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One incident, three years ago, which came to nothing in any event? I think we must differ in our definitions of 'enough'. Are we looking at an established pattern of behavior which is suggestive of current intent? Or are we instead looking at a single moment of excess, whose outcome provided a salutary lesson since taken firmly to heart? There's not enough here to know - the claim has yet to be substantiated, if substantiation there be. eta: As it happens, I'd take Alex Jones's patch, too. But I would require it be resubmitted anonymously, and without inflammatory verbiage. If not so resubmitted, I would not merge it. Yes, it does the project a disservice to reject good code. But software, like every made thing in the world, is made by people. It is not unreasonable for me to look at the sort of people who attend upon Alex Jones, and then at the sort of people who find his presence so distasteful that they will not associate themselves with anything he's touched however fleetingly, and decide which sort of people I prefer to include, by my actions, in my pool of potential contributors. If the latter group seems to me to be more likely to contribute good code, then I'm not going to put them off by having Alex Jones on my contributor list. If that costs the project a good patch, then that cost is still less than the other - if I've evaluated correctly, and if the patch has merit, someone not so divisive will submit another like it before very long. Of course, most people don't give a damn either way, and mainly just want to do the work they're doing and land their changes with a minimum of fuss. Which is more or less the point that I'm trying to make here: this is neither an attempt to install a blood estrogen titer in the code review process for Linux kernel contributions, nor to ensure that Linux kernel development is a clubhouse admitting only pale penis-bearing people of power. Everyone attempting to make a substantive contribution, of whatever sort, to the process, is doing so in good faith, out of a genuine belief that their contribution will improve the quality of the result. But I appreciate that's hard to keep sight of, when Twitter and ESR and /g/ join in, in their inimitable fashion to add only heat and no light. |