I don't really understand their POV. Can't a project accept free labor while also not condoning his actions?
I feel obligated to play devil's advocate, since no one else here wants to defend the other side, or even acknowledge it's validity. The argument is, no, a project can't accept work without condoning one's public character. If someone publicly says "I'm a developer on this project, and trans people are bad," that associates that project with their bigotry. It not only makes people reading those statements assume that the project itself supports that hateful position, but worse, it makes anyone of the discriminated class feel unwelcome. Can you honestly imagine a trans person feeling comfortable using or contributing to that product, now? Your statement parallels the debate in the thread, which can be summarised as: "are projects code or people?" The contributor in the thread argues projects are code, and do not involve any human element. Which is approaching clinical sociopathy. Code doesn't create itself. Projects don't exist in a vacuum. Humans work on projects. Together. And when one of those humans is publicly hateful toward a class, members of that class with healthy, natural levels of empathy are not going to feel comfortable working with them, at the very least. Beyond alienating members of the community, as you say, it is condoning his actions. To accept someone's work is to accept them, and on some level to tell the world "it's okay to be transphobic, we'll still take your work!" After WWII, the US employed numerous Nazi scientists and engineers, many of whom had committed war crimes. Such actions send an unequivocal message to the scientists of the world that they can do heinous things and aid and abet genocidal maniacs, and the US government will gladly employ them. Now, a transphobic tweet isn't quite the same as a war crime. But the message and effects are the same; they only differ in degree. To be clear, I'm not sure which side I agree with. But I certainly believe the argument is valid. And accepting the work of a transphobic contributor will make people in the trans community feel hated and unwelcome. That's a fact, not an opinion. And I tend to think there's something wrong with that.
Hmm... that's an interesting point. I feel like if this guy was a CEO or someone with authority over employees, then he should resign, because he would have power over other people and his antisocial views would contribute to a less productive workplace. But if this is just a random guy helping out, just like all the other people helping out, and no one is really committed to stay with the project in the first place, then maybe the project should live or die based on whether or not people are willing to continue working with him. It's like if a charity denied a contribution from a wealthy donor because the donor is homophobic. Should the charity really care who the money comes from? That said, I'm not entirely sure what it's like working on a project like this, maybe I don't understand the dynamics.
This is one of the problems with feminists; even though they claim to be open-minded, in reality they just can't accept that people might have different opinions from them. Wherever they encounter someone who disagrees with them, they try to silence him, get him banned, etc. I like the response from this developer: At least in this case, common sense won.If you want him removed, start working on Opal and contributing as much as him to everything he did for Opal so we have a replacement that's more in orientation with your morals and views.
Protip: you won't because you can't.
Unsorted observations: * There are an awful lot of transgender people in the free software community for both being very small sets of people. This is a thing a project actively looking for contributors might want to keep in mind. * Free software has always been explicitly political. * I'm ambivalent about codes of conduct myself. For why, see the talk page and history of any major wikipedia article. Too much structure is a very bad thing.
But seriously, has any software lost support because of the morals of its developers? Jobs regularly intimidated his employees and denied the existence of his daughter and Linus regularly belittles contributors on the linux mailing list. OSS is full of assholes.
That's an interesting question. Not one easily answered. How do you measure it? Though, there is a difference in an asshole and a bigot. Sociopathy and bigotry are both bad, but entirely different things. Are you aware of a significant project with a bigotted, publicly visible maintainer?
Mark Shuttleworth at Linuxcon. He did apologize for it though. I hope that once the rage dies down, people will try to respectfully communicate with OP's guy. Maybe he's hard-headed in his views, or maybe he'd be more willing to listen and update them when people aren't calling for his head.