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Linus Torvalds has talked about his experience on this subject; the book Producing Open Source Software also has a section that deals with difficult people, which is mostly related. If you want to read more, look these up. Maintain control. How is it possible that contributors can do damage in the first place? Did you give them commit privileges without ...

Discuss, discuss, discuss This is absolutely essential. You can't solve personal problems digitally - so when I say discuss, I mean call a meeting. You need to sort out some things with him: Project focus If everyone has a different idea of where the project's going, it's obviously not going to work. This is the root of the problem. Discuss with him what ...

Bring it up, clearly. This might seem obvious, but can't be stressed enough. If you are positive that the direction they taking the project into is incompatible with the vision of most, then this needs to be addressed. Make sure that other people are on board with mentioning it to them, so you form a unified front, but avoid making the problem contributor ...

The best way to deal with people who are ultimately being more of a bother than a help is to: First Talk to them. They may not know what they are doing wrong, talking to them may help solve the problem. Second If they still have not improved you may need to remove them from the project. Although this may be difficult, it may be the only thing to save your ...

There doesn't seem to be a copyright violation here. The code was pretty clearly released under the LGPL, and open source licenses are (almost certainly) irrevocable; it doesn't matter that the patch was never accepted, the code was still released under the LGPL, so as long as the appropriate copyright notices are being maintained (and it seems like they are)...

There are at least two competing interests in how open source maintainers run their projects: a desire to foster and accept outside contributions developer bandwidth Developers have limited time to review outside contributions, especially if the project isn't a full time job (but even if it is). Combine this with the occasional entitled user, and some open ...

Vaguely related because Apache contributors are under a CLA, a long time ago there was some feud between JBoss and Apache Geronimo, ... a very long time ago...http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=22337 But these are very rare events and IMHO a CLA is a strong deterrent to contributions. As an anecdote, I was asked once by Google to submit ...