"""In late 2009, the Chair and Red Hat sat down and decided, in a secret meeting, to rewrite the spec. [...] From scratch. By himself. After years and years of committee work. After years of investment by others in working code. Without asking anyone except Red Hat. And then, to force this spec through the working group using his usual tactics: bullying and lobbying. [...]
One of my spin-off projects was the Digital Standards Organization, and I came to understand what was needed to protect a standard from predatory hijack. I summarized the definition of a "Free and Open Standard" as "a published specification that is immune to vendor capture at all stages in its life-cycle." What the "free" part means is, if someone hijacks your working group and starts to push the standard in hostile directions (as Red Hat did), can you fork the standard and continue? Does the license allow forking, yes or no? And secondly, does the license prohibit "dark forks," namely private versions of the standard?
If either answer is "no," then you are at the mercy of others. And when there is money on the table, or even the promise of money, the predators will move in. The AMQP experience gave me a lot of material for my later book on psychopaths. [...]
If we'd managed to build a thriving community around OpenAMQ, it would have survived. So the lesson here is simple: community before code. Today this is obvious to me. Eight years ago, it wasn't."""
And reference this (http://hintjens.com/blog:120) Social Architecture FAQ which talks about rude but highly skilled people contributing to projects (read that with "community before code" and the quote "if you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together" in mind).
His book on Psychopathy was panned on Reddit, as well as on Goodreads:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4c27ss/im_pieter_hint...
Likewise, the wikipedia article for Social Architecture has been listed "not notable" for the past four years, and hasn't seen any meaningful edits since 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_architecture
With respect to the author, I'm not surprised. Nerds like ourselves enjoy "discovering" ideas, slapping pretentious labels on them, and then evangelizing them to the whole world... without checking if other people know more about those ideas than we do.
Pieter Hintjens died in 2016.
Is there any actual panning of his book by someone who read his book, in your link? Or anyone who engaged in good faith - e.g. it's a book about his experiences of problem behaviour patterns that hurt others?
The larger point is that the audience he chose to market to, rejected his ideas. Whether or not his audience was acting in "good faith" is irrelevant to his failure to communicate.