What do Rafael Avila de Espindola, Chris Lattner, Tanya Lattner, LLVM Foundation, Linus Torvalds, and Red Hat’s Jim Whitehurst have to do with this question? They’re all in the mix of a wide debate over whether developers of the software and open source community should be required to behave respectfully to each other.

Re: Rafael Avila de Espindola…

Last week, a software engineer publicly quit a very popular open-source project, setting off a firestorm of debate within the programming world.

Re: Chris Lattner…

Chris Lattner tweeted: “I am definitely sad to lose Rafael from the LLVM project, but it is critical to the long term health of the project that we preserve an inclusive community. I applaud Rafael for standing by his personal principles, this must have been a hard decision.” He also followed up with a longer blog post about the incident.

Re: Linus Torvalds…

In 2013, Linus Torvalds was called out for profanity-laced rants on the Linux email lists, which set the tone for the open-source world. He and the Linux community did an about-face — sort of — in 2015, telling members that their work would be criticized but asking them to “be excellent to each other” and to feel free to report abuse.

Re: Jim Whitehurst…

Red Hat is famous for its “meritocracy,” modeled after the Linux Foundation. Amid the #MeToo movement against sexual misconduct, especially in the workplace, Red Hat says it’s doing several things to make sure its culture is more welcoming, including sending its executives on a “listening tour.” Jim Whitehurst says he has also been encouraging the company’s top female engineers to get out and be role models and to speak up in open-source communities about being nice to each other.