Should open-source companies fire their community members?

In response to a middling post of mine on whether open-source companies offer better support than proprietary companies, Russ Danner shot back a list of questions that really set me to thinking. One, in particular, pushed my thinking on open source:

Sometimes you need to fire customers, is it ever appropriate to fire a community member?

"Firing a customer" refers to getting rid of customers who cost a company too much money to service/support. All industries do this to greater or lesser degrees (if you have cancer, try getting a new health insurance provider in the U.S.), but I've never seen the question related to open-source communities.

Community is the lifeblood of an open-source project, after all. Don't needy, loudmouth community members contribute, too?

I don't know. I can see two sides of this. On one hand, you may have a person that is disruptive to 95 percent of the other community members. Or that person may simply be a massive time sink for the leading developers on a project. (With some people, you can never answer their questions to the level they'd like, and so you get sucked into a black hole of endless questions.)

On the other hand, what would those other 95 percent think if they saw a community member--even an obnoxious one--dumped from the forums? That doesn't sound like the sort of community I'd want to join, where your voice is only valid if you happen to be singing in tune with everyone else.

I suspect that the answer is to let the community--and not the company or project lead--sort it out. If you lay out the ground rules for participation in a community, you can effectively push overly needy community members back to the community for answers to their questions. If the community opts to silence the needy member ("Go check the FAQ! We've answered that a million times already"), then so be it.

What do you think? I imagine this is a fairly common occurrence. How have you/your companies dealt with this kind of issue in the past?

[tristanbob]

Yes, we NEED to fire a disruptive community member

Matt,

Open source communities do value each others opinions. But if a member is repeatedly disrupting useful communication processes, then it is necessary to stop the interruption. If not, it can grind progress to a halt. How do we determine if the behavior requires this action? Well, you need a Code of Conduct (see Ubuntu) and a Community Council (see Ubuntu).

There is also the issue of how to actually block the trouble-maker. Communication is an open process, with no pre-approval necessary. So how can we identify the trouble-maker if they can register under multiple different names? A mailing list can easily get overrun by an emotional confrontation caused by a single trouble-maker.

Last consideration - It would be very easy for proprietary software companies to cause huge negative impacts on open source projects using this method. They stand to benefit greatly from this type of action. So when will this happen, or is it even happening already? (Cue X-files music)

Tristan

[ian.waring]

You can always tell them...

... to fork off.

Ian W.

[dneary]

Better than firing is avoiding hiring

A community grows according to shared values - if a community is friendly and welcoming, its newer members are likely to be friendly and welcoming. If a community is a little rough around the edges, then new arrivals are going to be the people who can ride out those rough edges - and are likely to have a few of their own.

The best way to establish a good community, then, is to identify good core values, and encourage them. A code of conduct, or benevolent dictators who pinch poor behaviour in the bud, are likely to help avoid the need of firing anyone.

If someone comes along acting in a way which is unacceptable for the existing community, they will hear about it, and are likely to feel misunderstood, unpopular, picked on - but they're not going to stick around. In the same way, if you allow bad behaviour to go uncensured, newcomers are likely to feel that the community is rude, unwelcoming, beligerent - and they will go elsewhere.