But it's not a business and that person wasn't a customer. Debian is a community, bound partially by common technical ideas about packaging, stability and security, and partially by philosophical ideas about Free software.
Their goal is not to satisfy everyone who comes to their mailing list, that would be insanity.
Sure, but most people would consider the original poster's request as quite reasonable.
Instead of considering it in a balanced way and producing a polite & considered response, the response was idealistic rhetoric. For better or worse, I think that does qualify the attitude of response as "unprofessional", as stingraycharles pointed out.
I think Google is more or less "in the wrong" too, but a less snippy, snarky response would probably do more to convince people of that. "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar", as they say.
I don't really think this is a particularly childish exchange. But either way, it struck me that when you consider the reason for the exchange: a unilateral decision made by Google -- that kind of reminds me of how Google handles support: they don't.
On another note - does chrome/chromium build on freebsd? Is there an equivalent api there?
I certainly sympathize with the chrome/chormium team: they're of course free to abandon users on old kernels/os'. It is a bit odd to demand a new kernel (newer than most Android installs uses) for a browser. We've come to learn to live with not having stable and secure browsers (choose either - usually choosing the updated, secure browser makes more sense). It's a bit more hairy when you need a new kernel. But I suppose newer hardware can just run Chrome (or chrome os) in a kvm vm anyway...
It's unprofessional by definition because it is so clear that the person responding does not consider this their profession.