[CookieMon]

> Who has been lynched because of a Contributor Covenant, or other similar open-source code of conduct?

The scope of the Contributor Covenant was widened in an attempt to l̶y̶n̶c̶h̶ harass and ban Elia Schito for an opinion he had expressed on his personal twitter[1].

Because Elia's twitter conversation wasn't connected with the project (beyond the project being listed in his bio), a new clause needed to be added to the Contributor Covenant in order to get him. To get it in, the new clause was presented to the Opal project as a pull request labelled "Update Contributor Covenant to include ethnicity"[2].

The Opal project noticed the extra change and guessed its real intent (that intent - needing it to go after Elia - was confirmed later by people arguing for the change[3]), so Opal edited that clause before accepting the change, but everybody else using a Contributor Covenant now has it, including Linux. (The Linux one has customized enforcement/judgement guidelines, so in its case the presence of the "Elia clause" might be less easily weaponizable by the twitter mobs it was written for)

The attack on Elia was instigated by the creator of the Contributor Covenant[4], who was unrelated to the Opal project but tagged in via twitter - it turned out this kind of drama was the Covenant's purpose.

After watching that I no longer see codes of conduct as community measures written in good faith. It hasn't just been the Contributor Covenant one that's bad faith either, however, projects that adopt them are changing and rewording them in good faith, so they can get better - it's just not the CoC intent.

Opal eventually got rid of their Contributor Covenant.

Links because of how unbelievable this stuff is:

[1] https://twitter.com/elia/status/611319469982527488 [2] https://github.com/opal/opal/pull/948/commits/817321e27eccff... [3] https://github.com/opal/opal/pull/948#issuecomment-113486020 [4] https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

[explainplease]

And this is how that creator is reacting to Linux's merging their CoC based on the CC: http://archive.is/6AyZy

[danso]

How are you interpreting that tweet? I see it as the creator's tweet as being facetious, if ungracious? Seems she's pointing out -- again, perhaps ungraciously -- how anyone in the Linux community who was anti-CoC now has to accept that a CoC is part of Linux.

I'd like to think ideally she could come off as less snarky, perhaps. You don't actually believe she's referring to an actual conspiracy, right? Usually infiltrators, even the most gloaty of ones, don't call attention to their current effort to infiltrate something.

[spangry]

"I can't wait for the mass exodus from Linux now that it's been infiltrated by SJWs. Hahahah"

Poe's law in effect?

[danso]

If I'm reading your summation correctly, someone made edited the CoC in an attempt to indict Schito ad-hoc, and that bad faith attempt was foiled because the community was able to see the timing of the change. Doesn't your version of events strongly imply that having the CoC on file is what made it even possible to see how transparent this attack was?

Maybe you believe that the CoC is what made this attack possible, but that's a far-from-self-evident line of thinking, because such bad faith attacks and power plays have long existed in projects with no code of conducts. I'm not for now getting into the argument of how a CoC may be overall beneficial, I am simply challenging u/aaron695 on his claim that CoCs have led to "lynching" and "are evil at its worst". I'm assuming that he, like many programmers, believes terminology have meaning, and that his choice of words reflects actual quantifiable and tangible wrongs.

I'm not even particularly bothered by aaron695's implicit comparison of what CoCs' allegedly inflct compared to the violence of real-life lynchings. But I think his use of the overdramatic term is a symptom of poor thinking here. Lynchings generally imply acts of horror arising from the absence of agreed-upon norms, or actual law. People who advocate for CoCs in good-faith, ostensibly do so because they believe a CoC can instill some trust (because actual laws aren't possible nor desirable) that behavior won't be punished/ignored for nebulous/arbitrary reasons.

The two examples given so far are examples in which:

1. The attempt to use the CoC in bad faith failed, as in your example with Schito.

2. Both the CoC's impact and its correctness are debatable, if we attempt to avoid taking or refuting Vegg's side. For starters, Vegg resigned. And if he hadn't, there's no indication the Node.js overseeing committee felt empowered to take action to remove him. And yet if the CoC did provide for that action -- again, such a rules-guided process (even if ultimately stupid) is still the antithesis of what a "lynching" entails.

I'm not trying to just be pedantic here, nor am I arguing that you and aaron694 are morally bankrupt bigots for your anti-CoC positions. I am arguing, though, that you have taken this stance without justifying evidence or logical reason. For an example of the latter, look at how you bring up the problem of "everybody else using the Contributor Covenant" that now includes the "Elia clause". Think about how absolutely absurd it would be if, in that argument, you replaced "Code of Conduct" with "[some library well-known to be broken/insecure]", and then used that line of reasoning to assert that open source software is "evil at its worst" or even, "kind of evil".

edit: correction, the user who brought up Rod Vagg was not aaron695, but another commenter.

[CookieMon]

Apologies, I thought lynching was your choice of words and I was using your words, I did think it was rather extreme. I agree it's overdramatic and a poor choice, I had missed that you were calling it out.

Regarding the CoC, I had spared you the details. Opal didn't have a CoC when this happened, they were pressured into Ada's by the outrage mob from twitter - told it would help prevent problems like this. Upon success at getting it adopted the group from twitter realized the CoC didn't have the clause they needed, so they added it. Opal was spared by customizing their CoC. The CoC everyone else got means twitterers have a codified excuse to shift their harassment to smearing the maintainer if they don't side with the mob in censuring a target of a pile-on.

My example isn't that an attempt to use the CoC in bad faith actually failed (do you really think Elia was unaffected?), it's that the attempt nakedly exposed how the whole purpose of the CoC had been bad faith. That was the revelation to me - CoCs had appeared so positive and community-minded before.

Anyway, I mistook your call-out for a question, so I realize the intent/history of the CoC wasn't of interest here.

> look at how you bring up the problem of "everybody else using the Contributor Covenant" that now includes the "Elia clause". Think about how absolutely absurd it would be if, in that argument, you replaced "Code of Conduct" with "[some library well-known to be broken/insecure]", and then used that line of reasoning to assert that open source software is "evil at its worst" or even, "kind of evil".

Lets leave evil and awkward analogies out of this. I meant literally the projects that adopted the Contributor Covenant now contain a clause that was written specifically to be bendable to to attack Elia. The clause isn't there to improve communities, it wasn't worded for that, it's in there to help facilitate attacks.

[danso]

Thanks for the reply, I could have been more explicit in saying that my argument (at that point) was meant to be narrow, because the parent commenter's starting assumptions were too unreasonable to lead to worthwhile debate.

That said, I think your framing of the Opal/Schito situation unfairly short-changes the pro-Schito side. Granted, while I do remember following the issue at the time, I now only vaguely recall its details. That its resolution isn't more memorable to me could admittedly mean that I think/thought Schito got what he deserved. But I don't (nor would other CoC supporters, I would think) claim that Schito was unharmed -- that's beside the point for now, since this isn't the time for a debate on what's offensive/exclusionary to the trans community. But if we just accept the premise that Schito should not have faced criticism (i.e. "harm") for tweeting (i.e. saying something across in a world-wide public channel) things that a community finds extremely offensive -- then there's no argument to be had.

I personally think that -- at least on the face of it -- what Schito said was more troubling than what people complained about regarding Torvalds and Rod Vagg.

But that issue IMO is orthogonal to the value of CoCs -- there is no CoC that would have stopped Schito from getting angry replies from the trans community. And as I read through that massive pull thread you referenced, I see that many of the prominent maintainers were in a state of reasonable debate and disagreement. Several pointed out that, as offensive as Schito's tweets might have been, there was hardly a "mob" in the pull request discussion; Coraline Ada is far outnumbered by people calling her unreasonable and accusing her of a "witch hunt".

Ada's pull request was closed and its discussion shut down. As you pointed out, there was no CoC before Schito got ripped on, so it is wrong, in a literal and figurative sense. Moreover, the opal project has since created and adopted a Code of Conduct. It is far less than what Ada pushed for. But I'm not trying to defend Ada's CoC, but to point out how it is beneficial to Schito and other maintainers of large, multi-collaborator projects to create and discuss a CoC, as Schito has apparently done, because it protects him.

The opal community was already lukewarm to Ada's complaints against Schito's 2015 complaints. Now anyone who wants to complain to opal's github community will be tolerated if they hate what Schito does on his personal Twitter account:

https://github.com/opal/opal/pull/961/commits/28738a25147ec9...

To me, this effort is beneficial to both sides; it protects community members from being punished by the project for breaking an "unwritten" rule. And it informs outsiders about the standards and decorum of the community, and they're free to join up or pass.

There are more benefits IMO to having a well-developed CoC, but I'll end my already wordy comment by saying that we should evaluate the value of CoC's independently from the political beliefs of their vocal proponents. Schito's situation isn't a good one; I'd like to see examples of how a community's agreed-upon CoC, whether it's the Contributor's Covenant or something lighter-weight, has led to capricious/unjustifiable action by that community.