Code of Conduct: Those Ejected should rescind their license grant.

From: unconditionedwitness
Date: Wed Sep 19 2018 - 23:50:09 EST


The grant is not supported by consideration.
It dispenses only largess, and asks for no recompense.
It is a bare license.
Thus it can be revoked by the grantor at any time.
His act of grace bestowed, and his act of propriety can rescind.

The free software world is held up muchly by a gentleman's agreement.
The agreement is that we shall take mutually beneficial actions, vis a vis the field of software engineering, to increase the net freedom available to all.

It is not so much held up by law, regardless of what the lay programmers and users of programmers would imagine to believe.

To turn one's contributions around as a weapon against the contributor:
to tell him he must not say this or that, he must not act this or that way,
lest he be barred from his hobby; let he be barred from freely giving
dispensation, is an abhorrent abuse of his magnanimity

Now this gentleman's agreement is being, or has been shattered.
You will find that the law has no supports to bind him;
but many to fell the ungrateful who saw themselves the inviolate annuitants of his altruism.

Bare licenses are revocable at will. They always have been.
Those who are thrown out of the "Linux Kernel Community" in punishment for not obeying this CoC, who's past contributions count for nothing in the face of those who will throughout the ages to control men in all things; for not "behaving properly" here or there, within their public or private life; for not bending the knee to the Anglo-American religion, should absolutely recind the grant they have dispensed.
They are well within their rights to do so, and hostile action must be met with the same and worse in response.