An anonymous developer explains why he has to remain anonymous:
Religious wars in software used to be about a fat bearded man named He-macs wrestling a pencil-neck named Vimmy over what text editor to use, but now FOSS devs are concerned about making sure marginalized human beings feel “welcome,” as if someone was trying to physically block newcomers. That opens the door to social justice and other buzzwords that prigs use to feel better about themselves, and utopian visions documented in “Codes of Conduct,” or CoC.
The sentiment behind a CoC is that there is no excuse for being an ass, which sounds great until you realize that only a select few people get to decide who’s an ass. So when open source leaders want to stop you from doing free work they can pretend that its your fault for violating their code instead of admitting they never really wanted to include just anybody. They’ve managed to make exclusivity look inclusive, and it makes me crazy that so few people see that….
They exempt themselves from their own standards and announce their
willingness to proxy dox anyone if persuaded to do so on subjective
grounds. There is no privacy for you: If you look privileged and someone
makes up a story about you, you might get a concerned email from HR
about something making the rounds on Twitter and causing a PR nightmare
for your employer. Whether or not you actually did anything wrong won’t
matter.Hacker Eric S. Raymond noticed the manipulation at work and indicated that women at tech conferences were targeting male open source leaders with false allegations. Accusations have power, and the 2013 PyCon incident with Adria Richards proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
We need to acknowledge the problem. If you are not considered worthy
of protection by ideological CoCs, then there are people out there that
want you to at the very least lose your job. If they see you
demonstrating even the most innocuous affection or humor, they will
likely assume malice and retaliate, especially if you are the wrong
color or sex. These are the same people who humiliated a scientist for
landing on a comet because of a shirt he wore.
If you think it’s bad now, just wait. The next step is going to be taking open source projects and closing them so that they cannot be forked. After all, what is the point of going to all this trouble to take over OSS if the productive people can simply render all their efforts irrelevant by a fork?
They don’t want a seat at the table, they want control. And what good is control if you can’t control everything?
As for those who say it’s not possible because the rules of open source don’t permit it, remember, they don’t only exempt themselves from their own standards, they exempt themselves from anything that limits their ability to pursue their objectives.
I was hoping to do the Open Brainstorm tonight, but we’ll do it tomorrow at 7 PM EST instead. I’ll send out the invites to the VFM tonight, and post the link publicly tomorrow afternoon.