is there seriously no way that this whole issue could have been handled privately?

There's a whole load of forum posts where people are blamed for spreading FUD (forum acronym of the moment), trolling etc, and otherwise giving the N900 bad publicity, and here we have one developer who's trying to bring commercial apps to the platform and he's being roasted over community coals. This community is currently the only way of bringing anything to the N900, and we are publicly and actively discouraging it. Have you seen what's Hot and what's Fresh in the downloads section? most of those apps have been there since christmas. So what's happening gents, apart from nothing much.

I'm not suggesting what SI02 did was the right way to go about things, but he should have got a private slap down rather than this public one. Surely we need to encourage people to work on the N900, not push them away.