OpalGate incident

On June 18 2015, a self-identified OpalRB core contributor made transphobic comments on Twitter. In response, Coraline Ada Ehmke opened issue 941 calling for clarification of the project maintainers' stance on the issue and its possible effect on future contributors.

The response from other project maintainers was decidedly negative and included personal attacks against Coraline. What followed was an argument about whether a maintainer's publicly stated opinions had a bearing on the community around the project. The primary representative of the project in this discussion, who goes by the Github handle meh , went on to state that he would knowingly and gladly accept working with a child molestor or cross-burning racist as long as their contributed code was good. It was later revealed that meh has created a number of Github projects with homophobic, sexist, and otherwise problematic names.

The resulting pile-on of responses ranged from those supportive of Coraline's case (in a decided minority) and those who were not. The latter camp was bolstered by sock-puppet accounts once the issue hit Hacker News, 4chan, and gamergate sites. Many sexist, homophobic, and transphobic comments were made over the course of the day, with the issue hitting 374 comments from 67 participants before finally being locked by project owner Adam Beynon.

A separate issue was opened calling for the project to adopt a Code of Conduct. This issue also attracted the vitriol and ire of a large number of people, who continued making very negative and personal comments (436 comments from 60 participants).

The project owner closed the second issue and adopted version 1.0 of the Contributor Covenant OSS code of conduct. He had this to say in the final comment:

Over the last few days, a number of people in this conversation have taken the issue in hand and shown that discrimination against other individuals in our industry is, quite frankly, alarming. The tech/development/computer industry has a long and troubled history of discrimination against various groups of individuals which, judging by some of the comments in this and other threads, shows no sign of improving anytime soon.

To the people who contributed comments and messages looking to improve our community: thank you.

This whole matter could have been sorted in a peaceful manner; instead the problems in our community are not just present inside Opal, they are still present within the whole developer community.