Contributor Covenant
The Contributor Covenant is a code of conduct for free/open source projects, created by Coraline Ada Ehmke. Today, the code has been adopted by over 40,000 open source projects including Linux, Swift, Golang, Rails, and JRuby.[1][2][3] Relevant signers include Google[4], Apple, Microsoft, Eclipse and Gitlab.[5]
In 2016, the author received a Ruby Hero award in recognition of her work on the Contributor Covenant.[6][7]
Backlash
Contributor Covenant as a way to gain power over people with different political ideas
Contributor covenant has been criticised as a tool through which far left groups try to gain power over people indifferent to politics or with a different political view[8][9][10].
Specifically, Coraline Ada, the transgender creator of Contributor Covenant, has called herself a "social justice advocate" and has called for open source software to be considered a "political movement" with its own "ideology", whose goal is to realise "the politics of social justice" and "the injection of political ideologies [...] in free software"[11]. She claimed meritocracy is pointless and that the true aim of open source should be to fight "capitalism" and to go against meritocracy by "level playing field" through inclusion of social justice advocates and exclusion of anyone against it[12]. She has argued that "cultures that value meritocracy often result in greater inequality"[13].
In 2016 PHP expert Paul M. jones claimed that "the Code of Conduct as presented enables its enforcers to stand in judgment of every aspect of your public, private, professional, and political expression [...] the real purpose of the Covenant is to [...] gain power over the political enemies of Social Justice, by using project membership as a form of leverage over them"[14].
He used as an example, among others, the situation of an Opan maintainer, who Coraline Ada, the creator of the Contributor Covenant, tried to have removed "in reference to a Twitter conversation where Opal is not the subject"[15]. Commenting on the situation, Coraline Ada wrote that "as marginalized people continue to fight for their voices to be heard, social justice questions are not going away any time soon".[16]
Paul M. Jones recalled another incident like this, when Roberto Rosario, a mixed race person who run at the time the Awesome-Django project, was asked to adopt the Contributor Covenant and, after declining to do so citing the total lack of any conduct related incident, was subjected to intimidation, as he was threatened to lose its job [17]. Speciafically referring to the Rosario controversy, it has been stated that "We must cast these would-be totalitarians out – refuse to admit them on any level except by evaluating on pure technical merit whatever code patches they submit. We must refuse to let them judge us."[18]
It has been claimed that Contributor Covenant is wrong because "open source shouldn't be political" and meritocracy and not political affiliation should be valued in techs.[19][20]
Backlash after Linux adoption
Following the adoption of the Contributor Covenant v1.4 by Linux[21], where the creator and maintainer Linus Torvalds temporarily stepped down citing personal reasons[22], the Linux community reacted with strong criticism against it[23]. At least one contributor is now calling for a revocation of their code under the GPLv2 license and is encouraging other contributors to do the same[24].
See also
References
- ^ "Contributor Covenant: A Code of Conduct for Open Source Projects". Contributor Covenant. Retrieved July 6, 2017.
- ^ Evans, Jon (March 5, 2016). "On the war between hacker culture and codes of conduct". TechCrunch. Retrieved July 6, 2017.
- ^ Bostick, Chad (November 4, 2016). "GitHub's Anti-Harassment Tools and the Open Source Codes of Conduct". Hello Tech Pros. Retrieved July 6, 2017.
- ^ "Code of Conduct – opensource.google.com". opensource.google.com. Retrieved 2018-05-26.
- ^ "Contributor Covenant: Adopters". Contributor-covenant.org. Retrieved 2018-05-26.
- ^ "2016 Ruby Heroes". Ruby Heroes. Retrieved July 6, 2017.
- ^ RailsConf (May 12, 2016). Ruby Hero Awards (Videotape). Confreaks. 3:52 minutes in.
- ^ http://paul-m-jones.com/archives/6214
- ^ https://medium.com/@jmaynard/coraline-ada-ehmke-argues-that-open-source-is-a-political-movement-and-that-it-should-honor-and-f8776ac607bf
- ^ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6918
- ^ https://medium.com/rx3-magazine/why-hackers-must-welcome-social-justice-advocates-1f8d7e216b00
- ^ https://medium.com/rx3-magazine/why-hackers-must-welcome-social-justice-advocates-1f8d7e216b00
- ^ https://www.contributor-covenant.org/
- ^ http://paul-m-jones.com/archives/6214
- ^ https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
- ^ https://medium.com/@coralineada/on-opalgate-2efd0fc1e0fd
- ^ https://archive.is/dgilk#selection-933.228-933.249
- ^ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6918
- ^ https://medium.com/@jmaynard/coraline-ada-ehmke-argues-that-open-source-is-a-political-movement-and-that-it-should-honor-and-f8776ac607bf
- ^ http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6918
- ^ https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=8a104f8b5867c682d994ffa7a74093c54469c11f.
{{cite web}}: Missing or empty|title=(help) - ^ http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1809.2/00117.html.
{{cite web}}: Missing or empty|title=(help) - ^ https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/software/general-linux-open-source/1047710-the-linux-kernel-adopts-a-code-of-conduct.
{{cite web}}: Missing or empty|title=(help) - ^ https://web.archive.org/web/20180923162742/http://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/09/killswitch-linux-code-of-conduct.html.
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