Personally, I jive with these personality types, and, think Theo is a fantastic fit for OpenBSD.

That is what you experience when you agree with him. Try to disagree and argue with him someday.

In my dozen or so years of experience with Theo, we've disagreed and argued many times and he's always been reasonable. For the record, if I had bothered to keep track of our debates, he's ended up being "right" far more often than I have. Yep, I've been wrong, quite often, and he's been kind enough to drop-kick me in a better direction. He's a friend and I've learned a lot from him over the years.

Your misconception comes from people showing up on the OpenBSD mailing lists with a prideful hostile attitude intending to prove how much they know, when in fact, they haven't done their homework correctly or completely. Things often go sideways in a hurry if people aren't willing to look at their own opinions critically and do the additional work to see the other sides. Of course, if you walk into someone else's home and shit on their couch, you get what you deserve.

There are edgy debates between developers, particularly in code reviews and proposed patches, but the reason for them is simple; everyone wants to get to the "best" and "most correct" answer. In other words the goal is the same, but the opinions vary.

Being friends with the person/people on the other side of a pointed debate is important, particularly across (human) language barriers. Jake Meuser recently wrote about this on undeadly.org and I can't express it any better than he has:

http://www.undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=201012060...

It's a worthy read.

I can believe this happens, but De Raadt wasn't asked to resign from the NetBSD core team by new users who hadn't done their homework correctly or completely; it was a consensus decision of some of the world's most experienced BSD developers who had worked with him extensively. (Of course, it's possible some/much of the fault lies with them.)

I think not always getting agreeing, not having perfectly aligned goals with others, and not always communicating well is just part of being human. But going our separate ways and doing our own thing can open up opportunities for changes (good and/or bad).

BTW, I never discussed BSD with him. I was never a BSD user and do not recall entering a BSD list.

Yes, working together as a happy family in the land of rainbows and candy canes is a nice ideal. But the reality is that not a lot of code is written by unicorns :)

Truth by consensus.

I might have hoped to see him stick by his guy.

But then, that's Theo. You take the good with the not-so-good.

But I'm not talking about rhetorical purity here. I'm talking about a comment that implies Theo gave a reasonable (maybe even classy) response to the situation. Put yourself back in the position of being a lead dev at Bear. Imagine someone accused one of your better developers of, say, fraud. What's the standard you set for yourself for sticking by your people? From your demeanor, my guess is your standard for loyalty to your own people is even higher than mine.

And that's my point here. How well is Theo acquitting himself here? He's not doing terribly. He's not necessarily doing great.

But hey, either way, I'm out here with my name signed to my posts. If it turns out Theo was justified in questioning how Jason handled this, everyone can look this post up and hoist me with it down the road. I would concede up front that this is kind of not a whole lot my business; I have a minor, historical, emotional attachment to it and nothing more.

You brought it up, I responded. There you go.

Mind you, this whole thing is built on the idea that NETSEC was, in fact, developing backdoors.

There are people who are smart, who do not.

There are people who are smart, give you ideas, and let you take all the credit.

And there are people who are smart, and subtly guide you until you discover "your" idea on your own.

I suspect that there's some positive feedback in this; if you are successful, you tend towards the latter, more cooperative end of the spectrum, and then people, seeing that you're kind, think more highly of you, and give you more respect and on balance you end up more successful. The converse is also true (I'm battling a little envy and frustration myself).

There's a saying in politics that "nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care", and it's both corny and tainted by association with politics, but there's some truth in it; high intelligence is value-neutral - it can make you a more effective dick just as easily as it can make you a constructive force.