Yep, this is one of the big reasons why I love the open source linux world. Something breaks -- and in this case, the initial situation looks quite terrifying. And then a whole bunch of people pile in with information, reproduction, systems they can use for testing, ways to handle this in production, ...
Imagine if this had happened to Apple, everyone and his dog would be rolling over each other villifying them.
Apple's file systems HAVE had some serious bugs, as you probably know. I haven't noticed that they've been getting all that much press. What press they've been getting is very negative, though, and quite right too.
I paid good money to Apple so something like that would not happen, so yeah I’d be villifying them. You bet!
As opposed to the free RedHat Enterprise Linux operating system
No, I love to hate redhat because they are the most incompetent company in the computer industry’s history; just take a look at their priority 1 bugs at bugzilla.redat.com and the picture becomes crystal clear. (I’m forced to perform system engineering on RHEL every day and a lot, so my hate for it grows daily.)
Like storing the passphrase in the hint field...?
Shit happens. Software is hard.
Since when is introducing a major regression into something as critical as a filing system a hooray for open source? Only on GNU/Linux... and nobody thinks twice about it or bats an eyelash; instead, the scrambling to contain the regression is greeted with a hooray. It’s mentality like this which makes me want to never touch a computer again.
Introducing major bugs happens in software all the time. Finding it, working out a solution, and fixing it quickly is a hooray for open source.
How quickly a problem is understood and fixed has nothing whatsoever to do with open source. That is a fallacy.