That was very well written, much better then I would be able to express myself in english :) From my personal experience working in software project teams (not so much open source projects), there's a certain type of personality which can destroy a team or a project. Usually this type of person is charismatic, convinced of him/herself that they can't do wrong, has only a few years of real-world development experience, is extremely touchy about criticism, takes everything personally (no matter how the criticism is communicated), and starts scheming inside and outside the team. That's my definition of 'destructive asshole' and 'drama queen'. I only encountered very few cases where such a person is really useful for the project, and I don't know people with decades of experience exposing such character traits. It's usually 'young whizkids fresh from university' (only a few of course!).
Thank you for the compliment. I see you are considering only personalities which 'destroy a team or a project', which includes destructive assholes by definition. If you limit yourself to that personality type then certainly very few are useful to the project.
But productive assholes are not destructive assholes, nor is being an asshole a universal character trait. A fan of sports team X can be a faithful friend to other fans of sports team X while being an asshole to all fans of rival sports team Y. A team member can be verbally abusive towards those who don't use the One True Brace Style, while being the primary architect for the system. That person is a productive asshole.
That said, these people are usually called "difficult to work with", not "assholes". Calling a coworker an asshole usually makes it more difficult to work with them, not less.
Good points. In my personal categorisation system, the people who endlessly discuss about brace style or system A being better then system B without either of them having any hard advantages over the other get the label 'religious zealots'. Also, while the amount of 'asshole-ness' in a character may be orthogonal to the quality of being a good programmer, I know no one personally who I would describe as a 'productive asshole', and I only ever had to deal with 2 or 3 true A-quality 'destructive assholes' in my whole carrier.
The thesis is that Torvalds is one such 'productive asshole'. Do you have any way to tell if someone is an asshole, assuming asshole-ness is mostly orthagonal to productivity? http://www.vice.com/read/orson-scott-card-is-officially-the-... describes Card as "a complete asshole and an unrepentant homophobe", and Card is a a productive and successful SF writer, so could also fall into the same category.
It's hard to read about women doing scientific research 100 years ago without thinking that most of their male colleagues were assholes in how they treated women.
It's really unfortunate that all open source discussions don't go like the discussion I just read between the two of you. It sure would be nice if that were the case.
