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The question is: how many other valuable contributors are you missing out on because of that person? The "classic" example of this is Ulrich Drepper, who maint
by Beltalowda 4y ago
The question is: how many other valuable contributors are you missing out on because of that person?
The "classic" example of this is Ulrich Drepper, who maintained GNU libc for many years. Everyone agrees he's a great programmer. He's a better programmer than I am. But he was also ... difficult. More difficult than anyone else I've seen in a mainstream widely-used project. Many people didn't contribute purely because they just didn't want to deal with Drepper. Debian found it necessarily to fork GNU libc because of Drepper.
So even if we adopt a purely utilitarian attitude on this (and I don't think we should in the first place), I think it's still a bad idea to grant some people a license to be a jerk. In many cases you're not going to come out with better contributions and code.
- Arnavion 4y ago>Many people didn't contribute purely because they just didn't want to deal with Drepper. I have no numbers to be able to confirm or deny this, but... >Debian found it necessarily to fork GNU libc because of Drepper. ... Debian created eglibc because they needed glibc to support their use case and Drepper didn't. Even if Drepper had been the nicest person in the world, if he rejected patches to run glibc on non-x86 then forking was unavoidable.
- josephcsible 4y agoI don't think Ulrich Drepper is a good example. He wasn't just rude; he also blocked merging important changes. I think a better example is Linus Torvalds. > In many cases you're not going to come out with better contributions and code. I think that you would most of the time.