Hm, I wonder if we might be talking about two different people. If you mean Carlo (aka ivelegacy, et. al.) he is one of only two people who also managed to get themselves banned here. We take pride in trying not to censor or ban for personal reasons and having an open discussion forum with very few rules, but Carlo unfortunately went way overboard. He has harassed me on other message boards and threatened to sue me -- for some not quite intelligible reason relating to us refusing to remove links to his website from posts he himself wrote.
I am not sure if Carlo is who you are referring to though?
When I said "prolific developer" I was mostly referring to
@onre who as far as I am aware has never issued any kind of threats (public, personal, or otherwise), nor tried to install Linux on an SGI. He has also always posted his patches and source up on GitHub! Unfortunately he was slandered very heavily by Raion before as well, which is why he is one of the first people that came to my mind when I wrote that.
Although I have no personal interest in Linux on SGI, I would say that arguably all of what we do here with old machines could be considered wasteful in someone's perspective. What we're trying to support here at the User Group is a gathering place for anyone who has interest in SGIs, no matter how specific or peculiar that interest may be. That's a big reason that a lot of us got together and did this in the first place. Whether people want to discuss Itanium, Linux, Visual Workstations, SGI Fuels, GNU software, emulation, or other subjects that were at one point in time either disallowed or discouraged on IRIX Network, it's all allowed and supported here. It's not a place where we try to set rules and boundaries on what we consider the best use of peoples' time or of the hardware. IRIX Network has been a lot better about that lately, to its credit, but it wasn't always the case.
For example, there is a rule on IRIX Network that was designed (and enforced) to stop people from linking to the Silicon Graphics User Group. It is against the rules to "promote other services," but "other services" basically just means SGUG. Putting such a policy in place on the SGUG side would go against all the principles of open communication and lack of censorship that we hold strongly, and so you will see links to IRIX Network in posts here. But it's tough for us not to at least remark when that's a one way street.
But as for Linux, of course you are free to tell people it is a waste of time; that's okay!
The User Group is here both for people who think SGI Linux is a waste of time, as well as for the people who might believe that it is interesting.