| 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. |
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.