Being a founding father of GNU does not give you the right to be a bully. Telling a developer that you want to cut off his hands so he can't program is not helpful and people who behave like that are not useful bug reporters. They are bullies and they are toxic to an open source project. No project should tolerate personal attacks like that.

Enjoyment is in absolutely no way a necessary condition for bullying. Bullying is abusive treatment, often directed repeatedly at specific individuals. That's what was happening here. "You know, every time I see a comment from [a specific Thunderbird developer] I just want to reach out through the intertubes and cut off his damned fingers to prevent him ever writing any code" That is about as clear a case of bullying I've seen in the 13 years I've been involved in Mozilla.

You can make all the excuses you want for him, and you can re-define bullying if you like, but he has gone well beyond "not seeing the need to spare people's feelings" here. He has verbally attacked people and he thinks he can get away with it because of his hacker credibility. "Because I'm a great programmer and you're a nobody programmer, I can call you names and tell you to die die die and tell you I'd like to cut off your fingers so you can't code any more. That's about as crisp a case of bullying as I can think of.

I've been a participant in GNU since 1990. I've been a maintainer of GNU Emacs, GDB, Guile, and (briefly) EGLIBC, but many others have contributed a lot more than I have. Mlynarik's contributions to GNU are relatively minor. Calling him a "founding father of GNU" is a bit rich; it was pretty gratuitous of him to bring it up.

Note that Mlynarik could have made every single one of his contributions without verbally abusing anyone. It's not like you have to swear at someone to explain why you think something is a bug. He freely chose to add the abuse to his technical content. Since the abuse is utterly inessential, there's no reason to put up with it.

The abuse doesn't even express depth of feeling. He's always written like that, to pretty much everyone, in all circumstances. It's noise in his signal.

I think Mozilla is absolutely right to ban him from its sites. As someone said, "Sure, you have the right to be a jerk --- just not on my web site."

I'm amazed that HN readers are so backwards on this.

If you let people treat you this way because they also happen to provide some value, then you're enabling them and encouraging the behaviour. People who behave in this manner should be ostracised.

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.

"do you have any idea where we would be without Linus Torvalds, Theo De Raadt, and Ulrich Drepper?"

I'm not suggesting they'd disappear. I'm suggesting that they'd be forced into behaving in a more respectful manner to people.

People stop acting like tools when other people stop putting up with it.

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.