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Comment by jakobegger | Hacker News Reader

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jakobegger

Here’s something I don’t understand. If all you want is to contribute code, why not do that?

How does it harm you if someone tries to increase diversity?

LLVM is a big project; there’s surely enough space for different people.

Some people will focus on the technical bits; others will focus on legal issues, and others can focus on social issues.

What’s the problem with that? Why do so many people become defensive when a project adopts a code of conduct?

If you really only care about building a great project with smart people, why do you care about the code of conduct? Just carry on with your work!

If the code of conduct actually gets in the way of working, please speak up, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here.

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Because a code of conduct is just a foot in the door. It provides a pretense for people to seize power and start policing others in the community.

That would be only one objection, but as always happens, the rules are not actually what is written, as the OP rightly pointed out.

Another recent example was the Rod Vagg drama in node.js... he became the target of ire for tweeting an article about Neurodiversity and Free Speech. Does that sound like something that should go against any code of conduct that aims to be more welcoming and create diversity? Of course not, unless you subscribe to Social Justice, where everything is a dogwhistle and an opportunity to name and shame others.

The person who was leading this charge was then discovered to have a tirade filled twitter stream full of spiteful and hateful language aimed at white people and men. Which apparently did not violate any CoC.

The hypocrisy is obvious to anyone who digs past the surface, and the fact that well-meaning bystanders are effortlessly recruited into defending this petty and destructive behavior is what makes it so pernicious.

the person you're referencing to with the RAMPANT misandry on their twitter feed is just intolerable and tiring.

If so, rvagg should be criticized for those tweets, not for a reasonable article on neurodiversity.

You misunderstand rvagg didn't have tweets containing misandry. The person who was leading the charge against him did.

As per his message, it wasn't just the code of conduct. It was also their partnership with Outreachy which he sees as a sexist and racist organization. He doesn't want to contribute code to a project he sees furthering those goals, sounds fair enough.

As far as objecting to CoCs, a lot of people don't like them because they've historically opened the door to non-developers coming in an usurping actual contributing developers and shifting the project focus from something technical to something political.

That would indeed be objectionable! For someone unfamiliar with that history, can you give a few projects I should read up on to find out more?

Yes, you should read up on the Contributor Covenant. The creator of which is notorious for aggressively pushing to get the CoC included into projects and then harassing developers. Here's one of the more famous examples:

https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

Also see how the creator tried to force this CoC into Ruby:

https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12004

Didn't these people also get upset over some projects documentation using "he"? I remember seeing a massive thread about the Issue requesting gender neutral language and the maintainer spiked it. On another note it sure seems like CoC are often weaponized by people who engage in wrong think.

edit: found link -> https://github.com/joyent/libuv/pull/1015

OMG, this is priceless:

  > Our community prides itself on niceness. What a code 
  > of conduct does is define what we mean by nice.

They should try to force this CoC into Linux kernel :-D

Oh god I want to read Linus' reply :D Better than a Netflix subscription for a year or so.

How about an actual example of "usurping actual contributing developers and shifting the project focus from something technical to something political."? Just trying doesn't count.

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