Fired From an Open Source Project? Oh Yes!

What's happened so far:

• Yesterday, a member of the open source project MooTools, Olmo Maldonado, posted an inflamatory video criticizing jQuery and Prototype, on the MooTools blog.
• Soon after, John Resig, the creator of jQuery, posted a response (response contains the video).
• People on the interweb (including me) have been fueling the flame war all day long.
• The creator of MooTools, Valerio Proietti, just took down Olmo's post and blogged a very nice apology that will hopefully put the fire out.

Here is the really good part:

(Quotes from Valerio's post):

"Olmo’s lack of maturity, even for his age, always was notable…"

"Olmo is no longer a part of the Mootools development team. We wish him well, but frankly we can’t tolerate his immaturity any longer."

Olmo was fired from an open source project!!

Now I don't mean to hurt the guy, I feel for anyone who has been fired. But just think about this: Letting you commit now costs the project more than your contribution is worth. Even though your contribution didn't cost anything. I've known people who are "negative productivity." They not only produce nothing, but the also take up other people's time in the efforts to produce, but I've never heard of this.

I don't blame Valerio, I'm sure he did what he thought was right and just, and I am in no position to say he did the wrong thing. I don't know all parts of this story and can't see into his heart, so I mean no malice or judgment towards him.

As a resident loud-mouth/instigator/f-bomb advocate I am just shocked and surprised….

2 Comments

Douglas F Shearer said on December 13, 2007

Seems like an altogether strange situation, I feel it might be something of a publicity stunt.

After all, I wasn’t aware of this project till now, whereas I use prototype and JQuery every day.

Steven Bristol said on December 13, 2007

@Douglas,

I don’t think it’s a stunt. MooTools is pretty popular.