This post is about open source burnout, but it's not about adopters feeling entitled to my time, or disagreements between maintainers, or anything like that. My personal experience of working on open source Scala projects for the past decade has been almost entirely positive, with only one or two exceptions that I can think of off the top of my head, out of dozens of thousands of interactions.

Instead this post is about my unwillingness to continue contributing my time to a community whose leadership is characterized by unreflective privilege and petty vindictiveness (Martin Odersky), grifty amoral opportunism (John De Goes), cowardice and inaction (Typelevel), and betrayal of trust (the Scala Center).

I'll start by introducing myself. Much of my career for the last decade has involved working in the Scala programming language. This has included several threads of open source and community work:

All of this prelude is just to say that I've invested a significant part of my career in the Scala programming language, that I've cared deeply about its adoption in the past, and that I still care deeply about the culture of the Scala community.

As of today, though, I'm stepping away from all of these projects. I won't be reviewing pull requests, fixing bugs, answering user questions, or publishing new releases. The only exception is that in the short term I will continue to moderate venues I personally maintain, which currently primarily means the Circe Gitter channel.

I have no objection to other people continuing work on these projects, and if anyone wants to maintain any of them, I'm happy to discuss passing along GitHub and Maven Central access.

I've not made this decision lightly. I've watched friends and colleagues walk away from the Scala community in disgust since at least 2014, and I've spent years trying to call attention to the patterns of behavior that caused them to leave.

In the past I had thought that the problems of the community were primarily the work of a few bad actors: John De Goes, Jon Pretty, Tony Morris, Paul Phillips, etc. I no longer think that this is the case, for several reasons. Instead I've come to believe that the problems have always been the result of failures of leadership, and that those failures have been getting worse, or at least more publicly visible.

The most significant of these failures has been the Scala Center at EPFL's catastrophic response to reports of sexual harassment by one of its founding officers, which first became publicly known earlier this year. This response included a cover-up and an explicit refusal to condemn the abuser's actions in the center's official public statement on the matter.

Another development is that Martin Odersky, the creator of Scala and Academic Director of the Scala Center, has recently made his positions on some matters of community leadership much clearer than they'd been in the past. This comment is one early example. His threats in this GitHub discussion and this Scala Contributors thread are others.

Odersky has emailed my colleagues to ask them to "disavow" me because I liked a tweet criticizing him. He ranted at Typelevel's leadership because they dared to ban John De Goes on his (Martin's) birthday. This kind of pettiness and vindictiveness is dangerous in a person in Odersky's position of power.

Lastly I've come to lose any confidence I still had in the ability of the Typelevel organization to act as a counterweight to these problems. The Typelevel leadership has sometimes muddled their way into taking the right actions, but usually too late and for the wrong reasons. One example is the statement about their decision to ban De Goes, which completely ignored dozens of reports from people who had been targeted by De Goes, and focused instead on his "combative style" in technical discussions. I personally believe that this explanation was at least partly disingenuous, and in any case it has provided years of ammunition to bad-faith detractors.

There are many other examples of this kind of thing, including the Typelevel issue linked above, where comments repeating racist and transphobic conspiracy theories (e.g. "programmers being persecuted for questioning whether 4 year olds should transition") were allowed to stand unaddressed for months, despite many people (including me) asking the Typelevel leadership to provide a clear response.

Several of the members of the Typelevel Steering Committee are friends or former colleagues of mine, and I have deep respect for a few of them, but I don't believe that Typelevel as an organization will ever be able to break out of this cycle of accommodation, delay, and ineffective action.

I'm not sure what it would take for me to reconsider this decision. NthPortal's comment here would be a good start. I would also want to see the directors of the Scala Center step down and publicly acknowledge the harm that they've done. I don't expect any of these things to happen.

I'll probably continue writing some Scala occasionally, at least until I can find a better way to do one-off data munging tasks with types in a REPL. I also don't intend to stop trying to raise awareness about the problems in the community (sorry to disappoint anyone who's read this far and has been hoping for that). If anyone has questions about this statement, or if you want to adopt any of my Scala projects, I'm easy to find.