This level of user facing pettiness is a great way to make sure no one ever wants to do business with you.
I mean, who doesn’t like hawaiian pizza?
Trying to log in or create a new account without checking the box returns a “please try again” error.
… and of course, includes a useless shitty non-telling error message…
Last year I didn’t know who Matt Mullenwag was.
This year I know he’s an asshole.
Get out of the way of everyone else, you random single asshole.
This childish drama has been going on for so long that I would have expected that by now some significant portion of people who worked on this before it all started would have founded a successor organization, forked the whole thing and moved on without that guy.
Maybe institutional inertia is preventing this.
Maybe there is more to the whole story than is publicly known.
Maybe the trademarks he holds are actually very relevant.
Whatever it is, this clearly demonstrates that just because something is open source it does not mean people can not fuck with it and drag others down with them. Even if it is a very relevant and widely used piece of software that a lot of people rely on.
The view from a mile off is that he’s a standard-issue abusive prick. Any hint of working around him might’ve been met with enough manipulative discouragement to make people go “ugh, fine” and keep putting up with the status quo. It’s just another people problem - so long as the software still works.
As soon as he fucked with people’s ability to quietly tolerate it, he became everybody’s problem.
I love this sort of harmless pettiness. So much of the internet has become corporate and sterile afraid of offending anyone.
And before anyone assumes- I’m not talking about political correctness. This kind of thing should be reserved for controllable trivialities. Star Trek vs Star Wars fandom. Sports rivalries. Deep Dish vs Thin Crust (both are wrong though).