Linux CoC Announces Decision Wrt Kent Overstreet (Bcachefs)

What he said wasn&#x27;t even nearly as bad as what I&#x27;ve seen Linus say in other threads over the years. Is &#x2F; was Linus Torvalds ever subject to a &quot;tribunal&quot; like Kent just was?<p>In the end, it&#x27;s the users that end up suffering. The guy (Hocko) kept making mistake after mistake and Kent struggled to get him to do anything remotely net positive with regard to the issues in that original thread.<p>I&#x27;m not arguing that what Kent did was right or wrong, but I would be curious to hear what other ways people work with remote developers who are awful, especially when they work for other companies. You can&#x27;t just fire them, so I understand the frustration here.

I tried reading the history here. I confess the emails signed &quot;on behalf of the committee&quot; hit with a bad taste.<p>In particular, if the goal is to promote more discussion and openness between contributors, having a &quot;committee&quot; involved feels very counter productive. As does demanding an apology.<p>By all means, empower folks to call others out as rude. Publicly call out what you see as transgressions. But don&#x27;t do so with a shield of, &quot;I&#x27;m speaking for the committee.&quot;

Not meaning to support him, but for Kent’s perspective:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;trouble-in-116412665" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.patreon.com&#x2F;posts&#x2F;trouble-in-116412665</a><p>I don&#x27;t think what Kent did was right, but I&#x27;m also not sure this kind of heavy-handed approach by the CoC team is good, either. The forced public apology sounds a bit like a kindergarten teacher forcing two kids to shake hands after a fight.<p>On my part, I just hope that Linux will get a real competitor to ZFS.

I&#x27;ve been an on and off contributor of FLOSS software for a long time. Sometimes I sent some unfinished patches and got responses like &#x27; I don&#x27;t think you know what you&#x27;re doing&#x27; and &#x27;turn on brain&#x27;.<p>At the time I considered those developers were right and didn&#x27;t complain. It made more careful before sending patches and commenting. But it also affected my willing to contribute with the project. I also consider that, although those devs were right, they could have expressed themselves more cordially. I don&#x27;t think being that rude improves anything.<p>I do support the CoC committee decision and hope more projects had one.

Being technically wrong and unproductive during a technical argument should not warrant being insulted.<p>But It would surely suffice to prevent a <i>demand</i> for a public apology from the exasperated party who was on the right side of the argument ; or at least not before the insulted party having issued an apology for being wrong and uncooperative in the first place.<p>When CoC have the effect of punishing volunteer work for not being nice&#x2F;polite&#x2F;SFW during an argument, regardless of who was technically right, this is putting form over substance.<p>This is a stance that seems balanced toward corporate friendliness. But I believe that the kernel benefits more from being a community&#x2F;volunteer oriented project than pandering to corporate culture of niceness over anything else.<p>Losing BcacheFS over this would be a shame.

So &quot;CoC committee&quot; recommends refusing pull requests because their author was rude when arguing technical issue with someone who appears to be incompetent? Am I getting this right?

Good code is not written in a democratic way. Seems like Hocko was wearing Kent down with his arguments on what was a very bad idea in the first place.<p>I agree the last sentence by Kent was not needed, but I can totally understand his frustration.<p>I think it’s a loss for the users at the end on the day.

My reading of it is that they both were being jerks. In particular, the whole &quot;I supported my argument with references, but it&#x27;s YOUR job to locate those arguments&quot; never sits well with me.<p>Reminds me a bit of this time I had <i>FINALLY</i> gotten someone to volunteer to help out with maintenance, and his first action was met with someone being a real jerk. I called them out on it and they started attacking me. I never replied, but I did get an &quot;appology&quot; from them: [paraphrased] &quot;I&#x27;m sooo sorry... That I sent that from my work address. Please don&#x27;t get me fired, I need this job.&quot;

Oh, well. I tried to side with Kent but there is no way. His reply sounds like someone thinking about themselves as super-powerful just to have their super-powers stripped. Schadenfreude

I am very much on the observer&#x2F;user side of FLOSS, but the way Codes of Conduct have been applied since their widespread adoption have seen a lot of very productive developers ostracized for their emotionally unregulated methods of communications. This general regard for ceremony and civility above anything else leads to these NKVD-like committees policing code access where the quality of work delivered is considered only collaterally, if at all.<p>I am worried that the trend these code of conduct implementations set in the past few years optimize for a future where development environments will be optimized for the prosperity of low-productivity, low-intelligence, high-vulnerability and highly-provocative individuals. This idea that the tone of communication may not be coupled in any way to the frustration of the correspondent is in my opinion extremely misanthropic and allows intense psychological abuse through condescension and&#x2F;or playing dumb.

I suggest reading the whole mail thread before judging. The CoC decision was the last resort.

I really want to migrate my zfs pool to bcachefs so I can finally follow the latest version of fedora from day one, but this crap is making me doubt it’s a good move…

Why didn&#x27;t they block his access to the mailing list instead?<p>It&#x27;s not his code that people felt hurt by, was it?

In this conflict, there can only be losers. :-(

Linux is officially dead. This nonsense should not happen. Now users will suffer from bugs, because of some CoC nonsense.

They really need to just kick him out of tree. Quit playing games with him and put bcachefs out of tree where it belongs.

Tbh the longer this goes on the worse it makes the kernel and Kent look. Coc drama is petty but this is the latest in months worth of problems coming out of bcachefs. Were currently at the point of &quot;get better&quot; and the next action should be &quot;get out&quot;. There <i>is</i> a place for bcachefs in the kernel, it&#x27;s just out of tree.