that it does.
