In my memory this started way before the recent BLM protests - around the time CoC (Code of Conduct) was being introduced.
The things about the CoCs that really annoyed me:
1. People would literally go around projects and send pull requests just to change the code of conduct to improve the wording even tho no one had made any complaints or anything. Anytime a CoC get added you would see more people mess around with the CoC than the code. It was like people just wanted to look like they were improving things while not actually doing anything.
2. The only blog posts I've seen about CoCs at conferences and stuff have sounded nuts. One was for SunshinePHP[0] where one of the infractions was someone flirting with someone who had a boyfriend who was at the conference and said she could do better. They wrote that they told the offender to go to his room to prevent him from being assaulted. But mentions nothing happening about a guy threatening violence for flirting. I would understand if they were threatening violence in response to violence but flirting, nah. Then there was the whole fast.ai[1] thing where the infraction was basically someone was offended on the behalf of someone else who wasn't offended.
I don't know what you think flirting is but that ain't it. Your man was being a creep and while I'd agree violence isn't the answer, I'm not at all surprised if he was threatened. (I also wouldn't be surprised if he was just told to back off initially but then pushed the issue because that is what creeps do.)
And if for some reason this still isn't obvious to the reader, here's a top tip for how to avoid getting into a fight: maybe don't insult people.
Let's be serious it depends on the context of the conversation. She could have been flirting with him and then when he flirted she said "but I have a boyfriend" and he could had said that and she could have agreed. That is flirting. It could have been what we suspect some guy hitting on a woman and she said "I have a boyfriend" and he said that. I used the word flirting because that is what the source used.
The guy was probably a creep and I am not surprised either but if you're going to have a code of conduct for everyones safety then say someone had to go to their room for their safety tells me your code of conduct isn't for safety but for apperance.
One would think it could leave some sense about the maintainer(s) being decent in some way. Instead I’m just left with a feeling of coercion if anything.
It just shouldn’t be necessary to “present” yourself as a decent person as the author of some code.
Some document in a project folder online doesn’t make you or me better people. It seems to me more of a futile (and stupid) gesture if anything.
We need to spend our time actually doing decent things, and being decent people. Putting a document in our projects telling others that we are doesn’t really change that.
A standardized way of telling others you are a certain way, doesn’t make you so. It relieves us of putting in the effort if anything.
/idealistic early morning rant over
Is this mutually exclusive to stopping people doing bad things and being bad people though?
There are a number of internet communities which essentially have this in the opposite form - as in "getting insulted is expected, no we are not going to do anything about it".
This was the de facto Linux mailing list way for a bit, and was somewhat documented in a lot of "how to interact and what to expect on LKML" guides.
If everyone is going to act in good faith the whole time, sure, it's fine. But as soon as you get one person acting in bad faith, it all falls apart - see the current Republican Party, for example.
> Be a help in times of trouble.
> Do not return evil for evil.
I will try, for you SQLite! :D
This one is similar to "be conservative in what you say and liberal in what you accept from others"[1], but worded better.
And while you are right, the code itself doesn't care, there are lot's of interactions around producing that code that are between humans, where behaviour is important.
It's not much different from the guidelines that exist for this very site: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I mean, that is a kind of code of condcut, too.
This is true, but they wont read the CoC. And even if they do, they won't follow it. If someone can't practice basic decency, a txt file won't change them. Its an entirely futile effort at best and more likely a virtue signal than actually trying to improve things.
The only thing that works is strict moderation. You don't need a CoC for that.
Otherwise you end up with arbitrarily enforced rules, created ad-hoc by whoever is doing the enforcing, without a way to know what they are or a way to appeal if you feel wrongly moderated.
Good. Otherwise people will pretend to be a laywer and talk about how _technically_ the rules don't say specifically what they did. Its a waste of time.
But really, in all my time on github and gitlab I have never seen an actual contributor violate common sense and common decency. The only shitty things I have seen have been anon users piling in on issue threads which have gone viral and in that case you just limit the repo to contributors only.