> Who has been lynched because of a Contributor Covenant, or other similar open-source code of conduct?

The scope of the Contributor Covenant was widened in an attempt to l̶y̶n̶c̶h̶ harass and ban Elia Schito for an opinion he had expressed on his personal twitter[1].

Because Elia's twitter conversation wasn't connected with the project (beyond the project being listed in his bio), a new clause needed to be added to the Contributor Covenant in order to get him. To get it in, the new clause was presented to the Opal project as a pull request labelled "Update Contributor Covenant to include ethnicity"[2].

The Opal project noticed the extra change and guessed its real intent (that intent - needing it to go after Elia - was confirmed later by people arguing for the change[3]), so Opal edited that clause before accepting the change, but everybody else using a Contributor Covenant now has it, including Linux. (The Linux one has customized enforcement/judgement guidelines, so in its case the presence of the "Elia clause" might be less easily weaponizable by the twitter mobs it was written for)

The attack on Elia was instigated by the creator of the Contributor Covenant[4], who was unrelated to the Opal project but tagged in via twitter - it turned out this kind of drama was the Covenant's purpose.

After watching that I no longer see codes of conduct as community measures written in good faith. It hasn't just been the Contributor Covenant one that's bad faith either, however, projects that adopt them are changing and rewording them in good faith, so they can get better - it's just not the CoC intent.

Opal eventually got rid of their Contributor Covenant.

Links because of how unbelievable this stuff is:

[1] https://twitter.com/elia/status/611319469982527488 [2] https://github.com/opal/opal/pull/948/commits/817321e27eccff... [3] https://github.com/opal/opal/pull/948#issuecomment-113486020 [4] https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941