The Linux Kernel Code Of Conduct Committee Releases Transparency Report
Five incidents in fifteen months: offenders being “educated”
The Linux Kernel developers were working with a “Code of Conflict” for many years, when, in September 2018, Linus Torvalds released Linux 4.19-rc4 and announced:
[…] This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of
not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been
both unprofessional and uncalled for. Especially at times when I made
it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me.
I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry. […]
The Linux Kernel mailing list receives thousands of messages each month. If you read through the commits and also the emails by Torvalds, you’ll see that, indeed, some people can be pretty harsh.
And because it’s not okay to insult developers and maintainers, and because the “Code of Conflict” is not explicit enough to keep bad agents at bay, Linus Torvalds agreed to adopting a real Code of Conduct for the Linux Kernel, based on the popular Contributor Covenant (v1.4). The corresponding changelog can be found here.
Now, after roughly 15 months, arriving in dribs and drabs, the first investigation reports concerned with inappropriate…
