Surprised that this isn't in the thread already. Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman from Google have done a bunch of great talks about exactly this: How

Surprised that this isn't in the thread already. Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman from Google have done a bunch of great talks about exactly this: How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q52kFL8zVoM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q52kFL8zVoM) They also wrote a book about the topic: http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018025.do http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920018025.do All of their advice comes from their experience running the subversion project. It is also good general advice for dealing with humans/engineers/etc.