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When people say things like this, the first thing I think of is ncurses' absolutely legendary licensing and social drama[1]. Be warned: reading that page in full will take you at least an hour.

To find petty bickering, look no further than most technical contributors. Accusing non-technical people of this sort of thing isn't borne out.

[1]: https://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses-license.html

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Your story is from 1996 and 1997.

Of course all the bickering was between technical people — those were the only people around!

It's just as true today, though. When the Rust mod team resigned en masse in 2021, it was announced by a programmer (the author of ripgrep) [0], and the conflict was with the core team (also programmers). A supermajority of the contributors to open source projects are programmers, so most famous meltdowns are going to be conflicts between programmers, not between programmers and the tiny minority of non-technical contributors.

I'm still waiting for anyone to give an example of an open source project meltdown that was triggered by non-technical contributors.

[0] https://github.com/rust-lang/team/pull/671

More recent example:

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/kitty/issues/879

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