Bonum Certa Men Certa

Techrights' Statement on Code of Censorship (CoC) and Kent Overstreet: This Was the Real Purpose of Censorship Agreements All Along

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 24, 2024,
updated Nov 24, 2024

Bombing people is OK (if you sponsor the key organisations that control Linux), opposing bombings is not (a CoC in a nutshell)

Trouble in the kernel

This post represents the views of multiple people (consulted upfront) associated with this site and it is based on readings of several sources, past knowledge of ours about the Linux Foundation's stacked panel, among other issues and facets covered here in the past. The subject came up in IRC many times this past week, but we lacked time to write about it, not to mention that waiting patiently for more input can only improve any statement we make (at risk of issuing it "too late", albeit it's not so-time critical). We recommend the article "Public developer disagreements endanger bcachefs". It's Liam's good outline, based on what Kent Overstreet wrote - a summary weighing at about 6,000 words (this page was difficult for him and also for us to access; that's "modern" Web). Overstreet really took time and invested time to properly explain what had happened (instead of writing code). Also see "Never Annoy The Linux Kernel Developers" (it concerns GPLv3). There are moreover 2 posts in Phoronix with many comments on them (we don't link to that site anymore). This is a very contentious issue that LWN's chief, with his conflict of interest notwithstanding (he's professionally attached to one party in this dispute), summarised as follows:

A kernel code of conduct enforcement action

The 'Linux' Foundation Technical Advisory Board (TAB) has decided to "restrict Kent Overstreet's participation in the kernel development process during the Linux 6.13 kernel development cycle" based on a recommendation from the Code of Conduct committee. In particular, the scope of the restriction will be to "decline all pull requests from Kent Overstreet" during the development cycle. Overstreet is the creator and maintainer of the bcachefs filesystem. This action stems from a message Overstreet posted back in early September that was abusive toward another kernel developer; there is a fair amount of back-and-forth about the incident and the committee's attempts to extract a public apology from Overstreet in that thread. Overstreet has published a lengthy blog post describing his side of the story.

This feels like a repetition of what they did to Torvalds in 2018. They try to force people to apologise, even when an apology should neither be needed... nor justified. They basically blackmail good people into doing things they would not otherwise (wilfully) do. This is how few corporations can dictate everything and weed out community efforts or personal/political beliefs, including opposition to distasteful things those corporations do (read: sponsors of Linux Foundation, akin to bribes for board seats and influence). The baiting of the community is apparent (the means) and the end goals are rather monopolistic.

Techrights has long warned about those sorts of things, as did Alexandre Oliva who saw the evidence we had published for years already.

Manners are OK. Being polite is OK. But the enforcement (policing) isn't done by the community, it's done by oligarchy through people appointed by them (and controlled by paychecks).

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