Where is this happening? The CoM says it can't happen on the project mailing list, or the project forum, or the project issues page ... Doing it on Twitter? Not within the project and fair game.
Also, why is "fair game" a concept that applies to whether misbehavior can be challenged and not to the misbehavior itself? If the contributor tweets, "Ew, all these incompetent purples keep making trash PRs," why should that itself not be considered outside the bounds of "fair game"?
People are free to express their dislike of the Greens or Purples on Twitter. And they'll catch the fallout on Twitter. Why should these conversations pollute the project documentation?
If the lead maintainer shows its true colors and refuses to become a decent human being, people will leave the project. If the project is truly important, someone will fork it and create a new project with a new community.
Personally (and selfishly), it comes down to this: years later, when I'm looking for a solution to a problem and $SEARCH_ENGINE returns an email thread, I don't want to sift through dozens of messages about the drama between the Greens and the Purples to find exactly the single line of script that solves my problem.
"Also, why is "fair game" a concept that applies..." I don't understand. Either you've misread me, or you're bringing in topics that I didn't address so I don't know what this is about.
What do you think gives you the right to demand inclusion?
It would require them to specifically search for information about the author, which I can’t imagine anyone doing. That, unlike posting something on twitter, would indeed be indecent.
I’ve seen many instances of project contributors being flamed because of their “bad” behavior on twitter or elsewhere, but have not seen anyone accused not judging a specific contribution based on its merit.
but to get to your point: on a merit based system every reason to decline a contribution should be based on the contribution, not on the contributer. everyone should be able to validate those reasons. if you got a sexist and he declines your contribution with a sexist reason that should lead to consequences for him. thats what your quoted line entails. the high ranking member violated it because he took your sex/gender into account when considiering your contribution. did he decline with racist remarks? he violated it again because he took your race into account. for me that would be a far better system because it does not put the control in the hands of the few maintainers, it puts the control in the hands of the whole community.
> Is [...] telling [...] women that they're shrill and need to tone it down and be less emotional, a sexist remark?
if it targets all women i would say yes. if its in a discussion and alice IS too emotional and shrill i would say no (but its badly phrased).
everyone should be able to take a step back from a discussion and reflect. am i too emotional? did i maybe take a wrong turn? dont take everything personal. sometimes text does sound angry and agressive, but wasn't meant to be. people are not good at communication. allow some room for misinterpretation.
Why not just replace the code with "No one can possibly behave poorly for the project, just believe everyone" and be done with it? Seems equally effective.
Then we can avoid having an HR department for every open source project.
These are different goals, and the former is sufficient if you don't necessarily want a community (e.g. it's a corporate code drop) or you see some reason why people will produce patches regardless. But it's the wrong priority for major open-source projects created by decentralized, often volunteer teams. Those projects need active bug reporting, design review, thinking about future goals, feedback on existing designs, shared visions, etc. A process that simply lets you accept correct patches, should they somehow show up, won't get you there.
This is the process that Rust core team member Aaron Turon calls "pluralism and positive-sum thinking" https://aturon.github.io/2018/06/02/listening-part-2/ , and former Linux kernel contributor Valerie Aurora calls, interestingly, "feminist" https://blog.valerieaurora.org/2014/10/03/operating-systems-... . But whatever you call it, it's very different from a process that just answers "is this patch being reviewed with sound reasoning." Such a process would have soundly rejected v1 of the patches implementing all the things requested in those articles and likely discouraged contributors (again, for sound reasons, not out of bigotry), and not produced technically better and more meritorious work.
It certainly does not sound to me like this Code of Merit is specifically for supporting sexism like you imply here. It is just specifically against the Idea that Merit or Meritocracy is "dead" which is a common view of those pushing for the usual Code of Conduct stuff.
This sounds good, but a clause like this can easily backfire. What happens if a high ranking member is (whether they know it or not) a bigot or sexist? Anytime someone tries to challenge them calling out their behavior, they're likely to point to this Code and say "stop making this about gender/race as that violates the code of merit". They can use the very rules meant to stop them as a weapon to silence those who would criticize.
The document presumes good intentions by all those participating. Good intentions don't work- mechanisms do. I see no mechanisms here.