Oh come on, that was one incident and he did fix the main issue. For a dude who does this in his spare time, he deserves a lot of credit.

I'm not talking about the security incident. Anyone can have bad days, I am not the one to hold the grudge.

What I've experienced is that Kovid is consistently hostile to anyone who disagrees with him in the slightest. There is no attempt to shine light on the argument or defuse the situation whatsoever - it always ends with comments like "what do you want from me? you get this project for free! if you don't like it nobody is forcing you to use it! get off my lawn!!!".

Of course, the guy has the right to talk to anyone any way he wants.

But I also have the right to publicly call him out on that.

I think he works full-time on his open source projects, but regardless I wouldn't fault him for that silly incident at all.

Try giving out years of your labor for free, and then try not being sensitive about it...

I know quite a few open-source maintainers who have never showed any kind of hostility, even in situations which would warrant hostility.

That's great for those developers but you can't expect everyone to act the same way. The fact is that you have not right for ANY support - there is even a disclaimer for that in pretty much every open source license.

I'm not talking about rights, I'm talking about manners. Everyone has the right to communicate any way they want, but I also have the right to call them out on that.

If you have a public, open-source project on GitHub, and you regularly accept and respond to issues/pull-requests/suggestions, you are obviously presenting yourself to the world. It is basic courtesy to not be hostile in such communication.

How on earth is overly sensitive a problem for anyone? Assuming for the sake of argument he is.

It is very difficult to communicate with Kovid when you're not a user and you've not previously praised his genius. Any kind of criticism or suggestion that isn't wrapped up in the "but your project is awesome and you're awesome!!!" wrapping-paper is met with hostility, insults and banning.

It is a problem for anyone trying to communicate with him.

Criticism or suggestion seems fine. Insulting is not. The one example I saw were someone was effectively making your claim was someone insulting him and him responding without any hostility, insults, or banning.

citation needed. You can't just make serious claims without any supporting evidence.

I'm not making serious claims, I'm sharing my experience when dealing with Kovid.

If you don't count personal experience as relevant, that's fine, but I really don't feel like digging up a bunch of github links from years ago.

You are attacking the character of someone but can't even be bothered to provide anything to back up your claims? Then why post this in the first place?

Because that's my experience and I'm sharing it with others.

Are you saying I shouldn't voice my opinions, unless they consist of only praise? Nobody asked the original commenter to provide proof of Kovid being "gentle". If you're going down the "only facts" road, then each praise should be followed by "sources" too.