Ban

I have been permanently banned from the Git project by The Git Project Leadership Committee.

This does not come to a surprise to me, since Junio C Hamano (the maintainer of the Git project and member of the committee) has a personal vendetta against me, and yesterday (2023-05-12) appeared to be visibly angry with me (enough so that he could not write correctly). 23 hours later I'm permanently banned with zero warning.

I have sent 6564 messages in total to the mailing list, the first one in 2008 (About git pretty), I managed to land 527 patches in upstream git, but in addition I have at this moment 1077 patches distributed in 181 branches, which you can find in my fork: felipec/git.

Moreover, I have contributed to Git's site: git-scm.com, Git Rev News, Git User's Surveys, and other related projects.

As a reward of all my selfless contributions to the Git community—100% of which were done on my own free time and received zero pay from them—I was not warned of the impending ban nor given a chance to present my case and defend myself.

Being a moderator of various communities myself, this is something I don't do, even to random users I do not know. I always give several warnings before hitting them with the permanent ban hammer, and afterwards they always have the opportunity to appeal the decision and present their case as much as they want.

I do this not just because I believe it's the right thing to do, but because I believe it's standard practice in all healthy communities and societies for a reason: people in positions of authority are human, and all humans make mistakes. Bosses, police officers, even judges make mistakes. Any person in a position of authority should accept the possibility that they could have made a mistake, which is why trials and appeals exist. Miscarriages of justice do happen, even when people are allowed to defend themselves.

The Git Project Leadership Committee never warned me—not even a single time—and did not allow me to appeal their decision or defend myself.

The current committee consists of four people, one of which has a personal vendetta against me.

It will take time for me to compile the actual reasons that likely lead to this ban. I will update this page accordingly, and write an article on my blog post: Felipe Contreras.

This is just my initial reaction.

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In their public statement (Git's Code of Conduct, and community updates) the committee argues that I was warned with a temporary ban:

Previous violations and related complaints resulted in the PLC's July, 2021 decision to temporarily ban him from the community for three months.

This is not true.

I have never been temporarily banned from the community. In July 2021 the committee requested that I temporarily stop engaging with certain members of the community for three months. Not the whole community.

Their actual request verbatim, was the following:

**No interaction from you with the people involved in the above emails, including unsolicited interaction with those enforcing the Code of Conduct for 3 months.**

I sought clarification by proxy (since they didn't want me to contact them directly), and got the response:

The "warning" from CoC is really about not engaging with folks who might not want to engage with him. If he wants to send patches to the list, I don't think the warning precludes that.

I fulfilled their request in full.

I kept sending patches to the mailing list, but did not contact anyone on the list they gave me.

The current committee is using this as an excuse for a permanent ban, but this is a lie. I have never been previously banned from the community, temporarily or otherwise.

Furthermore, the committee said:

Despite our repeated efforts (including applying corrective action as laid out in the CoC), Felipe Contreras has continued to violate the CoC, leading to numerous complaints from community members.

That's once again not true. There were no repeated efforts, as only one decision was made, and that was a warning to not engage with certain people temporarily, not a temporary ban from the whole community.

If in their opinion I violated their Code of Conduct repeatedly, I was never made aware of that. The committee has only contacted me once, two years ago, and did not allow me to reply.

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I find the punishment by the committee unfair and disproportionate—especially since they never warned me—and the fact that they are forbidding me from appealing their decision authoritarian.

But it does not surprise me, as I was not allowed to appeal their previous decision either, so their lack of due process was already known to me.

After 15 years of contributions I made entirely on a voluntary basis, I was not granted one final message. I wasn't even thanked for all my work. I was just blocked from the list like a filthy troll.

At this moment I do not know what's next, I guess...

Goodbye git.