> The question is, how many excellent developers leave (or never participate in the first place) without saying a word, because they don't want to deal with the

> The question is, how many excellent developers leave (or never participate in the first place) without saying a word, because they don't want to deal with the nastiness? That's a great point, and together we're actually correct. How many new developers would you gain by implementing some kind of (largely unenforceable) code of conduct versus how many old developers would you scare away with such a thing. Now you've got an actual engineering tradeoff that you can consider. Would the gains more than offset the losses? I certainly don't know. I don't think there is any way to know except to try it and hope it doesn't go badly. I can understand why people might not be keen to take a risk like that, though.