Concerning our new Code of Conduct...

[Randi Harper]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2015 at 1:45 AM, Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des at des.no> wrote:

> Johannes Jost Meixner <johannes at meixner.dk> writes:
> > I - as a male - feel not only not tolerated, but also discriminated
> > against,
>
> There are approximately 400 active committers, and not even five of
> those are women.  How the *hell* can you claim to be discriminated
> against when you are part of a 99% majority?
>

It's all tacky to have this on the mailing list, and it's all part of his
campaign for what he thinks is going to work, because he knows I was asked
by core to keep things quiet. He's continuing to target and harass women,
however, myself included. This will be my single post on the matter on this
mailing list, because this is not the right place to air FreeBSD's dirty
laundry, despite him repeatedly trying.

A few days ago, a tweet was brought to the attention of my org. It was some
MRA/PUA/super racist guy, although I hadn't heard of him before that night.
He had posted a picture of a black boy child getting raped along with a
snarky statement. We focus more on dev policies and mitigation techniques.
This was an extreme case, however. We responded, and this person's account
was quickly suspended, as was one of his friends, who commented "boys will
be boys". This guy was furious and started directing a stream of vitriol at
me from his blog, to which Johannes decided to contribute because he's made
it his mission to seek out abusive people and drive them to further
harassment. This is who he's siding with. This is what he's contributing.

The "male tears" comment wasn't even in relation to Johannes, but instead a
reddit thread, which he decided to crop out of the images. In this thread,
several people from GamerGate and people outside the project had started
posting about SJWs and bigotry before it was eventually moderated by
cperciva at . However, he's very determined to find fault in anything I say
and find a way to direct it at himself. He's annoying, and he's been
threatening me and constantly trying to stir up a mob, with little success.
Shockingly, my software works at blocking out the mobs. Weird, huh?

Maybe if I could spend less time writing software to mitigate harassment, I
could spend time contributing to FreeBSD again. Unfortunately, internet
culture is what it is, and it takes time to change, one company or open
source project at a time. I wish I could say that I'm shocked that people
would object to a Code of Conduct as Johannes did several times - very
loudly - but I'm really not. People dislike change, especially cultural
change that challenges their social position. It's understandable. However,
women make up less than 2% of open source developers. FreeBSD falls below
the average. If the project wants to change that, the environment needs to
be made more welcoming to women. Right now, it's not, which is made very
clear by this mailing list discussion.