[zahlman]

It's nice to see that people are still talking about this, and that someone has attempted to summarize the entire story. (I'm not actually familiar with LWN. As someone directly involved in the story, would it be appropriate to send email to the main LWN address to get in contact with the author? Or is there a better way?)

One thing that annoys me about the coverage is that it seems unaware of clear misrepresentations made by the CoC Work Group and the Steering Council related to this affair. In particular, they have repeatedly falsely insinuated that individuals like Peters and myself have tried to determine the identity of accusers or expected them to explain those accusations concretely. This is simply false. What I would appreciate, however, is for the CoC Work Group to explain properly how any person could in principle object to certain of the "examples that attempt to summarize an overall communication style that pushed boundaries too far", or what those supposed "boundaries" are or why they should exist, or indeed how any of that could possibly have "caused harm to multiple people in our community".

Another key issue is that they mischaracterized complaints by, or on behalf of, neurodivergent individuals, as petitioning for said community members to be treated more leniently or with some other kind of favouritism. This, too, is not true. The goal, instead, was to get them to understand that neurodivergent people - more or less by definition - cannot be expected to infer the standards of behaviour that they're refusing to lay out explicitly, and do not see how the supposedly problematic conduct could be judged as violating the Code of Conduct as written.

I think many neurotypical people would have similar questions, for that matter. But I and others felt it was important to point out the specific harm their policies do to neurodivergent people. If they could in principle be convinced of anything, then I hoped that this was the way, since avoidance of harm seems to be the language they speak. If not (which seems to be how it worked out), then I could at least say I accomplished the goal of publicly exposing their hypocrisy.

It will probably be a while before I write more blog articles about this situation - or more generally about the PSF and the broader Python community - but the above points are definitely on my todo list.

Some more specific nitpicks:

> The latter thread managed to get Knechtel an indefinite suspension from the forum, though the thread is somewhat difficult to follow due to edits, either by the moderators or Knechtel himself.

To be clear: "edits" here seems to refer to the complete removal of my own posts aside from the OP (and I think also one of Tim Peters'). The only post that was edited was the last one summarizing the CoC Work Group's judgment, and whatever change was made doesn't seem to have been substantial. The process for this removal is that the posts were first "hidden" by flags from "the community" (my own investigation into the Discourse software has determined that, with the default software settings, this could be done by a single flag from "Trust Level 4" members, which include moderators, who would thus be able to hide posts without any explicit acknowledgment of moderator action). Then, Discourse automatically deletes posts which remain hidden (moderator action or editing by the author is required to un-hide them, and of course the latter was not an option for me) for a minimum of 30 days (again, a default setting, but one that agrees with observed behaviour).

> So it probably came as no surprise to anyone who was paying attention that the SC suspended Peters as a core developer for three months on August 7.

The announcement was made publicly August 7, but the suspension appears to have been active since the 1st. While I don't have good evidence I can share for that fact, Peters was also suspended from the Discourse forum itself, and that suspension expires November 1 as well (https://discuss.python.org/u/tim.one/summary). (Peters has made quite few commits to the project in recent years, so this sort of thing could go unnoticed easily enough....)

> Peters's return from his three-month suspension is far from guaranteed, though. In previous cases, it has required a request to the SC for reinstatement, which has generally not happened with others in his shoes.

This shouldn't pass without an explicit mention of the story of Stefan Krah, another core developer who was also given a 3 month suspension, and who responded to it by resigning. This happened in October of 2020; during a two week period in the next month, there was a wave of core dev resignations (19 of them IIRC). (Granted, there may have been other motivating factors here, such as political tension related to the US election.) Notably, Peters was a supporter of Krah at the time, and considered that Krah might be neurodivergent (from the evidence available to me, this seems highly likely).

It's also worth highlighting the story of another developer who was suspended earlier in 2020, who apparently doesn't want to be named or discussed in any detail these days - I'm pretty sure I figured out who it was, but that's not the point. (Of course, please don't post any guesses publicly.) I'm bringing it up specifically as an example of how the Steering Council (which has only existed since 2018, mind) does its business (and apparently always has): https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-committers@pyth... There's a lot of confusion expressed by people who weren't involved (it seems that some people on the mailing list initially thought the post was telling them they'd been suspended). For those who were involved, it seems that it was obvious who got suspended, but again it seems to have been forbidden (either explicitly or by reading the room) to state the name explicitly. The thread linked above also includes a particularly poignant exchange between Jack Diederich (who also left in mid 2020 - publicly and fairly loudly) and Nathaniel J. Smith which I find highly emblematic of the ideological conflict at hand.

(Unsurprisingly - assuming I correctly identified the culprit - the suspension was motivated by posts that didn't say anything that I could see as objectionable, although they could possibly be described as somewhat conspiratorial.)