The reason so many people are against “Code of Conducts” is because they are not used as a baseline for professional behavior (against which there would also be arguments in Open Source), but as a political cudgel to score points and enact things like: https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...

See also: http://dancerscode.com/blog/why-the-open-code-of-conduct-isn...

But look at some instances for people who have tried to win political arguments by invoking CoC or are lobbying to instate them on Open Source projects.

Here is a case, someone from Italy was openly against reassignment surgery for kids on Twitter: https://twitter.com/krainboltgreene/status/61156951531550720...

Uh-oh my wrong-think senses are tingling, he had a different opinion on a social issue on his private Twitter account. How could this possibly be handled? Ignore him, discuss this issue with him or agree to disagree? No, clearly he must be somehow punished for this. Luckily he is apparently contributor to an Open Source project called Opal, so let’s bring it up there and insist: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

This is fortunately brought up by someone who has already developed their own “Code of Conduct” that would require that it be followed on “public spaces” (like Twitter, Facebook or forums) and if not be removed from the project: http://contributor-covenant.org/ http://where.coraline.codes/coraline_ehmke.pdf

“By adopting this Code of Conduct, project maintainers commit themselves to fairly and consistently applying these principles to every aspect of managing this project. Project maintainers who do not follow or enforce the Code of Conduct may be permanently removed from the project team.

This code of conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community.”

It’s basically a shakedown game for ideological control of a space and seems to work this way:

1) Someone gets offended by something someone in the Open Source community said (usually on Twitter or at an official event), they demand they be removed or otherwise punished for the offending thing.

2) They flood GitHub or similar with demands to remove said individual and/or at least adopt a “Code of Conduct” to prevent such “despicable” behavior like disagreeing in the future, which includes all Social media and official events

3) Once project creators have been socially shamed as some sort of bigots for not wanting to do anything against this sufficiently and the activists got a foot in the door they push a self-formulated “Code of Conduct” on the project like above

4) Then they demand it be upheld and anyone that says anything they deem offensive be removed from the project, if it happens another time they can point to said “Code of Conduct” and ask the project creators to abide. A “safe space” has been created. After this they don’t particularly give a shit if great software engineers get pushed out for disagreeing or the project even fails beyond this point, because said people don’t want to abide by their ideology.

Meritocracy is also generally a trigger-word for these people, they absolutely hate it. Just bring it up in conversation and they reveal themselves and their intentions rather quickly: http://readwrite.com/2014/01/24/github-meritocracy-rug

https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-dehumanizing-myth-of...

Another recent issue was GitHub removing a WebM Converter repo because it used the word “retards”, you can see the same individual involved in the first Twitter conflict pop up throughout the comments yelling at other people to leave: https://github.com/nixxquality/WebMConverter/commit/c1ac0baa...