Political Censorship on GitHub
I never expected this blog to go political but the situation became outrageous
GitHub deplatforms Code of Merit Author Roberto Rosario
Rosario’s account had been in a sort of limited state for years which didn’t allow people to follow him on GitHub. According to sources close to GitHub, the platform had enough but had to wait until the Linux Kernel adoption of a code of conduct story died down to take down the Code of Merit repository. Terms of service violations were cited as the reason to take down the repositories and the account. In addition to the Code of Merit the repositories and organizations for Awesome Django and Mayan EDMS were taken down too. In total these three projects alone had more than 11,000 stars and 3,000 forks. Awesome Django and Mayan EDMS are two of the most influential and well known Django projects and second in popularity to Django itself. GitHub censorship is affecting thousands of developers that rely on Awesome Django for their work.
Only a copy of Awesome Django survives in the service named GitLab. As can be seen this is the 5th most popular repository in the entire site, and ranks higher than even some of GitLab’s own products: https://gitlab.com/explore/projects/starred
GitHub joins the Python Software Foundation, the Django Software Foundation and the International Games Developer Association in their effort to silence Rosario and his movement against code of conducts in free open source projects. All three organizations had already removed or force Rosario to resign from positions in their organizations and have blacklisted him from their events.
Rosario’s last appearance at a Django/Python event was in 2016 for the talk about his free open source heart monitoring system using Arduino and Django. At the beginning of the talk he confirms that talk will be his last public appearance at a Django/Python event, either as speaker or audience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rubzEAojf-k
It’s really scary how silent it went. It was almost 2 months ago and I only heard it now. Also code-of-merit.org seems to be hacked.
And we cannot even blame it on recent Microsoft ownership because of the earlier incident: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15087164 It’s unknown why they didn’t succeed first time but apparently now Rosario will stay removed
Rosario is known as a creator of the Code of Merit, a pure meritocracy based Code of Conduct, that was hosted on code-of-merit.org before it was hacked. The likely reason for its creation was a SJW provocation in Awesome Django: