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Comment by rbanffy | Hacker News Reader

I really, genuinely, don't understand why such a bland code of conduct would be a turn off to anyone. I may not be easy to be around, but I try not to be abrasive while, at the same time, making clear why I think something is the way I think.

If you think someone is wrong very often, I believe saying why the person is wrong on every occasion will provide them with actionable information much better than calling them an imbecile. The goal is not to make the person go away, but to help them produce better ideas.

If someone verbally assaults me, I'll defend my point or, when provided with valid reasons, I'll behave like an adult and correct it. If I ever come across as abusive, let me know and I'll try to be a better person in the future.

Is that really too much to ask?

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The problem is multiple vague parts which taken together can be a bad thing.

>Examples of unacceptable behavior by participants include:

>Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting

Following which country professional setting? The US?

>Maintainers have the right and responsibility to [...] ban temporarily or permanently any contributor for other behaviors that they deem inappropriate, threatening, offensive, or harmful.

Ok, not too abusable.

>This Code of Conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community.

Ok.

>Representation of a project may be further defined and clarified by project maintainers.

And that's from where abuse will be coming. Using your blog not associated with Linux but with your name to tell things some "maintainers" don't like? Go work on another project. Because for this case your name is enough to check the "representation of a project" clause.

It's interesting to see the competing claims:

- the kernel community is comprised entirely of people who will never be abusive, so it doesn't need a code of conduct

- the project is surrounded by people who are so dangerous that they will abuse any kind of process, even a code of conduct

1. The CoC normalizes abuse. 2. If someone is abusive without a CoC thryvcan ve easily removed. 3. They aren’t abusing the code of conduct when they use it to attack people, that’s what itcwas designed for. It was designed by a person with an axe to grind who makes no secret of their agenda.

> The CoC normalizes abuse.

Please explain how an anti-abuse system normalises abuse?

> If someone is abusive without a CoC thryvcan ve easily removed.

It has long been argued that Linus was abusive, and he wasn't removed at all let alone "easily".

Anti-abuse system allows abusers to live in its cracks. The article explains that at length, with examples of offensive (though superficially compliant) language used by US managers.

If the CoC has cracks large enough to sustain an abuser ecosystem, those cracks will be identified and paved over.

That approach is called “Enumerating Badness”, and is known to never completely work.

It doesn't need to be perfect, as long as there are no false positives and few valse negatives.

... which is very much an unsolved problem wrt regulation of human behavior.

Did you really read the text to the end? "Verbal assault" doesn't have a universal meaning, politeness is VERY culture-dependent, and in modern IT everybody is forced to accept US corporate standard which I'm not even sure is universal for the majority of Americans, and often perceived as grossly insincere, and restrictive to the point it's practically abusive by people raised in other cultures.

As a person working for a US giant and not living there, this is relatable. Everyone seemes passive aggressive. It also doesn't help that I've always been more suspicious of polite people since my childhood

In what culture calling someone a fucking inbred imbecile would be considered polite?

Maybe not polite, but plenty would read it for what was meant? I'm not saying it's not unprofessional (and "the community" is probably better off without it) but perfectly healthy environments can include that kinda talk.

Plenty of friend groups cuss each other out in good fun.

Fine. I didn't specify context.

As you and @kingofhdds pointed out, it's OK to call someone that if you are a close friend or somehow trusted not to literally mean it, but we are talking about a mailing list that's a professional exchange for one of the most important software projects in history, that's read by thousands of people and its messages will be archived probably forever.

We can do better than that.

It's still an absolutely monocultural view. Indeed, in anglophone cultures "professional" = more formal, and restrained. In many other places it works like that: professional community means reduced social distance means LESS strict mode of communication, then you would use with people at a bus stop. Personally, I think in some cases it really makes sense to accept a compromise set of rules when communicating internationally, but they must be flexible, dynamic, as much informal as possible, not punishing, and not hindering efficiency. And swearing Linus could be quite within such a compromise. Btw, no formal CoC I ever read represent a compromise, and all efforts to enforce industry-wide CoC is obviously goes against the very idea of compromise.

It's easier than you think. Probably in all cultures there's an implicit quotient of seriousness applied to angry words (from 1 - "Literal meaning" to 0 - "Absolutely doesn't mean it"), depending on context. In many cultures it quickly decreases as social distance between participants of communication gets shorter. E.g. I wouldn't call a random guy "fucking moron", but I can do it within my circle of friends, and nobody would be offended. In many cultures working within a team means entering much closer relations then Corporate Standard (tm) presumes, and here's more: professional communities considered to be a sort of brother/sisterhoods with reduced social distance within. Do you see the point now?

A repeating pattern I saw on the mailing list is that people who oppose the code of conduct does so from fear that it will be wielded as a weapon in misunderstandings and politics.

What I also saw is basically 3 different type of camps. The one I mentioned above. The second group which think the code of conduct is good, needed, and will change the kernel maintainers so it has more diverse group. Last the group that is supposed to enforce the code of conduct and who has consistently proclaim that that isn't their job and that the code of conduct is more of a guide in mediation. The group I have not seen is those who say they need the code of conduct to feel safe as developers.

I believe that I need it to feel safe. But ironically, I don't feel safe saying that here after reading the rest of the comments. Posting from a throwaway for obvious reasons.

Agree.

Open Source values will still remain - working in a transparent, open (not always nice) way.

More with CoC, harassing people will not be tolerated

The entire point of the CoC is it creates a process whereby people not involved in the project can harass members of the project while remaining anonymous.

Notice the people making a stink about Linus do it by taking out of context, lying about what he said and have managed to get people to think he should step down.(and are putting in place a “code” that lets them do it even though he’s the kindest non-bigoted person you could think of.)

It’s completely political and it’s discriminatory.

> The entire point of the CoC is it creates a process whereby people not involved in the project can harass members of the project while remaining anonymous.

So there is a lot of people peripheral to these projects, that want nothing more than to disrupt by harassing people completely unknown to them, under a veil of anonymity? And that's the point of these CoC's?

Who are these people you speak of? Some secret cabal of "SJW's"?

You are saying the point isn't to codify some ground rules for collaboration and communication, which are then in rare cases abused by some individuals, the abuse is the point? Please.

Harassing is a continued assault. Calling some one stupid might be insulting but it is not harassment

This particular CoC goes much further than policing harassment.

Yeah, I wonder if the people posting about not contributing any more to Linux will also stop their open source contributions to projects associated with all the organisations on this page: https://www.contributor-covenant.org/adopters

Yep. There’s a half dozen there I used to contribute to... and one I didn’t realize had adopted it.

If I ever need to add a feature to one of them I’ll have to fork it.

But I think that it needs a “no CoC” license.

That list, by the way, is a list of projects run by people who bowed to pressure and didn’t really think it thru or believed the lies pushed by those pushing the CoC.

I know this first hand for the projects I was involved in. It vaguely sounded good, the maintainers were leftists too and everybody opposes harassment, right?

> That list, by the way, is a list of projects run by people who bowed to pressure and didn’t really think it thru or believed the lies pushed by those pushing the CoC.

Are you implying that those who support a CoC are lying or somehow not "strong" enough to oppose it? You've stated elsewhere [0] your objection that people who oppose a CoC are implied to be bigoted. And yet here you are assuming that those who have no problem with a CoC are weak and have bowed to pressure or believing some lie. It works both ways my friend.

[0] > If you don’t understand, maybe Consider the objections, instead of ( unintentionally) writing as if the people who object are presumed abusive or bigoted.

I don’t see the contradiction. Just look at any of the commit threads onva prohect where opposition to the CoC is discussed. They fly in “developers” who claim they don’t feel included and bully the maintainer to accept it, often straight up violating their own code in the process.

But then as the original agreement says there is no racism against whites people and no sexism against men.

> But then as the original agreement says there is no racism against whites people and no sexism against men.

Where does it say that? Here is the full text of the CoC: https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/1/4/code-of-con...

Thank you for posting that. I wish that link was higher up since I think people need to read the damn CoC before losing their shit.

Like, I don't really love it, but I don't really hate it either, and after reading it I find it hard to see what the LINUX IZ DED ZOMG kerfuffle is about.

Having read it, I thought there would be more to it. I don’t see enough to either agree or disagree with. That document is so vague and open to interpretation. Essentially only one part seems to be the meat:

> Project maintainers are responsible for clarifying the standards of acceptable behavior and are expected to take appropriate and fair corrective action in response to any instances of unacceptable behavior.

That’s it. If it’s acceptable to the maintainers, it’s acceptable. If it’s unacceptable to the maintainers, it’s not.

Perhaps they don’t want to get called a “rape apologist” by the CoC pushers like that T’so guy who didn’t sign? It happened with zero repercussions to the offenders too since they’re the mob in charge. There’s your problem.

Any open source project that gains enough traction to require a proper governance model has adopted a code of conduct. (Although I'd be interested in seeing if there are any notable counter-examples).

Whether or not it is based on the Contributor Covenant is irrelevant -- the language is roughly the same broad brush strokes with which you appear to have ideological differences. Do you take issue with the "Enforcement" section?

I suppose this means you (and anyone else that has a problem with COCs, I guess) will only contribute to small-to-medium open source projects where the maintainer does it as a hobby?

> Any open source project that gains enough traction to require a proper governance model has adopted a code of conduct.

That sentence probably needs some adjustment for time dependence. There were plenty of open source projects with proper governance models in the 90s (e.g. GNU, Debian) but AFAIK CoCs are a relatively recent thing.

Well, sure.

But a governance model that relies on a couple of hundred self-policing contributors needs to evolve with scale, right?

There are not more contributors to those low level projects, just more people complaining.

> and one I didn’t realize had adopted it.

You can see how you not noticing it is incompatible with your comments about CoCs being the end of the fucking world, right?

I want to add that, even though (as stated in the article) polite language doesn't imply good intentions, it's a good start nevertheless.

Bless your heart.

In the Illuminatus books there is a story that may help illuminate this. Some dude posts signs in a store that say "DO NOT SPIT ON THE FLOOR. --MGT". The staff assumes it's from management, so they leave the signs up. The customers feel insulted that management would think they would spit on the floor, so they stop buying there. The store goes bust.

The apparent blandness of the CoC may exactly be the problem.

That example shows a clear problem in the employee/management relationship. Putting up signs like that without adequately informing the employees is really bad passive aggressive management. Likewise, the employees simply accepting such a change being made is a clear indicator that they're either afraid to ask questions of the management for fear of reprisals, or that they've simply stopped caring about what management does, because they've lost faith in the leadership.

Either way, it's a clear case of mismanagement and miscommunication.

Nothing to do with a software project CoC.

> the employees simply accepting such a change being made

You know, in many places confronting management about the changes they introduce is not something that is generally practiced, and if you do that, especially in a semi-public way (even if that means Cc:-ing a few coworkers), you're simply at risk. This applies to small mom-and-pop shops, and equally applies to Google.

Which is a definite sign of a sick management culture and companies run by dictators, with no regard for the well-being of their employees.

Yes. It's unfortunately ubiquitous.

If you don’t understand, maybe Consider the objections, instead of ( unintentionally) writing as if the people who object are presumed abusive or bigoted.

That wasn’t your intention because you meant to just say you have no problem accepting criticism. But that’s the implication.

And the idea of guilty until proven innocent, but you can’t defend yourself because you will never hear the accusation and your attacker can remain anonymous while you are drummed out of a job based on lies without a chance to defend yourself should be offensive to all reasonable people.

That’s what these “CoCs” do and that’s how they are used.

Look at drupal- the guy attacked for being kinky (really he was attacked because someone didn’t like him and the CoC gave them power to vindictively gee back at him.). Look at the numerous attacks the author of the CoC has perpetrated. Look at the listing of the head of Mozilla for the “crime” of not being a Marxist.

This is an age where people are being reported to HR for the “hate crime” of bringing Chik-Fil-a in for lunch!

Actually I was surprised by the Drupal guy since a lot of the people behind these CoCs seem to be various blue-haired kinksters themselves.

I don't think either that or Linus' excessive swearing belongs in a software project, but CoC makers clearly aren't interested in maintaining a civil society, they're just interested in maintaining their particular brand of ideology.

For clarification the dripal guy didn’t bring any bdsm into the project, they dig into his personal life and found it. They beat the poor guy up so bad he’s now apologizing in hopes of mitigating the damage. But they really don’t care. He didn’t harass anyone.

And how does not having a CoC stop that? Like, if someone takes a dislike to someone, and they have sufficient power, they can remove them anyway.

You just said it yourself, they need to have sufficient power.

Following one of these CoCs to the letter, I could levee infringements against practically anyone, even if I only made minor contributions.

And that could get you blacklisted in other totally unrelated projects.

Good times!

> I really, genuinely, don't understand

This means you haven't read the article.

I did, and I don't agree with its conclusions.

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