Amy Palamountain. GitHub tried to stop her image appearing in this article. Why would she want her picture not to appear by her words? This image is derived from a photo released under CC-BY 2.0 by her fiancé Michael Holman (who goes by Martin Holman also). The license requires I credit him (awkward!) and link to the license – here. He has changed the licensing since then but the grant of the CC-BY 2.0 is irrevocable. Archive linked to show the license granted when I downloaded it – here .
Note – no private details are revealed in this article. All contact details have been put pro-actively and prominently into the public domain by their owners.
As a postgraduate law student who has been praised in Parliament for his pro-bono equalities work, and was asked to give evidence to the House of Lords Committee on the Mental Capacity Act 2005, I am frequently asked questions about equalities law. I am loathe to condemn even people whom I disagree with because of the complex and difficult issues they face.
Nonetheless several people this week have asked me for my legal opinion on the TODO Group ‘Open Code of Conduct’ (archive here) and I do feel some excoriation is in order. The TODO Group is a group of companies who “want to collaborate on practices, tools and other ways to run successful and effective open source projects”. They have recently published a Code of Conduct.
The issue that has attracted controversy is the ‘definition of harassment’ written by Github employee Amy Palamoutain. Much of this is unobjectionable, aside from prolixity. For example, the following are examples of behaviour that is prohibited –
“•Threats of violence, both physical and psychological
[…]
•Deliberate intimidation
•Stalking or following”
However, one passage has caused great offense. It says this –
“[…] We will not act on complaints regarding:
• ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’”
