I've only met Zed once, it was at EuroDjangoCon in Prague a few years ago. Zed did a keynote speech, and afterwards in the lobby as he sat down near me, I told him how much I enjoyed it, just expecting the usual "thanks, glad you did" or whatever. What actually followed was a nearly two hour conversation, over lunch, on topics from music to education to my dumb startup idea. Zed talked with passion and intelligence on all three, and seemed genuinely interested in what I was doing - and I'm just some dumb schmuck programmer he's never met before.
I see a lot of what is said about Zed online, and I think it's sad, because in real life, he's a fucking stand-up guy.
I don't actively loathe him, but the persona he spends so much time cultivating is brash and irritating. It seems whenever I see his name mentioned, it's because he's making a stink about something, rather than doing something useful. I get that he does useful things, and LPtHW is apparently a great resource, but he (intentionally) attracts far more attention with his antics than his works.
The court jester may make a good point every now and then, but he's still a clown.
He must realize his "loud" persona is what brings out the trolls that he so often complains about, so I'm going to guess that yes, it's calculated. Turn off the persona, ignore the trolls, and the trolls will go away.
I don't loathe him at all. I just think he could spend his time better, especially when he has such a captivated audience. Instead of setting an example of being a troll and responding immaturely (and threatening to leave github, oh my). He's fairly arrogant and preaches his opinions on how to run startups, of which he's never done.
He seems to inflame conversations for the sake of inflaming them. That's all. He likes the attention.
He has a tendency to blow things out of proportion and to air these problems publicly, using inflammatory language when most people would choose to use more direct channels.
All of the incidents I have read about have been legitimate problems, but I personally would have handled all of them very differently.
This particularly incident, for example, probably could have been solved simply by e-mailing github. In Shaw's case, he assumed they were in on it. I'm sure he had his reasons, and certainly the troll behind dongml gets no sympathy from me but I don't think blaming github and dragging them into this was appropriate.
Honestly I've never understood why some people (seemingly) defend him unconditionally. It sounds like he's a really stand-up guy in real life, but I'm still willing to call out my friends when I think they've gone too far.
May be before putting all your blames on a open source community, you should have studied a little bit of social-anthropology.
You see, if you had involved deeply with any hot new tech community, like node.js, instead of Rails, you would have had the same problem with that community.
