Drama Characters
Meet the key players in open-source drama. Sorted by chaos level.
Jia Tan
@jiat0218
Unknown identity behind the XZ Utils backdoor. Carefully crafted a 2-year supply chain attack.
GitHub account: [email protected]. Made first commit June 2022. Gained direct push access January 2023. Injected backdoor March 2024. Identity still unknown.
Matt Mullenweg
@matt
WordPress co-creator and Automattic CEO. Known for aggressive business tactics.
Co-founder of WordPress, CEO of Automattic. 1000+ commits to WordPress core (ranked #6 contributor).
Graf Zahl
@Graf
GZDoom project leader. Management style led to mass developer exodus in October 2025.
Long-time GZDoom project maintainer. Known for dismissing PRs and maintaining tight control.
Jeff Atwood
@codinghorror
Stack Overflow co-founder. HODL'd a 17-year grudge against DHH, then sent threatening email in 2025.
Co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse. Creator of Coding Horror blog. Defended Windows developers for 17 years after DHH's 2008 dismissal. November 2025: sent email saying "you should be afraid of me." Posted the threat on Mastodon (infosec.exchange).
David Heinemeier Hansson
@dhh
Rails creator. 2008: dismissed Windows developers. 2025: too busy configuring Omarchy to respond to threats.
Created Ruby on Rails. Co-founder of 37signals/Basecamp. Known for controversial takes. 2008: "I have hard time imagining hiring programmer still using Windows." Created Omarchy Linux distro (misspelled from "Monarchy").
George Hotz
@geohot
The legendary hacker. Age 17: unlocked iPhone bootloader. Age 20: hacked PlayStation 3.
Founder of Tiny Corp. Creator of tinygrad, TinyBox GPU systems. Known for taking technical challenges.
Salvatore Sanfilippo
@antirez
Created Redis in 2009. Switched to proprietary licensing in 2024, triggering Valkey fork.
Redis creator. Led Redis Labs company. Made decision to switch from BSD to SSPL/RSALv2.
Armon Dadgar
@armond
CEO of HashiCorp. Switched Terraform to BSL, triggering community fork to OpenTofu.
HashiCorp co-founder and CEO. Company acquired by IBM for $6.4B in 2025.
Eelco Dolstra
@edolstra
NixOS founder. Resigned from board in 2024 due to governance crisis.
Maintained NixOS for 21 years. Stepped down after Anduril defense contractor sponsorship controversy.
Madelyn Olson
@madelyn
Longtime Redis maintainer. Started Valkey fork, now backed by AWS, Google, Oracle.
Senior engineer at AWS. Was ranked #6 contributor to Redis before removal. Led Valkey fork effort.
Theo Browne
@theo
Content creator focused on web development. Known for publicly challenging projects.
Popular tech YouTuber (@t3dotgg). Donated $5,000 to FFmpeg despite Twitter drama with their admin.
Linus Torvalds
@linus
Creator of Linux kernel. Reference point for benevolent dictator governance.
Linux kernel creator. Maintains the largest open-source project in the world.