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We have received three submissions pertaining to an unfolding story.

It all started in August with a controversial editorial by Leigh Alexander at the gaming news site Gamasutra. It was followed by Intel pulling their RealSense ads from the site. This, in turn, led a Linux Dev to claim he'll no longer make any kernel updates for Intel.

Intel Pulls Ad Campaign from Gamasutra

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The war of words over misogyny vs. political correctness in the video game industry continues, with Intel pulling ads from the gaming news site Gamasutra for its RealSense gesture interface platform in response to an email campaign organized by a grassroots 'Gamergate movement'.

The latter group mobilized in response to an editorial by Gamasutra's Leigh Alexander, who listed a series of misogynistic incidents involving masses of anonymous gamers, then argued: 'We still think angry young men are the primary demographic for commercial video games — yet average software revenues from the commercial space have contracted massively year on year'. Alexander concluded: '"Gamer" isn’t just a dated demographic label that most people increasingly prefer not to use. Gamers are over. That’s why they’re so mad."

Posters at other gamer sites, as well as reddit, expressed satisfaction at the news.

And then things got even more interesting... [more after the break.]

We then received this succinct summary:

Linux Kernel Developer Strikes over Intel's Withdrawal of Ads on Gamasutra

keplr writes:

Yesterday, Intel withdrew their advertising campaign on gaming news website Gamasutra, over recent changes to editorial position in opposition to #Gamergate. Today in response Linux Kernel developer Mathew Garrett announced on his blog that he would no longer be using unpaid time to work on patches for Intel in the kernel.

Intel's decision to withdraw support came after Gamasutra blogger Leigh Alexander's controversial remarks sparked a firestorm of outrage among gamers. Alexander declared in her article that "gamers are over" and that the industry needs, and would be forced into, a feminist, "social justice", direction. Outraged readers began a campaign soliciting Gamasutra advertiser to withdraw support from the site, and were successful in the case of Intel.

The campaign by Gamasutra's readers is part of the larger #Gamergate movement to expose corruption in gaming journalism.

And, for those who would appreciate some more details:

Linux Kernel Developer Refusing to Update Linux Kernel over #GamerGate

Vanderhoth writes:

This is a double whammy,

Apparently the #GamerGate controversy is spilling over into the IT world.

Yesterday Intel decided to pull it's ads from the Game site Gamasutra over comments made by Leigh Alexander who wrote in August an article titled “gamers are over.”

From the article:

“Traditional ‘gaming’ is sloughing off, culturally and economically, like the carapace of a bug,” Alexander wrote at the time. “This is hard for people who’ve drank the Kool-Aid about how their identity depends on the aging cultural signposts of a rapidly evolving, increasingly broad and complex medium. It’s hard for them to hear they don’t own anything, anymore, that they aren’t the world’s most special-est consumer demographic, that they have to share.”

Today a Linux kernel dev felt this was Intel showing support for a consumer revolt steeped in misogyny and has vowed not to make any kernel updates for Intel

Here's a direct link to the dev's post

Excerpt from the post:

Recently, as part of the anti-women #GamerGate campaign[2], a set of awful humans convinced Intel to terminate an advertising campaign because the site hosting the campaign had dared to suggest that the sexism present throughout the gaming industry might be a problem. Despite being awful humans, it is absolutely their right to request that a company choose to spend its money in a different way. And despite it being a dreadful decision, Intel is obviously entitled to spend their money as they wish. But I'm also free to spend my unpaid spare time as I wish, and I no longer wish to spend it doing unpaid work to enable an abhorrently-behaving company to sell more hardware. I won't be working on any Intel-specific bugs. I won't be reverse engineering any Intel-based features[3]. If the backlight on your laptop with an Intel GPU doesn't work, the number of fucks I'll be giving will fail to register on even the most sensitive measuring device.

It has been said that the internet routes around breakage. Is this a tempest in a teapot that will blow away and be forgotten? Or is this a canary in a coal mine bringing attention to a deep-lying problem that will keep arising until properly solved? And how could that be achieved?