Earlier quoted context omitted.
With most OSS projects nowadays I don't think you have to use a mailing list or anything that would have an MOTD in order to contribute. Contributions nowadays are often done entirely through the repository, so it makes sense to put in them the things that people contemplating contribution should be cognizant of. Repositories for most projects are more project repositories than mere code repositories.
> Repositories for most projects are more project repositories than mere code repositories. Indeed, but for some reason it still feels odd. I've acknowledged I'm getting old, right? ;-) Also, there is some rational justification to my feeling. It used to be that you might kick-ban someone from a channel or /dev/null their mailing list contributions. But if they made a technically meritorious merge request via SCM the…
I think putting the CoC into the repo is mainly to clarify that it applies to discussions on the issue tracker. If GitHub didn't also do issue tracking and other things where actual discussions occur, there would probably be fewer CoCs in repos.
> Measured tolerance and forgiveness are both important virtues
There are a small number of extremely toxic people in positions of power who will abuse "forgiveness" in order to deliberately commit an unending series of abuses on a string of people. People kept "forgiving" Harvey Weinstein for decades. The line between tolerance and enabling can get hard to distinguish, especially when someone has enough power to control the narrative.
So a community must be aware that its tolerance mechanisms can themselves be maliciously abused. But the alternative—intolerance and being unwilling to forgive—ends up harming the larger number of people who are fallible, do hurtful things, but can be remediated. It gives less room for people to be human.
Finding the balance between these opposing forces is hard. A maximally efficient and happy community is one of complete trust between all participants. But that is also the definition of a maximally vulnerable and exploitable one.
> But, also, I've always considered OSS a hobby scene rather than a business model or resume booster.
That line got really blurry when open source ate the world and many large tech companies now work heavily with open source. You have many employees (like myself) who work on open source projects full time at work. And you have others who work on open source because it helps them find employment at companies that use that code.