Be careful about who you may have just ostracized. To play devil's advocate, do you have any idea where we would be without Linus Torvalds, Theo De Raadt, and Ulrich Drepper?
They are somewhat known for their public moments sounding just like this guy.
Personalities are complex. We can't just cherry pick the attributes of a person and separate those from those which we perceive to deviate from the ideal.
Whether this particular guy is a net gain for the community isn't for me to decide (though I do love emacs, and use a lot of core GNU software), but if colorful language is the price I have to pay for their contributions to society, that value proposition is still a no brainer.
Anecdote: many of the brilliant developers I've worked near (the major outliers, 100x productivity types) have some kind of quirk. This could be that they snap sometimes, or that they don't shower, or that they neglect their paperwork. Give them some feedback, grow a thick skin, but don't ostracize them.
How many brilliant developers have you not worked with, because they looked at that kind of comment, and decided that they would rather spend their spare time working on a project where they _wouldn't_ get told that their fingers should be cut off to prevent them ever writing any code?
" if colorful language is the price I have to pay for their contributions to society, that value proposition is still a no brainer."
Except that you're not paying any price at all. It's the Thunderbird community paying that price and there is no reason for them to do so. If your list of his accomplishments included making Thunderbird a great piece of software, we might be having a slightly different conversation. Also, kicking him out of Mozilla's bug system very likely has zero impact on your emacs and core GNU software.
IMO, being a hero on one project does not give you the right to be a bully on another.
They are somewhat known for their public moments sounding just like this guy.
Personalities are complex. We can't just cherry pick the attributes of a person and separate those from those which we perceive to deviate from the ideal.
Whether this particular guy is a net gain for the community isn't for me to decide (though I do love emacs, and use a lot of core GNU software), but if colorful language is the price I have to pay for their contributions to society, that value proposition is still a no brainer.
Anecdote: many of the brilliant developers I've worked near (the major outliers, 100x productivity types) have some kind of quirk. This could be that they snap sometimes, or that they don't shower, or that they neglect their paperwork. Give them some feedback, grow a thick skin, but don't ostracize them.