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Comment by ocharles | Hacker News Reader

When CoC's exist to foster inclusivity, exactly which "contrarian opinions" are you feeling are being suppressed? That's it's OK to harass or exclude minority groups? I am not trying to put words in your mouth, but the purpose of a CoC is to create a constructive and progressive environment. A CoC is project wide, not internet wide. This is not an attack on freedom of speech, but providing a stable environment and refusing to give a platform to those who's views do not align with a project's. And a project choosing what views it wishes to platform is entirely within its rights.

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Most CoC's I've seen have been more about exclusion than inclusion. It boils down to "by not excluding people who talk about X, you aren't being inclusive of group Y". And it's not even talking about harassing or excluding minorities, it's anything that goes against extreme leftist views. Something as simple as "illegal immigrants should be deported" is considered racist hate speech by some groups. Outside of the SV tech bubble, it's considered a political opinion about how laws should be enforced, but even on this site I've seen people say that wanting immigration laws enforced is almost as bad as being a white-nationalist nazi. You can usually look at the wording of the CoC and see that they have an agenda behind it. For example, the FreeBSD CoC only bans comments that reinforce systemic oppression, so when you know about who wrote the CoC, it means that negative comments about white males are acceptable because they don't fit into the "systematically oppressed" groups the author's had in mind.

Also, if a project was deciding on it's own code of conduct, that's one thing. But when you have people creating twitter hate mobs that threaten to contact your employer and get your fired, or get you blacklisted from events if you don't adopt their CoC, it's not really the project owner's wishes. The people trying to force adoption of certain CoC frequently don't even participate in the project who's owner they're harrassing.

The literal written meaning of a Code of Conduct and the way that Code of Conduct can be used as a political weapon do not have to be congruent.

Exactly. Just add the NCoC type of CoC, like https://github.com/domgetter/NCoC or this text:

We are all adults. We accept anyone's contributions. If you are feeling harrassed speak up by yourself. We do not censor, we don't stop any discussions. Nothing else matters.

Possibly what may make people nervous are statements like this (from Mozilla's): "we recognize that it is possible for actions taken outside of Mozilla’s online or inperson spaces to have a deep impact on community health."

This may be a perfectly reasonable caveat, as the given example that follows seems to be, or not, because it doesn't really say much more detail than that. But it's fairly certain it means that the CoC is not strictly limited to Mozilla resources and functions and how you behave in them; i.e., it isn't just project-wide, and you might run afoul of it other places. I know it certainly gives me pause to consider, and I've been a Mozilla community member for almost 15 years.

If the purpose is to create a progressive environment and a person doesn't identify as progressive, they may not feel included.

It's the threat of force that bothers me. I don't find looming threats very welcoming, particularly where they pertain to behaviour that may be interpreted rather differently depending on the location of the speaker.

I, personally, would feel much more welcomed by those which adopt non-violent communication. RMS' recent proposal is one such example.

> And a project choosing what views it wishes to platform is entirely within its rights.

Ah, so you are OK with their original CoC, right?

As a Christian, I don't have any objection to The Rule.

As an American who believes in the separation of church and state, I definitely understand and sympathize with the instinct that, although religious laws often provide good moral guidance for secular codes of conduct, the two serve distinct purposes. You don't have to reject the ten commandments to recognize why we need more graularity and detail in actual laws regarding murder.

As a developer, I recognize that there are concrete and specific ways in which documents like The Rule fail to meet the pragmatic needs of a code of conduct, including:

1. clearly delineating acceptable from unacceptable behavior

2. establishing a reporting mechanism

3. codifying specific consequences for doing things that were clearly delineated as unacceptable.

A perhaps important thing to realize about monkish orders is that they were intrinsically self-selecting; you didn't need to worry about the "spirit" vs. the "letter" of the law. Monks did not need to worry about people misunderstanding ambiguously stated laws (e.g. "love thy neighbor"). The process of joining a monk-hood or a a religion includes an indoctrination/inculcation/instruction into the "spirit" of the law. Sending a pull or posting on a message list is not even remotely similar.

I.e., if you want to extend the development community beyond a small a close-knit group who understands each other, then you need something closer to laws than to religious commandments.

> if you want to extend the development community beyond a small a close-knit group who understands each other...

But of course, the development community for SQLite has always been, and likely will continue to be, a close-knit group who understands each other. Which means that the requirements for a "true" code of conduct (the benefits of which have yet to be proven) don't really apply here.

The original CoC was not a code of conduct in any meaningful sense of the word and is not really comparable to this current one.

Yes, I was, and I was also OK with not using the project while they held that "CoC".

People are making it Internet-wide, though. There's a chain reaction affect where upstream projects are contacting their dependents and forcing CoCs on them. Even if there weren't, the people who started the "movement" are aggressively pushing their views. No wonder they are facing resistance.

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