Far more is being made of this situation than seems merited by the facts. That it's easy to do I recognize, but that ease is no excuse.
This would present a problem, except the Linux governance model doesn't actually confer power to a person or persons to exclude contributors from the kernel. Linus and his underling maintainers are still individually free to accept or reject patches from anyone. CoC complaints would be handled by the Tech Advisory Board, but they can't issue orders or blacklists to maintainers.
Funny thing is, I suspect that this is by design, to make Linux development resistant to covert or open hostile action from the likes of Microsoft.
Pending a drastic change in the process, you can all keep calm and carry on using Linux.
I'm opposed to racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia too, but damnit, if I'm a maintainer and Alex Jones has a good patch, I'm going to clip out the attached verbiage about Hillary Clinton being a literal demon and roll the patch into my next rc. I'd be doing the project a disservice not to.
The OED has entries that were submitted by an insane murderer from the asylum (look up William Chester Minor).
eta: As it happens, I'd take Alex Jones's patch, too. But I would require it be resubmitted anonymously, and without inflammatory verbiage. If not so resubmitted, I would not merge it. Yes, it does the project a disservice to reject good code. But software, like every made thing in the world, is made by people. It is not unreasonable for me to look at the sort of people who attend upon Alex Jones, and then at the sort of people who find his presence so distasteful that they will not associate themselves with anything he's touched however fleetingly, and decide which sort of people I prefer to include, by my actions, in my pool of potential contributors. If the latter group seems to me to be more likely to contribute good code, then I'm not going to put them off by having Alex Jones on my contributor list. If that costs the project a good patch, then that cost is still less than the other - if I've evaluated correctly, and if the patch has merit, someone not so divisive will submit another like it before very long.
Of course, most people don't give a damn either way, and mainly just want to do the work they're doing and land their changes with a minimum of fuss. Which is more or less the point that I'm trying to make here: this is neither an attempt to install a blood estrogen titer in the code review process for Linux kernel contributions, nor to ensure that Linux kernel development is a clubhouse admitting only pale penis-bearing people of power. Everyone attempting to make a substantive contribution, of whatever sort, to the process, is doing so in good faith, out of a genuine belief that their contribution will improve the quality of the result. But I appreciate that's hard to keep sight of, when Twitter and ESR and /g/ join in, in their inimitable fashion to add only heat and no light.
These people are not acting in love. They are acting in hate trying to protect those they love. It is shameful. It is how wars start.
"The CoC is a political document" is a reasonable statement from someone who considers that everything is political. I disagree, and I think a lot of risks attend upon such consideration which Ms. Ehmke and the movement of which she's a part too often fail to recognize. But, disagree though I may with their rationale, at least they have a rationale. Their opposition seems primarily to rely on viciousness.
Forced to weigh people who I think are wrong about some things on the one side, and on the other people who plumb the depths of hatred and vileness without the slightest apparent scruple, I hope I may be forgiven for deciding that my sympathies belong with the former.
The hell of it is, there are worthwhile counterpoints to be made, and people trying to make them. But there's no hearing them through all the garbage, and until we figure out how that changes, I don't see any real prospect of a stable modus vivendi.
If you were conspiracy-minded about it, it almost seems like the SHITCOCK posters are agents for the other side, in order to discredit the opposition. (It's happened. Look up Meg Lanker-Simons, a standard issue SJW stupid enough to get caught sexually harassing herself.)
[0] https://twitter.com/coralineada/status/1029161113848557569?l...
Note that she went on this tirade last month.
Where have I given Ms. Ehmke a free pass? Where has anyone?
So Ms. Ehmke's only regret in Opalgate is that she tipped her hand too much too soon, and wasn't vague and concern-trolly enough to convince the Opal project maintainers to evict the allegedly transphobic contributor seemingly of their own accord.
Part of the problem people have with the Contributor Covenant is that while there isn't any anti-meritocracy language in the document itself, the rationale for the document cites "dogmatic insistence on meritocratic principles of governance" as a problem that must be corrected. It's right there on https://contributor-covenant.org. Previous versions of this document made reference to "the pervasive cult of meritocracy", but again, that was tipping her hand too much so she dialed it back some. Given that meritocracy is the bedrock of open source development principles, chafing at the adoption of a document whose stated purpose is to combat meritocracy is to be expected. Her goal is to make her values open source values, and in the absence of an opportunity to collect scalps, she will look for leverage to twist arms. The strategy is to tone down the language of her CoC and related documents until it's palatable enough to get an in, and then put the screws to the community once they've pledged to uphold her code.
Ever play Pandemic? A winning strategy is to start with benign symptoms like sniffles and a sneeze or cough, and then, only once everybody is sick (including those paranoid holdouts in Madagascar), crank up the nausea, vomiting, internal bleeding and heart failure sliders.
As it happens, the critique of meritocracy is one of the claims I don’t particularly buy. One of many; sympathetic as I am to most progressive goals, I think the movement’s choice of methods is almost maximally foolish. But, leaving aside the question of good faith on which I doubt we will agree, I think you ascribe a lot more power to the pro-CoC faction than that faction is in truth able to command.
In my original post, I said the CoC would be a problem, but the structure of Linux governance appears to be resilient to bad-faith complaints for the time being -- again, likely to prevent entryism from the likes of Microsoft in the 90s, when the threat of infiltration of the process by saboteurs was arguably more real.