As we’ve previously reported at Breitbart Tech, social justice warriors are currently engaged in an ongoing effort to spread their ideology in the open source community, a pillar of meritocracy and innovation that underpins many of the everyday tech products we take for granted.
Their current strategy involves the imposition of so-called “codes of conduct” on the multitude of hacking communities that make up the world of open source. Modelled on the “safe spaces” of university campuses, these politically correct guidelines allow for the excusion of coders who make SJWs “feel unsafe.” Needless to say, it doesn’t matter how talented the coders are – if they offend an SJW, they’re gone.
Their latest attempt is in the community of Ruby, one of the most popular programming languages. Earlier this week, Coraline Ada Ehmke, a self-described “intersectional technologist, transgender feminist, and code witch” and creator of the SJW-backed Contributor Code on GitHub made a post calling for its implementation in the Ruby community. Here’s an excerpt:
Our community prides itself on niceness. What a code of conduct does is define what we mean by nice. It states clearly that we value openness, courtesy, and compassion. That we care about and want contributions from people who may be different from us. That we pledge to respect all contributors regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, or other factors. And it makes it clear that we are prepared to follow through on these values with action when and if an incident arises.
Niceness! Who could object to that?
Yukihiro Matsumoto, the creator of Ruby, for one. In a response, Matsumoto (known as “Matz” in the Ruby community), said that while he agreed with the general principle of anti-harassment, he thought the SJWs were going too far. In particular, Matsumoto objected to the idea of banning coders from a project as a punishment, and instead advocated the deletion of offensive material, a much milder punishment.
Crucially, he also rejected the principle that coders could be punished for actions and speech that takes place outside the Ruby community. This rule is a holy grail for SJWs – coders living in fear of exile for the programming communities for anything they say, anywhere on the internet. This rule, already implemented on an alarming number of coding projects, gives SJWs a Stasi-like incentive to monitor coders’ activities across the entire web.
Matsumoto was hardly alone. Other Ruby contributors piled in to reject Ehmke’s latest attempt to spread political correctness further into the coding community.
“As a minority far oppressed more than Coraline, she needs to just drop it”, said one coder. “Well this is how we work” wrote another, in a parody of SJWs. “We see a healthy community with no conflict. We come along, propose our trojan horse (CoC). Divide and conquer the community. Once its in ruins, we move on.”
Overall, however, the discussion thread was dominated by SJWs demanding the implementation of the code. Like a student government poll, radicals are over-represented in the electorate. It seems, as Eric Raymond and Meredith Patterson warned, that the silent majority of coders have not yet mobilised. With the politicisation of coding at hand, however, perhaps it’s time for them to do so.
Follow Allum Bokhari @LibertarianBlue on Twitter, and download Milo Alert! for Android to be kept up to date on his latest articles.
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