A CoC Will Destroy Your Free Software Community and Help Imposers of CoC (Like Microsoft)
Related: The Linux Foundation's Linux Kernel Code of Conduct (CoC) Committee is Now Officially Corporate
A Code of Conduct (CoC) is always - or by default - presented as innocuous and much-needed. Who actually enforces a CoC though? What happens if the CoC becomes a weapon that's not a double-edged sword but a banhammer of large corporations that bribe ("sponsor") a project? Manners matter, say companies that COMMIT SERIOUS CRIMES. See, you cannot name the misconduct or the crime; You may get punished for doing so, since that's "rude".
Abusers like to disguise censorship (of their abuse) as "manners" or good "conduct". They're making new laws or rules to make it impermissible to mention their crimes.
Cases aren't lacking to demonstrate this point. To make matters worse, the people who push hard for projects to adopt a CoC are often perverts and criminals; they don't want people to pay attention to what they themselves are doing. There are high-profile examples of that, too.
We're hardly fans of Bryan Lunduke (to say the least, he's a liability and he came from Microsoft), but hours ago he published a new video about the Linux Foundation, where Microsoft is buying loads of seats and ousting 'undesirables' (including Linus Torvalds himself). We noted earlier that it's about the "king of Linux" remark and Lunduke says Torvalds totally dodges the question about a maintainership heir (saying it was Cox and Morton who implicitly did this before, now it's Greg K-H; Cox left, Morton is a lot older than Torvalds, and they make fun of Greg K-H being bald, perhaps because the CoC doesn't apply to everybody or is selectively applied). Lunduke has the original clip (Creative Commons licence). He plays back the original words of Torvalds and explains why "the likes of Microsoft" will take over Torvalds' position through the Linux Foundation. Microsoft will decide and Jim Zemlin will merely be the man in the middle (facilitator of corporate interference, sometimes by VMware too, in spite of seriously violating the licence of Linux).
Also a few hours ago LWN finally took out of the paywall this article about the CoC causing a mess inside "the Python community". Yes, even LWN called it a "mess" (in the headline) and the comments are so many (one can safely assume 'pre-filtered' by LWN, so many are not visible) that it's a mess to keep track of, however they served to confirm what Lunduke covered a month ago. Basically someone got suspended for several months, in spite of decades of contributions to Python, simply because he said he liked some SNL skit. He didn't say "slut", but that segment/skit had the word in it. Nobody got offended, but this was used as a pretext to basically oust a person who wasn't even rude. Who benefits from this mess? Remember who paid a lot of money to take over the founder of Python and bought board seats.
Yes, that's Microsoft.
That's something to bear in mind now that Microsoft's Trojan horse (Mono) dragged a CoC into WINE. Nothing would please Microsoft more than WINE (or PE) being in disarray, partly due to infighting and ragequit-type resignations. A lot of GNU/Linux growth came through the Steam Deck in recent years. █