Perhaps? But if someone had that attitude, and couldn't be bothered to discuss design impacting changes with the devs who are making sweeping changes impacted b

Perhaps? But if someone had that attitude, and couldn't be bothered to discuss design impacting changes with the devs who are making sweeping changes impacted by the contributor's change? In that case I don't want them on my project, because they are toxic, and probably toxic in other ways. More people need to realize that Open Source projects are a gift from the authors to the software community. Other developers do not have the right to make changes, push for the development to go in a certain direction, etc. If an author wants that they'll turn stewardship over to a committee and maybe be part of such a committee. You have only two rights with Open Source work you want to work differently: fork it or forget about it (i.e., not use it). Anything else is a massive gift from the maintainer(s) and should be viewed as such. And yeah, as you can tell from the last paragraph I'll proudly wear an Arsehole button to avoid wearing a Burnout button. Heck, to borrow from Bruce Lee in Snowcrash, I'd even wear a "12 Gauge" button to avoid burnout (button only though, the behavior is not for me).