Kent Overstreet, the developer of the Bcachefs file system, stated that the future of his developed file system in the kernel is in question due to actions taken by the committee responsible for enforcing the code of conduct in the developer community (CoC Committee). Linus Torvalds refused to accept another set of patches for Bcachefs into the 6.13 kernel branch, citing complaints from the CoC committee.
A few days prior, an amendment was made to the documents governing activities related to the code of conduct, introducing the possibility of blocking a developer in case of a breach of the code and disagreement to resolve the conflict according to the scenario proposed by the CoC committee. In case of refusal to issue a public apology, the new version of the rules introduced the ability to impose a 'ban' that temporarily suspends the acceptance of patches and pull requests, as well as excludes the violator from community discussions by blocking access to mailing lists and kernel.org services.
The changes to the code of conduct were agreed upon by Linus Torvalds, Greg Kroah-Hartman (responsible for stable kernel branches), Miguel Oheda (Rust-for-Linux), Dave Hansen (maintainer of the mm subsystem from Intel), Jonathan Corbet (LWN), Steven Rostedt (Red Hat), Dan Williams (Intel), Theodore Ts'o (ext4), and Konstantin Ryabtsev (administrator of Kernel.org). The blocking can occur for a period not exceeding the development cycle of a new kernel branch (about 2 months). As a condition for lifting the ban, the CoC committee may require the violator to issue a public apology. The decision to impose a ban is made by the CoC committee with the agreement of 2/3 of voting participants.
The blocking of Kent Overstreet is related to the offensive remark 'Get your head examined. And get the fuck out of here with this shit.' made during a discussion with Michal Hocko, one of the developers of the kernel memory management system. The insult was noted by CoC committee members who requested a public apology, to which Kent responded with a refusal, considering it unacceptable to raise personal matters in public and stating that he and Michal had already resolved the issue privately. Kent also mentioned the unpleasant insinuations referring to the need to support the community's image, but in Kent's opinion, they were motivated by a desire to maintain corporate participation in the project.
Source: linux.org.ru
