Reprinted with permission from Ryan

(Matthew Garrett continues on his several-month long binge of harassing TechRights disguised as a woman, “elusive_woman”, while having also demanded that Free and Open Source Software projects adopt Microsoft-approved CoCs)

Summary: Ryan, who has repeatedly been defamed by Matthew J Garrett in our IRC network (through extremely rude sockpuppets that promote illegal activity), is expressing his personal thoughts here; those represent the views of Ryan, not Techrights; Garrett has vandalised our IRC network for years, so this is relevant to the site; also see this article about SELF fending off CoCs under threats of violence

Corporate trolls use “Codes of Conduct” as a subtle act of sabotage against Free and Open Source Software and Communities.

When I kept getting banned from Ubuntu and having them scream “Code of Conduct” over a decade ago, I became very annoyed at the entire concept.

It turns out that it was just the seed of a very large problem beginning to percolate in the Free and Open Source Software Movement.

In the past 15 years, CoCs have infiltrated most FOSS projects and have had a chilling effect on Free Speech and anyone with an off beat sense of humor.

Furthermore, they’ve been used to give companies like IBM (now a partner of Microsoft) a platform for defunding the Free Software Foundation by defaming Richard M. Stallman.

There have been numerous debacles, such as the Sage Sharp incident, where a transgender “developer” wrote very bad code and then blamed the quick dismissal on “gender issues” and not simply the fact that it was crap and it got the same response as anyone who had submitted obviously broken code.

“They/Them” went on to the Outreachy project, which nearly bankrupted GNOME.

GNOME literally ran out of money to maintain GNOME’s software, Web site, and infrastructure, and had to get a bailout from Red Hat to continue because of a failed outreach to “women”, and that’s using the term “women” as liberally as possible.

Red Hat then gave “They/Them” a participation trophy.

Matthew Garrett[1] is a proponent of CoCs because they ruin Free Software. He also seems to hide behind a transgender “partner” as a beard so that he can avoid being criticized. [2]

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[1] (I based the meme on the “elusive_woman” sockpuppet account and my ex’s TSA story about a transgender woman coming through and alarming and saying “It must be my HUGE COCK!”)

[2] (He thinks.) (When I told him if you like it, go and put a ring on it, he told me he can’t come out of his house to spend 5 minutes getting married because COVID is still out there.)

The elevator pitch is, “If you want your project to fail, if you want to be canceled from your own project and have to come back on your knees after they send you to therapy you didn’t need, begging for your own project back, let them (they) inflict a CoC on you.” ⬆