Linux CoC Announces Decision Following Recent Bcachefs Drama

Following the recent messaging from Bcachefs lead developer Kent Oversteet that Bcachefs changes for Linux 6.13 were rejected on the basis of his Code of Conduct, the Linux CoC committee has now formally announced their decision.

The Linux kernel’s Code of Conduct Committee wrote today on the public Linux Kernel Mailing List:

Kent,

The Code of Conduct Committee received reports about your conduct in this email discussion.

Link to email where the violation took place:

https://lore.kernel.org/citv2v6f33hoidq75xd2spaqxf7nl5wbmmzma4wgmrwpoqidhj@k453tmq7vdrk

Our community works on trust and respect and has agreed to abide by the Code of Conduct:

Reference: https://docs.kernel.org/process/code-of-conduct.html

The code of Conduct Committee has determined that your written abuse of another community member required action on your part to repair the damage to the individual and the community. You took insufficient action to restore the community’s faith in having otherwise productive technical discussions without the fear of personal attacks.

Following the Code of Conduct Interpretation process the TAB has approved has approved the following recommendation:

— Restrict Kent Overstreet’s participation in the kernel development process during the Linux 6.13 kernel development cycle.

– Scope: Decline all pull requests from Kent Overstreet during the Linux 6.13 kernel development cycle.

Therefore it looks like no pull requests from Bcachefs lead developer Kent Overstreet will be honored for the current Linux 6.13 cycle… It stops short of ejecting Bcachefs from the mainline kernel or other actions, but remains to be seen definitively if his pull requests will then be honored for Linux 6.14+ or any other caveats.

The cited message of the violation can be read here that led to this Code of Conduct infraction.

Kent has already responded to the CoC committee message and acknowledges the impact along with somewhat of a brief apology to “things getting this heated the other day” followed by additional commentary.

So for Linux 6.13 at least, no pull requests from Kent look like they’ll be going through.