First of all, I genuinely wish him well. He's an extremely talented developer, and we need more people focused on securing our digital infrastructure. My sentiments mirror what others here have said, hoping he can work his way through recovery and growth to be in a better place down the road. And if there really has been crazy stuff like swatting, that punishment is dealt to the perpetrators.
However, in his role leading a project that ostensibly wanted people to use it, he had a very offputting set of personality characteristics that worked against that goal. He was very opinionated and often condescending, frequently stating opinion as fact and being shallowly dismissive. I'm not talking about arguing with people asking that he add shiny baubles, but just generally almost annoyed the person he was talking to didn't realize the obviousness of their own stupidity in not seeing it his way.
Then, he had a gigantic victim complex where any comment that could be perceived as negative whatsoever was seen by him as some grave personal slight deliberately intended to hurt him. It wasn't sufficient for him to explain why he thought others were wrong. It was frequently accompanied by accusations of bad faith, of potential coordination with others trying to take him down, etc. It came across as hysteria. Not to mention the needless aggression with the Calyx developers, etc.
A few years ago, the IRC channel had a lot of this victimization and desperation-type content from him. It got to a point I was uncomfortable using GrapheneOS out of concern for the leadership and prospects of support.
It used to be Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD and to some extent Linus were benchmarks for "prickly" open source leaders, but I think Daniel gave them all quite a run for the money.
It's good that despite all that, Daniel managed to find some developers he could get along with and the contributor base grew beyond him. Here's to hoping the new leadership team steadies the ship and manages not to be so hostile to the community.
Edit to add: looking over the [2] link from parent, it's clear he did provide a lot of thoughtful, helpful answers as well, so I wouldn't want to downplay the great deal of good for which he's responsible. We're significantly better off that something like GrapheneOS exists.
However, in his role leading a project that ostensibly wanted people to use it, he had a very offputting set of personality characteristics that worked against that goal. He was very opinionated and often condescending, frequently stating opinion as fact and being shallowly dismissive. I'm not talking about arguing with people asking that he add shiny baubles, but just generally almost annoyed the person he was talking to didn't realize the obviousness of their own stupidity in not seeing it his way.
Then, he had a gigantic victim complex where any comment that could be perceived as negative whatsoever was seen by him as some grave personal slight deliberately intended to hurt him. It wasn't sufficient for him to explain why he thought others were wrong. It was frequently accompanied by accusations of bad faith, of potential coordination with others trying to take him down, etc. It came across as hysteria. Not to mention the needless aggression with the Calyx developers, etc.
A few years ago, the IRC channel had a lot of this victimization and desperation-type content from him. It got to a point I was uncomfortable using GrapheneOS out of concern for the leadership and prospects of support.
It used to be Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD and to some extent Linus were benchmarks for "prickly" open source leaders, but I think Daniel gave them all quite a run for the money.
It's good that despite all that, Daniel managed to find some developers he could get along with and the contributor base grew beyond him. Here's to hoping the new leadership team steadies the ship and manages not to be so hostile to the community.
Edit to add: looking over the [2] link from parent, it's clear he did provide a lot of thoughtful, helpful answers as well, so I wouldn't want to downplay the great deal of good for which he's responsible. We're significantly better off that something like GrapheneOS exists.