GNOME ponders its code of conduct

When I went to the Community Leadership Summit, I fell into a
conversation with Kirrily Robert, Dave Neary and several others about the
events at GCDS. Bruce joined us, at which point it became impossible for
anyone else to manage to complete a sentence without being interrupted.

Bruce explained to us—at us, actually—at some significant length, that Mr.
Stallman has undiagnosed Asperger's Syndrome, that he was "incapable of
apologizing", and that the order-of-magnitude lower level of participation
by women in community-based software development versus proprietary
wasn't indicative of any sort of a problem at all.

These are pretty much the same statements he made here on LWN when
the discussion here turned to Stallman's GCDS keynote. They earned him
some significant criticism here, and they served him no better at the
Leadership Summit.

Since the conversation had turned at that point into a lecture from Bruce,
and one which was becoming increasingly unrewarding, I—along with
Kirrily, Dave and several of the others who had been in conversation—gave
up and left the room to seek more worthwhile pursuits. No one "ran", no
one was "in tears".

If I'm passionate about attempting to point out and address the problems
that I see in our community, like sexism, like attempts at imposed "group
think", I don't apologize for that. It's unfortunate that—rather than
responding to the issues themselves—others are as passionate in
"attacking the messenger" to shame and harass those who do see these
things as problems into silence and sweep such issues under the rug.