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Conference Shutdowns & Bans

Safety governance that killed the conferences it was supposed to protect

• DerbyCon Shutdown (2019) Dave Kennedy shut down DerbyCon after 9 years. "We got too big." Fear of repercussion for enforcement decisions. The illmob blowup over disputed conduct reports was the last straw. A conference that couldn't enforce its own policies chose death over litigation risk. [TechTarget] [CyberScoop] [Vice]
• Chris Hadnagy — DEF CON Ban (2022) Banned from DEF CON with no public disclosure of allegations, no hearing, and no appeal. Hadnagy sued DEF CON for defamation. Case dismissed with prejudice — meaning he can never refile. The social engineering trainer got socially engineered out of the community he helped build. [TechTarget] [Fortune] [The Register] [→ full dossier]
• BSides Cleveland Fallout (2022) Hadnagy made a surprise appearance at BSides Cleveland after the DEF CON ban. The organizer who allowed it stepped down under pressure. Attending a conference while banned from a different conference was treated as a community violation. [IT Pro]

Linux Kernel Code of Conduct

The world's most important open source project adopted an outside activist's document

• Torvalds Steps Aside (September 2018) Linus Torvalds took a leave of absence to "get help on how to understand people's emotions." The same commit that announced his departure adopted Coraline Ada Ehmke's Contributor Covenant as the kernel's Code of Conduct, replacing the old "Code of Conflict." One commit. No community vote. [BetaNews] [It's FOSS]
• Kent Overstreet / bcachefs (2024) Overstreet, bcachefs maintainer, banned from the 6.13 kernel development cycle. Not for WHAT he argued — his filesystem patches — but for HOW he argued. The CoC was used to enforce communication norms, not prevent harassment. Technical disagreement reframed as conduct violation. [OSTechNix] [Phoronix] [LWN]
• ESR Honeytrap Claims (2015) Eric S. Raymond claimed in 2015 that a woman attempted to entrap a well-known open source developer into a compromising situation that could be used to force CoC adoption on a major project. ESR stated the attempt failed because the target was warned in advance. Unverified but consistent with the stakes. [The Register]

FOSS Governance Blowups

When the enforcement mechanism overrides the community it claims to serve

• Richard Stallman — FSF (2019/2021) Forced out of FSF in 2019 over comments on the Epstein/Minsky situation. Reinstated to the board in 2021. Open letter demanding removal: ~3,000 signatures. Counter-letter supporting him: ~2,000 signatures. FSF statement: "We missed his wisdom and experience." The founder of the free software movement was expelled from his own organization, then quietly brought back when the organization couldn't function without him. [Washington Post] [WP Tavern] [The Register]
• Brendan Eich — Mozilla (2014) CEO for 11 days. Resigned after a 2008 Prop 8 donation surfaced. Co-founded Mozilla. Created JavaScript. The donation was legal and predated his appointment by 6 years. OKCupid blocked Firefox users to apply pressure. A $1,000 political donation became a career-ending event for the creator of the language that runs the web. [Wikipedia] [TechCrunch]
• Larry Garfield — Drupal (2017) Drupal's Community Working Group investigated Garfield's private sex life (Gorean community involvement). Finding: NO Code of Conduct violation. Project lead Dries Buytaert expelled him anyway, overriding his own CoC committee. Garfield was removed for legal, consensual private conduct that the governance body explicitly cleared. [Inc.] [Reason] [The Register]
• ESR Banned from OSI (2020) Eric S. Raymond — co-founder of the Open Source Initiative — banned from its mailing lists under a Code of Conduct he never agreed to. No specific violation cited. The co-founder of the organization that defines "open source" was expelled from it by a governance document adopted after his tenure. [I-Programmer] [Linuxiac]
• NixOS Collapse (2024) The NixOS moderation team resigned en masse after the steering committee overrode their decisions. Eelco Dolstra, the project founder, stepped down. 24 maintainers left. The Lix fork was created. The governance mechanism designed to protect the community instead destroyed it. The moderators quit because the body above them captured enforcement. [LWN.net]
• NixOS — the Anduril Trigger & the Second Walkout (2024–2025) The 2024 crisis had a political trigger the founder's removal is often told without. NixCon dropped the defense firm Anduril as a sponsor after contributors objected to its military work, and the open letter demanding Eelco Dolstra's resignation counted his push to keep Anduril among its grievances. Anduril founder Palmer Luckey publicly called the sponsor removal "an outrageous example of censorship." Dolstra stepped down from the NixOS Foundation board weeks later; the code left in the Lix and Auxolotl forks. The ratchet clicked again in September 2025, when five of seven moderators resigned "in protest of the Steering Committee's ongoing pattern of attempting to interfere with moderation team operation, membership and specific moderation decisions." [LWN: leadership crisis] [LWN: Dolstra steps down] [Palmer Luckey] [NixOS Discourse, 2025]
• GNOME Foundation — Short Tenures & a "Weaponized" CoC (2024–2026) GNOME cycled two executive directors in two years — Steven Deobald stepped down after roughly four months in 2025. Separately, the Foundation removed elected board member Sonny Piers "for cause" in a closed May 2024 vote it did not disclose for two months. GNOME contributor Andy Holmes wrote that "large parts of the community do not trust our CoC structure because they feel it can be weaponized as part of internal power struggles." The board gave its own account of the removal; the two versions are on the record and disagree. [The Register] [LWN] [GNOME board notice] [Andy Holmes]
• Debian Project Leader — Single-Candidate Election (2026) Debian's 2026 Project Leader election listed one candidate. Sruthi Chandran ran unopposed and won, 289 votes to 50 for "None of the above." Her platform makes leadership demographics an explicit plank: she writes that she will "bring up the topic of diversity for discussion every election till we have a non-(cis)male DPL." A project of thousands of developers offered its voters a choice between one person and nobody. [Platform] [Vote record] [Bits from Debian]
• Arch Linux — XLibre Wiki Page Deleted under CoC (2026) Arch Linux deleted its wiki page for XLibre — a fork of the X.Org server — on the ground that the fork's own documentation breached the Arch Code of Conduct's requirement to respect other FOSS projects, citing XLibre website language that called X.Org contributors "toxic elements" and "moles from BigTech." Critics called the removal censorship; Arch pointed to its rule against maligning other projects. A packaging wiki reached for a conduct clause to erase documentation of software that still builds and runs. [OSTechNix] [Arch CoC]

License Wars

When open source licenses became political weapons

• Lerna / ICE Ban (2018) Lerna maintainer added a clause to the MIT license banning 16 companies working with ICE. The modification violated both the OSI Open Source Definition and the FSF Free Software Definition. Reversed within days after community backlash. The attempt to weaponize a permissive license for political enforcement failed — but the idea didn't die. [Vice] [Changelog]
• Hippocratic License / Ethical Source Coraline Ada Ehmke (author of the Contributor Covenant) created the Hippocratic License, restricting software use to activities consistent with the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Violates both the OSI and FSF definitions of free/open-source software. ESR called the Ethical Source movement "identity politics and vulgar Marxism." The license that claims to prevent harm defines harm according to its author. [firstdonoharm.dev] [It's FOSS]
• Post-Meritocracy Manifesto "Meritocracy mainly benefits those with privilege." Also authored by Ehmke. The document argues that evaluating contributions on technical merit is itself a form of discrimination. Signed by contributors to multiple major open source projects. The logical conclusion of governance capture: the standard by which code is judged is itself declared oppressive. [postmeritocracy.org]

Speaker Targeting

When the safety infrastructure targets the people it claims to protect

• Kathy Sierra (2007/2014) Received death threats, was doxed, and driven offline in 2007 after blogging about Java programming. Returned in 2014. Driven offline again by the same harasser (Andrew "weev" Auernheimer). The safety infrastructure that emerged after 2007 — codes of conduct, reporting mechanisms, conference policies — did nothing to prevent the same attack from succeeding a second time against the same person. [Wikipedia] [Salon] [Daily Dot]
• Georgia Weidman on DerbyCon Security researcher who stated that speaking at DerbyCon was "more detrimental to her career" than fighting off a physical attacker. The conference safety apparatus created a situation where the act of participating was itself a professional risk. [CyberScoop]

The Architects

The ratchet has authors — the instruments were written, adopted, and aimed by named people. Capture is vandalism.

• Coraline Ada Ehmke — the Contributor Covenant One author, three instruments. Ehmke wrote the Contributor Covenant — the code of conduct the Linux kernel adopted in a single commit in September 2018, and the template adopted by thousands of projects since. She also authored the Hippocratic License, which restricts who may use the software (conflicting with both the OSI Open Source Definition and the FSF Free Software Definition), and the Post-Meritocracy Manifesto, which holds that judging contributions on technical merit is itself a form of discrimination. Her stated aim is safer, more inclusive communities. The documented outcome, project after project on this page, is that the covenant and the code-of-conduct model it standardized became the lever by which founders and maintainers were removed from the work they built — Overstreet for tone, ESR from the OSI he co-founded, Garfield after his own committee cleared him. Write the rules that get adopted everywhere you didn't build, then watch them used to evict the builders. That is not governance. It is vandalism with a style guide. [Contributor Covenant] [Hippocratic License] [Post-Meritocracy Manifesto] [Linux adoption]

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The Pattern

The ratchet clicks in one direction

• The Ratchet Mechanism A Code of Conduct is adopted after an incident. It is never rolled back. Its scope expands from safety to communication norms to political compliance. It gets used for non-safety enforcement (Overstreet banned for tone; Garfield expelled after being cleared; ESR expelled under rules he never agreed to). The community fractures (NixOS lost its moderation team, 24 maintainers, and forked; DerbyCon died; FSF split into dueling petition camps). The enforcement mechanism survives. The community it was supposed to protect doesn't. This is not a bug. It is the documented outcome of every case on this page.