The death threats really, really suck. That’s obvious. Absolutely no one should receive those. If he did receive any that’s awful. All of that is quite obvious.
However, you shouldn’t use the reaction of a minority to invalidate the reaction of the majority. (I obviously don’t have number but do you really think any kind of majority sent hate mail?) I think your characterisation of this makes no sense at all. I also think that an organisation and a CEO has to stand above some death threats. It was obviously just a few people. Most of the reaction was completely harmless. And you can’t use those few people to drag the others through the mud.
I think this is some weird game of telephone where those who object translate the harmless reaction into some sort of hate storm that never really existed. Look at what people actually wrote. It’s really, really harmless.
There was the stuff people were writing in public (newspaper articles, hacker news), which was as you say harmless for the most part.
There was the stuff a different group of people were privately (if you count blog comments as private) sending to Brendan and anyone who came out publicly in support of Brendan. It was of quite a different tone.
The comments along those lines to Brendan I was not terribly surprised by, because some people just suck. The death threat responses to things like http://incisive.nu/2014/thinking-about-mozilla/ (and yes, there were a number of those)... I don't know what to tell you. People suck more than I expected, I guess.
Then of course there are the people who would like to pretend like that second group doesn't exist or to excuse their actions. That sort of behavior I just can't condone.
Obviously this second group wasn't a majority of any sort. It doesn't have to be. It just has to be big enough to make the situation completely untenable. And they will keep doing that sort of thing again and again unless someone bothers to tell them that it's not acceptable. Simple thought experiment: how many death threat mails does one have to get before it's worse than "some death threats"? Once you've gotten a few thousand, has that line been crossed? And a few thousand people is obviously a tiny minority of any relevant group in a situation like this one.
It doesn't _define_ the issue, but it's also inseparable from the issue in this case. If you want to understand why what happened happened, you have to understand this aspect of things.
However, you shouldn’t use the reaction of a minority to invalidate the reaction of the majority. (I obviously don’t have number but do you really think any kind of majority sent hate mail?) I think your characterisation of this makes no sense at all. I also think that an organisation and a CEO has to stand above some death threats. It was obviously just a few people. Most of the reaction was completely harmless. And you can’t use those few people to drag the others through the mud.
I think this is some weird game of telephone where those who object translate the harmless reaction into some sort of hate storm that never really existed. Look at what people actually wrote. It’s really, really harmless.