The Linux Kernel Replaces Its Code of Conflict With a Code of Conduct
How the kernel community's often-combative development culture led to a September 2018 policy change, and Linus Torvalds' own public acknowledgment that his past conduct needed to change.
On September 16, 2018, the Linux kernel project replaced its long-standing “Code of Conflict” with a Code of Conduct based on the widely-used Contributor Covenant — a governance change with an unusually personal dimension, arriving alongside a public acknowledgment from Linus Torvalds himself that his own historical conduct on the mailing list had been part of the problem.
The Code of Conflict it replaced
The kernel project’s previous conduct document, the Code of Conflict (adopted in 2015), was notably minimal and largely reactive — it acknowledged that discussions could get heated and gave a path for escalation, but it did little to proactively describe expected standards of behavior. In practice, the kernel mailing list had a long-established reputation for blunt, sometimes harshly personal criticism directed at contributors, including from Torvalds himself in a number of widely-circulated email exchanges over the project’s history.
Why the change happened when it did
Greg Kroah-Hartman, the kernel’s second-in-command and maintainer of the stable tree, was the primary force behind pushing for the more substantial Code of Conduct, arguing directly that the existing Code of Conflict “is not achieving its implicit goal of fostering civility,” and pointing to other open-source projects where explicit, positively-stated behavioral guidelines had demonstrably improved community culture where a purely reactive conflict-resolution document had not.
The new document
The adopted Code of Conduct was based on version 1.4 of the Contributor Covenant, a template already in use across a large number of other open-source projects by that point — rather than writing kernel-specific governance language from scratch, the project adopted an established, widely-recognized standard. It was formally signed off by both Torvalds and Kroah-Hartman, along with other prominent kernel figures including Dan Williams of Intel and Chris Mason of Facebook, signaling broad buy-in from major corporate kernel contributors rather than a change imposed narrowly.
Torvalds’ own acknowledgment
What made this particular governance change stand out from a typical project policy update was Torvalds’ own public response to it. In the release notes accompanying the Linux 4.19-rc4 development kernel, Torvalds directly addressed his own history of harsh, personal criticism on the mailing list, describing his past behavior as “unprofessional and uncalled for,” and announced he would be taking time away from kernel maintenance specifically to get, in his words, assistance in better understanding and responding to the impact of his communication style on other contributors.
The aftermath
Torvalds returned to active kernel maintenance after his announced time away, and the Code of Conduct has remained the kernel project’s governing behavioral standard since. A dedicated Code of Conduct committee was subsequently established to handle reports and provide transparency into how the policy is actually being applied in practice, formalizing an enforcement structure the earlier Code of Conflict never really had. The episode is frequently referenced as a notable moment in a broader, ongoing conversation across large open-source projects about balancing technical rigor with a sustainable, less personally combative contributor culture.
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