Comment by Fordec
4 years ago
In Ireland there was a referendum to repeal the ban on abortion referendum there was very heated arguments, bot twitter accounts and general toxicity. For the sake of peoples sanity, there was a "Repeal Shield" implemented that blocked bad faith actors.
This news makes me wish to implement my own block on the same contributors to any open source I'm involved with. At the end of the day, their ethics is their ethics. Those ethics are not Linux specific, it was just the high profile target in this instance. I would totally subscribe to or link to a group sourced file similar to a README.md or CONTRIBUTORS.md (CODERS_NON_GRATA.md?) that pulled such things.
I think that is a sensible way to deal with this problem. The linux community is based on trust (as are a lot of other very successful communities), and ideally we trust until we have reason not to. But at that point we do need to record who we don't trust. It is the same in academia and sports.
The tech community, especially in sub-niches is far smaller than people think it is. It's easy to feel like it's a sea of tech to some when it's all behind a screen. But reputation is a powerful thing in both directions.
There is also a more nuclear option which I'm specifically not advocating for quite yet here but I will note none the less;
We're starting to see in discourse regarding companies co-opting open source projects for their own profit (cough Amazon) and how license agreements limit them more than regular contributors. That has come about, at the core of it, also because of a demonstrated trend of bad faith but also combined with a larger surface area contact with society. I could foresee a potential future trend where individuals who also act in bad faith are excluded from use of open source projects through their licenses. Imagine if the license for some core infrastructure tech like a networking library or the Linux kernel banned "Joe Blackhat" from using python for professional use. Now he still could, but in reputable companies, particularly larger ones with a legal department that person would be more of a liability than they are worth. There can be potentially huge professional consequences of a type that do not currently exist really in the industry.