After all, Javascript was created by a homophobe. We should use a more minorities-friendly language and not encourage the use of problematic technologies made by bigots.
Edit: also, someone claimed that a lead maintainer of the Linux kernel is a rape apologist. That's good enough to drop Linux, right?
If that was proved to be the true, then I would want him or her to work on Linux from jail.
I don't like the idea of associating political views with technologies.
The problem is that it's used too often to shun or control people that don't agree with a political ideology. A good example of this is the Mozilla CEO.
An open and "accepting" community should also accept people they might not agree with..otherwise you should't call yourself open, accepting, or inclusive.
Being "accepting" does not imply being accepting of those who are themselves intolerant, and indeed the meaning and value of liberalism dissolves into something toothless and even dangerous when interpreted that way.
If the Russel's paradox aspect of this you bugs you, then label the position "accepting of all other beliefs except those which are themselves intolerant." In practice, this is what most liberals, even die-hard ones, subscribe to.
It's not usually a big deal if you are interacting in a strictly professional capacity: if they let their bigotry get in the way of good business and engineering and teamwork, you can drop them on those merits alone irrespective of their reasons for being subpar engineers or businessmen.
Edit: Also, is there evidence that he was a vastly superior choice? I'd accept sufficiently advanced technology even from a wicked murderer.
> I'd rather have really good code, even if written by a racist or sexist, than bad code (period).
That's a perfectly valid choice. In some cases, it's a completely correct choice. But that's not the tradeoff that I want to make.
Take a look at the original Agile Manifesto: http://agilemanifesto.org/
Sometimes you can have it all: good process, good tools, good individuals and interactions. But when they conflict, the AM says that we should favor the individuals over the processes.
I'm saying that as a development community, we should favor inclusiveness and respect, even at the cost of (some) technical merit. Similarly, we should favor open-source infrastructure, even at the cost of the App Store audience.