GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct
phoronix.com
phoronix.com
There was this famous Drupal dev that wrote a transcript of a fetish wedding on his fetish social media profile. An enemy of his on Drupal quoted that transcript and used it as examples the Dev should be punished.
Drupal, like GCC proposed rules, allow punishment of someone for something they did outside the community, and not only the guy was punished, an ex girlfriend of his was harassed by "helpful" people.
Oh wow. I was undecided about the helpfulness of CoC as sometimes people in the project can become hostile, unstable or passive-aggressive.
But this case is very bad. Seems like CoC opens up ways for character assassination, effectively becoming "rules for the harassment of the outgroup".
Has it ever been used in any other way?
Because they have, and I guarantee you that you've been aware of such enforcement actions in the past.
And it's not like I don't understand the baseline fear of bad-faith actors - I've been on the receiving end of a few myself, as have most of us. However, those fears never really led anywhere productive. What _was_ productive was going off on my own and building new things with people I actually enjoyed being around.
Compare federal law which says "no racial discrimination" which clearly applies equally to all races.
The federal law is written better.
Disclaimer: I did harbor hope Hans Reiser would be found innocent.
Which leaves open the interpretation of outside violations by whomever is adjudicating it so as not necessarily to apply to all instances of unwelcoming doormats which may be present on contributors homes.
As such I feel like the wording on external interactions is pretty reasonable if interpreted in good faith.
I wont tell you, as I dont want to be accused of putting words in anyones mouth, this will probably be downvoted, but go look it up yourself if you care.
In general i'd say, it doesnt matter who brings information, only what the information is, given how extremely objectively poor the standard CoC is, I think it bears consideration here.
They were literally _FIRED_ from Github because of a "problem" with a female coworker, allegedly.
Github was like the "wokest" startup at that time, with diversity officers and what not before everybody else, after the sex harassment scandal...
One can be oppressed because of their characteristic while still being oppressive toward others.
edit: changed the wording.
Oh okay, I didn't find that on Wikipedia (it just says she was fired but doesn't say why) and didn't see any headlines on it in my search. That is bad, and worthy of firing, although I'm not sure exactly how it relates to what the GP was saying about nefarious plans for the CoC or whatever.
> One can be oppressed because of their characteristic while still being oppressive toward others.
Very much so. It's like people who were abused revisiting that abuse on others.
Most infamous instance is probably this one, in the Opal repo: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
As well as this thread in the Ruby issue tracker that devolves into pure chaos with Ada refusing to actually participate in any of the valid points others bring up: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12004
And I'm sure there's many other instances if you look around a bit.
not at all. We can acknowledge that other people have opinions ("respecting" a fact makes no sense in english) but we don't have to respect either the people or the opinions, depending on who they are or what they are: such respect can be earned and lost on merit
> If you work within the system in a legal and peaceful manner, then that is fair game
working within the system means complying with the CoC and any other terms & prerequisites to contributing
if you aren't doing that, you're trying to fight the system, that which you claim to support so wholeheartedly, exposing you for who you truly are
and if there is no CoC? is it then respecting the system to throw a tantrum if they wont adapt one?
And I don't see why anyone's opinion outside the relevant project should matter at all. I've contributed to many projects over the years and I can't think of a single time I've ever come close to caring or even knowing what the maintainer's opinions on the world are. It's simply not something that comes up unless you explicitly go looking for it, and honestly what's the point? I'm sure many of the projects I've worked with have had their fair share of people that I'd disagree with on any number of topics, but that's wholly irrelevant if we're talking PRs since we're not evaluating someones morals and opinions, but the code they're producing. Chances are there's no slurs or anything political in the code they're submitting, so why give the energy to looking at anything else?
All of their arguments are also posed in a way to make anyone who disagrees seem like they're disagreeing with something very reasonable. It's phrased in such a way as to imply that they're in the 100% right, and if you dare disagree you're a bigot/homophone/transphobe/whatever other bad thing that can stick.
Every time I've seen a project get targeted by these CoCs, all the maintainers approach it from a good place assuming no malice, whereas the ones pushing for it will NOT take no for an answer.
I mean just look at one of the final comments in that locked Opal issue: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941#issuecomment-1132902...
They're blatantly trying to paint anyone disagreeing with them, no matter how mild the disagreement, as someone attacking them directly, and there's a scary amount of people who would side with them as well.
I think the best way to avoid falling into that kind of trap is to learn to dissociate between a value one believe in, and a discourse/action done in the name of that value.
It's perfectly possible to agree to one without agreeing to the other.
People who haven't yet learned this[1] tend to think that disagreeing with the latter also means disagreeing with the former. Worse, they might believe that not personally sharing/believing a value constitutes an attack on this value. And since one's identity tends to be tied with one's deeply held values, it constitue an attack on them or on their peers as well.
The important point is that good people might do it in good faith, out of naivety. In the Opal thread, however, I believe most of the 'Twitter army' that came to +1 the CoC uses it as a rethorical trick, out of self-righteousness.
[1] And I honestly believe that most early twenty-something tends to fall into that category, especially the most politicaly or religiously active ones.
That unfortunately just shows how naive the average person has become.
Anyone else notice that all of this identity politics stuff seems to mainly infect projects in more "accessible" languages? I've heard about it in Javascript, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc. but not much in C/C++ and basically none in Asm. The sibling comment here about SQLite's response (a pure C project) to this trolling provides a great contrast. People and projects solidly focused on technical stuff know better.
At some point this pendulum has to swing back.
> "Some people are saying that the Contributor Covenant is a political document, and they’re right."
"I can’t wait for the mass exodus from Linux now that it’s been infiltrated by SJWs. Hahahah "
This included the project lead writing blog posts and then silently editing them afterwards. It was never about the rules, only about creating a body of people with the aurhority to act like total cunts in the name of civility. That's what they get off on.
If CoC sound like a nice idea to you... remember, we had waaaay less drama in open source before the people who want CoCs showed up.
Instead of just 1 angry mail on a mailing list you can ignore, now there is weeks of drama as reputations are destroyed, communities are split, and the press gets involved to feed off the carcass.
Once you understand this dynamic, you see it for what it is: the petty feuds of small minded people, who claim to love open source but cannot stand the fact that anyone really is welcome.
Didn't you say a couple sentences above that the committee who were actually given authority decided there was no CoC violation? It sounds like the people you think acted badly were not actually given any authority to do so. But maybe I'm missing something?
There's plenty of precedent for people advocating for this: spousal abuse, animal abuse and sexual abuse are all areas where people said that laws about such things would result in widespread abuse of the laws and would do little to correct the problems the laws aimed to address.
We have that now with gun laws in the United States. People rather speciously say that new laws and the enforcement of those laws will be too intrusive, so we just really shouldn't have them.
(I don't want to have a discussion about gun laws specifically - an overwhelming majority of the United States want strong gun laws, and those who are OK with multiple mass shootings every week really have no compelling arguments beyond vaguely invoking "the Second Amendment", but I imagine there's plenty of overlap between people who think CoC are bad would and people who don't want new gun laws. I use gun laws in this example because of the weakness of the anti-gun law arguments.)
But what's really telling here are statements like this: "who claim to love open source but cannot stand the fact that anyone really is welcome"
So the people who are breaking CoC and making people feel unwelcome are somehow more important than the people who are enforcing CoC and making the CoC breakers feel unwelcome. Got it.
The entire thread flipped on me.
Since I've been hyperconscious to separate the work people accomplish from the organic thing that did the work. If not for that event, I'd still be using that account and I'd be critical of people who do 'bad' stuff on their off-time.
So Larry was into BDSM, that basically made women slaves. He was into the whole community thing and went to a wedding that was in the community. He gave a speech. he shared his speech. Larry's enemy used that as a weapon.
But Larry's girlfriend was/is mentally challenged - I dunno what exactly but there were some issues on the mental side of things that she needed help with. (Not meant to be nasty, I dunno how else to put it in a better way) Larry said he talked to the therapist/doctor/whatever who looked after his girlfriend and explained their kink to make sure they were ok with it and she wasn't being taken advantage of. This was a big deal to the people who didn't like Larry and they kept banging on about how he was taking advantage of a vulnerable woman.
Larry took her to a drupal conference thing. She wrote some code that went to Drupal's code base and those commits were attributed to Larry. There was an implication that she was forced and enslaved to write code for Drupal.
Larry's enemy as far as I know actually broke the code of conduct and I believe was banned.
Larry as far as I know while didn't do anything against the code of conduct was stopped from being allowed to contribute to conferences and various other things and basically stripped of his position within the Drupal Community and he was reasonably well respected within the PHP and Drupal community however he wasn't banned like the other person and remained in the community. He is still active there with his last post being 2 days ago.
Either women or men can choose to take submissive roles, and that is their free choice among practitioners. Likewise, either women or men can choose dominance (in fact it is popular for a dominatrix to be paid for her services.)
The BDSM community (not merely people who have a fetish) is very careful about safety and respect for others. There are safewords and failsafes and safety checks at every stage of the scene.
I think it is dismissive and close-minded to say that such a community "makes women slaves"; it shows that you are an outsider and that you know nothing of their customs, morals, or attitudes.
This specific BDSM-fetish did. That was part of the kink and the ideology behind it.
I ask because I'm not surprised at all that there's slavery among BDSM aficionados, but it is supposed to be consensual, and Larry himself asserts that every slave relationship is consensual in the communities he belonged to, as of 2017: https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/tmi-outing
So forgive me if I've misread your implication that any of this was non-consensual or forced. You didn't say so, but you seem to be implying that.
Their kink was a slave relationship and some people thought that was taking advantage of a mentally challenged woman. He says he even consulted with doctors to ensure they were able to consent. He says police also attended and were ok with it (but Dahmer and others prove that doesn’t really mean anything).
Power Corrupts, and any time you give a group of humans power over another group of humans they will abuse that power. EVERY TIME.
No human can resist, and it an immutable law of psychology. Power Corrupts and will be abused.
CoC's formalize this power, and result of which is inevitable
This is the key to any group organized by the Rule of Law. Having the rules written down, in theory, means that everyone knows what the boundaries of their liberty happens to be, and they are free to behave without constantly asking for permission. That's the theory. The reality is that sometimes that "laws" are poorly written for that purpose, and sometimes the way the group enforces those "laws" fails rise to the aspirations.
I think a CoC for a larger project is helpful for not only advertising the norms of the group, but creating an an opportunity to avoid arbitrary enforcement.
Unfortunately, a lot of those CoC are simply copy and pasted from other groups without the adopting group really understanding what they are adopting, and there's an absence of a "jury of your peers" and instead you are always "tried" by (often) self-selected judges who are mostly there for the thrill of being an enforcer.
So, it's like half-assed Rule of Law and you get half-assed results. But it's a step in the right direction.
Instead, the committee should be limited to gathering the information and, if any action is to be taken, it should ultimately be decided by a "jury of one's peers"--eg a group of non-committee members of the project selected at random. You'd probably have the project leadership operate in some capacity as a "judge".
I mean... there's a reason this stuff exists in the "real world". It's amazing that folks just throw all that out and try and start over from scratch, rather than actually, I dunno, trying to learn from what's already been tried. But then, we're software engineers, so... I guess that says it all.
Who you are in "real life" very much affects who you are, and what you are capable of, and how you are impacted by what you experience on-line. Anonymity works in very limited circumstances. It quickly becomes pathological over the long-term.
Sure, social norms need to adapt to the circumstances and the context, but the fundamentals of kindness, respect, integrity, and the need for communities to police themselves on some level, don't really go away.
These are long-term work projects where folks are either employed or are volunteering and donating considerable amounts of time and energy. If you want that to be successful, in the long term and for increasingly many people, you need a mechanism to deal with people behaving badly, or people not understanding one another. It's ridiculous to think this is all necessary when all you want to do is write some code, but it's also ridiculous to think you should have to worry about harassment, bullying, or worse when all you want to do is write some code.
this is not to say that one shouldn't be open with who they are in real life, when projecting themselves on the Internet, but, rather, to show that, just a couple short decades ago, it was far less popular to do this than it is now. Internet users were usernames, avatars, and forum sigs, and perhaps a personal webpage (which was highly unlikely to reveal much about one's real-life identity, either). that's all you had to go on at the base level, and then, from there, it was one's actions that influenced others' opinions of them, as opposed to anything having to do with one's real-life physical or demographic characteristics.
it was so cool, man, let me tell you. it felt like being on the brink of a glorious cyber-libertarian future, where all manner of real-life bigotry could be nonexistent, because it was useless, because nobody knew anything about anyone else, because we were interacting with cyber-avatars of each other first and foremost, only getting to know the real meatspace people behind the cyber-avatar after becoming friends with them, through shared purpose and/or interest. especially after learning that this dude I was interacting with, teaching, learning from, making stuff with, for months, online, was black, it was just so exciting, because one got the feeling that perhaps this Internet thing could truly be a force of good in the world—if everyone became used to interacting with these raceless sexless ideology-less cyber-avatars on this Internet thing, then perhaps, gradually, real-world bigotry would be phased out, as it would largely be useless in this new realm of cyberspace.
but then Facebook, Twitter, etc. came to be, the iPhone was released, and normies became connected to the Internet 24/7. then, as if that wasn't bad enough, the modern idea of identity politics cropped up mysteriously right around the time the #Occupy was gaining steam. then in 2013—a decade ago now—Donglegate happened, and it became clear to me that the cyber-libertarian dream of an utterly meritocratic, bigotry-free Internet, full of all kinds of weird and cool people coming together to share interests and make weird and cool stuff together and share said weird and cool stuff with the rest of the world, was most certainly long since dead.
You need two things for this kind of problem to occur:
1. people who abuse power
2. rules that allow this abuse (in this case the CoC)
You cannot change humans, but you can lobby to prevent 2 from happening (in this case lobby against a CoC to become adopted).
Call it something else than a code of conduct if it helps, but I don't believe you can not have a guideline of sorts.
All a CoC does is setup the illusion of open and unbiased enforcement.
It's like how cops have rules about needing reasonable cause to search vehicles lending them some legitimacy, but they simply have a dog trained to signal for something suspicious even when there isn't anything, allowing them to claim reasonable cause without being able to be questioned.
The problem is ultimately that the average person is ok with operating under such a rule regime. Systems like these were _made_ to be abused.
It's simple: If your project displays a CoC it won't get contributions. We'll fork it and remove the CoC where possible. If it's not possible we'll write our own.
I mean, of course it should. I’m not talking about the Drupal case because I don’t know the particulars, and it sounds complicated to say the least.
But imagine a very plausible case where someone fills their social media with slurs against how a particular race is dumb and lazy, then works on a software project with people of that race. It’s reasonable to expect that maybe they’re going to be a jerk to those members, ignore their suggestions, slow roll their merge requests, etc. It’s also reasonable to expect that those other members are going to seethe every time they see the jerk’s name cross their screen.
“Oh, he’s only a racist on social media” doesn’t pass muster.
It was worded rather sharply and I apologized; probably shouldn't have put it like that. I'm not the "internet atheist" type of person who enjoys challenging other people's beliefs in an attempt to come off as "smarter" or "more rational", but ... it is a load of bullshit innit?
I'm not vehemently against code of conducts; I rarely even notice if there's a CoC and I feel the overall goals are fine. But it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. No, we shouldn't go around trumping on other people's beliefs and be respectful of them, even when you personally think it's a load of bollocks, but at the same time making any challenge outright forbidden also doesn't quite sit well with me. It's also my belief that pseudoscientific quack medicine is harmful, so, you know...
So it's definitely whiplash inducing for the same group of people preaching inclusion and tolerance, and how we need to accept regional and racial dialects in the workplace, to then turn around and implement slackbots that nag and shame me for my regional speech patterns.
I wish you guys could understand that
The rest of the comment is speculative: you don't know anything about their politics, or have any reason to believe they're being obtuse.
Even that's a weak rule though. For example if a girls soccer team performed really well you might hear someone say "those guys really gave it their all today" (though I'd say this usage is mostly dead, I don't think I've heard it this way in a long time), but never "THE guys really gave it their all today".
I'm sure some linguists have studied this and have a term for this kind of thing.
I absolutely would not say "hey ladies"
It would feel too formal to say "hey everyone"
"Hey people" would be awkward
"Hey you all" eh
It might be better to leave it at "hey"
It might be best to just say "bye"
My region uses "you guys" for the you plural in English, too, and you petty speech totalitarians didn't show up until I was grown so even though I now live in a region that says y'all and even prefer it, when speaking I form sentences in my native language too quickly to catch myself every time I use my native term for you plural
But you and your language policing petty authoritarians would have me sent to the gulag for your ridiculous overly academic context ignoring willful and politically motivated misinterpretation of my diction
Screw you!
In any case, I think your example works better with a bisexual speaker. A straight guy would probably use more specific gendered language rather than a neuter construction. A bisexual person using "guys" to refer to the men and women (s)he has dated would be an example of a third person neuter usage—which I also think would be quite rare.
It seems very reasonable that "guys" could function similarly in English. Moreover, I might not say "the guys I've dated" as a straight man, but if all the women I've ever dated were talking together in a room, I wouldn't bat an eye asking "what are you guys all doing?".
Similarly, I wouldn't say "all the folks I've dated", but I might say "good evening, folks" -- the word is a misfit solely because of the idioms and context, not because the word is inherently communicating something else.
Like in those earlier examples, the people are probably all within the same house/yard at the same time when they're called to dinner, or they're all using the same online discussion forum at about the same time.
When discussing multiple individuals with significant time and/or distance separating them (like the people somebody has dated over the span of years), a more specific term like "men", "women", "men and women", or "people" would likely be used instead.
I have so much fun joking with some of my women friends that they're sexist because they're using "guys" instead of "folks".
To me, it's one of those things where someone is always going to be awkward and say "that doesn't include me". They may jokingly say something but some take it as a personal insult and just assume the other person is being sexist. While I always use "folks" just to avoid the hassle, personally I wouldn't be too bothered if the people who take "Hey guys" as a sexist insult don't talk to me.
I guess it is some kind of "gotcha", intended to undermine "woke" people but it seems a bit self-defeating.
"White people are so racist they're even racist when they're trying to be non-racist" seems more woke than anti-woke to me, but that doesn't seem to be the intention.
Is there injustice in the world? Clearly. Are these people insufferable? Also very much yes.
In the tech context specifically, we are very international in a way that doesn't map to US culture wars, which makes the white woke people look even more out of touch with reality.
And since the negative discourse (e.g. saying "Women face so many issue in the workplace" as a man) is way more socially palatable than a positive one (saying "Women have it OK now in the workplace" as a man), people who try to be sensible about thing not directly concerning them tend to overdo it by amplifying the "everything is bad" angle.
Which is why at the height of the BLM movements, lots of well-meaning (but IMO severely misguided) people felt that 'master' or 'blacklist' were carriers of oppression, while not thinking twice about words such as 'white noise' or 'white-label' (Implying that a lack of creativity or panache is associated with whiteness, the horror!), The former was among white 'wokes' sensibility-by-proxy, while for the latter the same crowd had the experience and tool to know this argument is bonker, and that anyone having issue with the expression 'white noise' has mental issue.
I came to this conclusion after a gay/muslim friend of mine, who likes to do humoristic quizzes on Instagram did one for the Ramadan. He asked "Apart from Ramadan, what are the other 4 pillars of Islam", and accepted the Ru Paul reference "Creativity, Uniqueness, Nerves and Talent" as the answer. The only people taking issue with that were non-muslim white french dudes who felt it was islamophobic, which greatly annoyed my friend, who felt it feed into the stereotypes of "angry muslim".
I'm a native English speaker in the US, in my late 50s, and I was taught that "guys" used in that way was gender neutral in grade school.
The idea of a native (probably white) English speaker lecturing them on it being sexist or non-inclusive is repugnant to the extreme. At that point they've lost the argument, and can frankly get fucked.
It really is amazing how those people don't see it that way and instead think they are really helping anyone. English was forced on a lot of the world. Now it's sort of happening again, in a different way and with infinitely less violence, but the justification remains the same: to civilize the savages.
And it's not like Japanese doesn't have similar sexist norms baked into its own vocabulary either (if anything, to a rather greater extent than English). No, an everyday modern speaker probably doesn't mean anything by the fact that it's danna-sama but oyome-san, or the fact that formal speech (as one would use with a superior) is read as feminine-coded in casual contexts. But that doesn't mean there's not something behind those norms, either.
Whether the lecture is counterproductive is an entirely different question to whether the usage is sexist.
I’ve been working on open source projects for about a decade now, including years of professional work, and I have never seen or heard someone chastised for using “guys” informally. This includes in communities with established, formal codes of conduct. It strikes me as something that most people wouldn’t even notice, unless the speaker was intentionally using it in a way that implies gender.
But, there are people out there who jump at the opportunity to take offense on someone else's behalf.
The female analog to "guys" seems to be "gals", but nobody uses that anymore, preferring "girls". The word "girls" is a word of automatic offense taking to some, even if everyone involved in the conversation is cool with it.
I've seen the "girls" one play out with someone stating that the women get a pass self-referencing and the guy who actually goes to lunch with them can't say it.
These same people who want to take offense are sometimes drawn to these CoC's -- either to implement or enforce them.
Then add in the desire to drop life changing punishments to such mild things. Say the wrong thing and get fired. See Python and the stupid dongle joke. That didn't need a video, that needed a brief reprimand of, "grow up" and it could have been done. Instead it got an interrogation and people fired -- and more CoC's for everything.
Holy crap, if some of these people had seen the 70's.
> Then add in the desire to drop life changing punishments to such mild things. Say the wrong thing and get fired. See Python and the stupid dongle joke. That didn't need a video, that needed a brief reprimand of, "grow up" and it could have been done. Instead it got an interrogation and people fired -- and more CoC's for everything.
To be clear: this had nothing to do with a CoC; I don't think PyCon even had one at the time. Given that both people ended up being fired it's unclear that a CoC could have even possibly produced worse individual outcomes for either, given that the power implied by one is normally limited to an online community or physical conference center.
A problem people have with them is they are being weaponized by people attracted to enforcing their concepts of thoughtcrime.
I don't see anything particularly interesting in the GCC one. It's just saying it's not a free for all like some places are ok with.
In particular: did you witness the instigating incident, the bullying, or both? Did the bullying actually weaponize a CoC, or is it your impression that the presence of a CoC empowered the bully? Is "bullying" your characterization or someone else's? And so on.
They probably means you should name the opensource project that "bullied (people) for greeting others".
> Hi! Reminder: “guys” is an inherently gendered term. Great alternatives include “everyone”, “folks”, “team”, "friends" or “y’all”. Thank you for helping us build a more inclusive community!
The only thing that really bothers me personally about this is the mistaken idea that language can be "inherently" anything. The meaning of a term varies based on usage, it is not inherent.
> I have never seen or heard someone chastised for using “guys” informally
A bot that is doing this is tantamount to a person doing it, since a person made the bot and a person installed the bot.
That's not a ping, that's imposing your language on others. A ping would be something like "guys is a gendered term for some people"
CoC's are poison, and if your project has a "Code of Conduct committee" it is dead to me.
I fully admit this hasn't been possible for everything, but I'm making great progress
If OP’s org does have a CoC equivalent, it wouldn’t be the gotcha you seem to think it is
I fear that that stipulation will be used to try and kick out people for holding "bad" opinions outside of the project. Like what was tried with Elia Schito.
The Code states, "Harassment and other exclusionary behavior aren't acceptable."
Yet, targeting specific individuals with exclusion seems to be the main method of enforcement.
As you indicated, the linked-to page recommends exclusion be used: "In addition, violations of this code outside these spaces may affect a person's ability to participate within them."
The GCC Code of Conduct Response Guide (https://gcc.gnu.org/conduct-response.html) also advocates for the use of exclusion: "In ongoing situations, any member may at their discretion employ any of the tools available to the committee, including bans and blocks."
And: "An imposed vacation (e.g. asking someone to "take a week off" from a mailing list or IRC)."
And: "A permanent or temporary ban from some or all project spaces (mailing lists, IRC, etc.)."
The "vacation" one seems particularly insidious to me, as it tries to portray externally-forced exclusion as something that a person voluntarily imposed on himself.
Like so many other open source project codes of conduct, this one also seems to be inherently self-contradictory and hypocritical.
That's not the gotcha you think it is; enforcers get higher privileges to enforce. Cops have the authority to carry a gun and kill people; the army has the authority to carry and use guns that civilians don't.
"Take some time off" is a more friendly alternative to "you are unwanted / banned"; the former is trying to help them, the latter is excluding them.
I would literally rather be banned with language telling me I was banned, because that's honest at least. If you're kicking me out of a community because you don't like me, at least have the decency not to pretend to my face like you are trying to do me a favor.
In government cops should not have more authority to "carry a gun and kill people" over that of the average person. If a cop needs to use deadly force, then any other person in that same situation should be authorized to use deadly force.
Rules for theee but not for me is a terrible doctrine, equality for everyone (including the enforcers) under the law should be the goal
CoCs aren't about stopping harassment and exclusion, they're about establishing a monopoly on harassment and exclusion.
And please don't be difficult by choice. As I wrote, it's not just about threats, but also about a host of other things (discrimination, sexually explicit/violent material, doxxing, personal insults, unwelcoming sexual attention, advocation for any of the beforementioned behavior, repeated harassment). Not everything is something you would approach the police over, but it's all stuff you don't want to be subject to because you contribute to an open source project.
https://github.com/ltworf/international_code_of_conduct/blob...
One place where I disagree is in the "skill discrimination" section. If you look up the definition of the word "discrimination", you'd see that it probably means something different (in common use) than what you intend.
I'd be fine with agreeing that volunteers are not obligated to put energy in to low quality / low energy contributions, but saying explanations aren't required is unhelpful. "It's low quality code" is plenty of explanation. What you've written suggests that contributions can be rejected because of previous instances of low quality / low effort, without explanation, and that does nothing to further a project. A technical, if short, explanation is always a good idea.
I've tried to explain kindly why I reject and what to change… but results were poor. The code of conduct doesn't forbid to try, it just doesn't punish giving up.
I see that having CoC is getting standard with OSS projects, old and new alike. But have no idea if it actually does anything.
"If you have a CoC, then you have formal rules around moderation with the option to appeal"
Basically, when someone does something stupid (and let's be realistic, it will happen) then there are clear rules and processes to follow.
It seems a lot of people have a problem with the wording, or the implication that their behaviour may be bad and get them removed.
I am certainly aware of projects which have banned people for CoC violations. These usually aren’t loudly publicized, so I’m not going to do so here. Would those projects have banned those people anyway? No way to know.
Codes of conduct are more about changing who is in the community than about changing the conduct of existing community members. Periodically someone runs afoul of the ruling elite who pass judgement upon them behind closed doors, usually leading to excommunication. The atmosphere of knowing what you say will be reported upwards and optionally stripped of context and rephrased to your detriment promotes an environment of inclusivity and safety.
I'm not totally clear what "inclusivity" means at this point. It seems to be "excluding unpopular people and ideas", which should be termed "exclusivity". I've been known to say openly critical things about parts of our industry in public - basically because a lot of software dev is done really badly - and that sort of general negativity has no place relative to enthusiastically praising whatever nonsense is going on at the time.
E.g. you go to a talk on concurrency. You know it's nonsense, the code on the slides was wrong and the speaker has totally misunderstood the domain. So you talk with fellow attendees about how it was really interesting and excellent. One guy says "the first example deadlocks", and that makes someone feel uncomfortable, properly fixed by kicking him out of the conference. This is very inclusive and good for industry. Then you all go off to write code that doesn't work.
edit: can't believe I forgot the best part. If there's someone in the community you don't like - maybe their work makes you feel inferior, or they're a competitor in some sense, the burden of proof for triggering evisceration by committee is usually negligible. Tell some people they made you feel uncomfortable, let some of them talk you into reporting it and put them down as witnesses, bang - problem solved. Very convenient.
Most of the developed world has really clear ideas about the scary things - sexual assault, harassment and so forth, dealt with by a judicial system. So the honourable goals of the CoC systems could be achieved by following norms of society with the existing structures in place. That seems better to me.
Oh, please. That's just unfounded FUD-spreading.
DI became DEI became DEIB in less than a decade. They are working on new initials as we speak, to confuse and demoralize anyone who opposes this make-it-up-as-we-go-along sophistry. Inventing all of this language infrastructure around what used to just be the Golden Rule is clear nonsense.
E - Equity (not equality)
I - Inclusion
B - Belonging
Inclusion
Equity
Belonging
they're not meaningful
uh, i might be out of the loop, what's wrong with the word "deadlock" now ?
The CoC people are relatively transparent that they want to be able to push people like Torvalds and Stallman out of projects. Raising the question; do we have a limitless supply of Stallmans and Torvalds out there to draw on, or are these people actually quite rare? From what I can tell they are quite rare and need to be encouraged in the good they do rather than ostracised for the flaws that all humans have in some way or another.
Stallman is a great example. There is a long queue of people lining up to criticise him, but nobody has successfully cobbled together an alternative to the FSF. It wouldn't be hard. GPL 2.0 hit a better sweet spot than 3.0. Nobody has stepped up to the plate.
This isn't true. I have actually seen several non-FSF/OSI attempts at licenses in the recent past, most notably License Zero with its Prosperity and Parity licenses, as well as alternative licenses like the Server Side Public License and Business Source License.
The trouble is that attempting to learn from the lessons of past licenses tends to draw a lot of dogmatic outrage because said licenses either don't conform to the open source definition or four freedoms - or at least, not in the opinion of the OSI or FSF.
If developers are unwilling to think outside those boxes en masse, then we are in effect "stuck" with the existing power structures. And that power structure is what led to things like the wide preference of permissive licenses and promoting and prioritizing the GPLv3 over the AGPLv3.
They generate outrage because they are accompanied by people trying to change the definition of open-source, not with the idea of alternative licenses.
If the precondition of learning lessons from past licenses is that they must follow the rules set by those past licenses as holy writ, then it follows that organizations like the FSF with leaders like RMS are the best you can hope for.
Personally, I think we as a community of developers are capable of better.
- Shared Source
- Clear Source
- Awesome Source
- Friendly Source
- Just SourceOpen source means things and people are right to complain when your license doesn't mean that. So you can have your Source-available licenses, use them if it's right for your project, but stop trying to freeboot off the OS/FS brand.
Probably why M$ owned github encourages them.
Is there a current need for the FSF or alternatives? There's a wide variety of licenses already developed and between GPL2 and 3, LGPLs, AGPL, BSD/MIT, Apache, Mozilla, and normal commercial licenses, plus or minus PATENTS files, I'm not sure we need an organization that is developing another license, plus advocacy, plus developing a collection of fairly unrelated software at this point. I guess you could say the Apache foundation almost does the same thing, although I don't think they did much advocacy to use their license.
Yes, FSF was important, but when it winds down, it will not be replaced by one organization.
The issue I have is the people who are confident that cancelling that person is a good idea. It seems like a mistake.
careful there you will get some very bad takes, and memes on Popper's paradox of tolerance, which has been completely bastardized to justify all manner of intolerance these days...
I think this line of thought deserves some exploration.
If the burden of proof truly was negligible, CoCs would probably be weaponized more often. My impression is more that the burden of proof is reduced selectively, in favor of people who are good at a certain type of politics / playing social games.
So CoCs can be perceived as a shift of power away from technical merit and towards social skills. No wonder there's a backlash from a lot of technical folks. It's also objectively questionable whether such a shift of power is useful for projects.
(Humans are always gonna politic, even if it's only nerds, but the normative shift of whether politicking is officially condoned or even valued is what matters)
I don't think it's a surprise that we're seeing CoCs in this age of commercialized open source. In the 90s and 00s, open source projects could only survive by technical merit. Nowadays, corporate sponsorship is a very important factor in project viability, and with corporations comes the bigger focus on politics.
Towards social merit. If you can't/won't convince the new "powers that be" that you are sufficiently aligned with their dogma, then goodbye.
- Regular meetings to keep everyone on-track (as nobody is being paid, its a passion project, etc)
- Setting up clear rules and moderation guidelines, together. The team sat together and came up with a list of do's and don't's, best practices and principles to be used when moderating. Such simple ideas as "maximizing interaction" while keeping within the rules and Discord ToS, had a noticable impact. This was also useful to review moderation action that had been taken, and evaluate moderators, and possibly rollback moderation actions that were not in line with the code of conduct.
TL;DR: Formalizing rules that have existed informally only makes it easier to review moderation actions, to moderate, and to add new people to the team. It also clarifies to the community how moderation is done.
There's a difference for baning people in places where they should behave professionally, and banning people for stuff they do outside of those places.
For example: is hurling abuse at another member about their sexuality in a bar not connected to a conference, "a space under GCC control"?
Technically: no. But those people are only proximal due to participation in the project.
But maybe they don't do it to members. Maybe it's just their hobby - attend GCC conferences and hurl abuse at people in the nearby gay bars each night, then show up the next day in the T-shirt and conference badge, forcing the reception staff they were yelling at the previous night to interact with them.
Again: technically, not connected to GCC. After all - they could fly to any city they want at any time and do this. They're not doing it in "spaces under GCC control". But they're doing it right next to them. And any member of the public making casual observations would start to see the pattern of this happening whenever a GCC conference is in town.
With other environments like forums, or even single commits or issues opened, I think it shouldn't apply; they're just randos, often even anonymous.
But with some projects, where for legal reasons people's real names & identities have to be exposed, it becomes another matter.
For what it's worth, I dislike real identities on the internet; I think e.g. open source projects should allow contributions from randoms / nicknames. But I guess there's legal issues.
conferences became cesspits.
project leaders went from knowledgable dictators to well-liked community leaders, who had no idea what they were doing, and into which direction to go forward. the yes-sayers.
Ideally a community should not need this. But most so-called communities are not communities. Membership and participation can be fleeting so there will be a constant influx and loss of members and participants, all of whom hold different values and some of whom the original founders would have never invited in the first place.
So the risk is that a project built by people sharing a common set of values may be recuperated by people diametrically opposed to those values. Defining those values helps with that. For the primary demographic of HN, usually "don't be a dick" suffices for this. The problem is that lists of values don't provide an enforcement mechanism.
This means you likely end up with one of two situations after a preexisting project adopts a CoC: either nothing changes because the code of conduct is not enforced (or only inconsistently), or nothing changes because everybody already involved in the project agrees with it and those e.g. throwing slurs at existing members or otherwise harrassing them would have been kicked out anyway.
The problem is when projects that don't have a strong ideological/emotional investment in codifying a set of shared values (or lack a consistently shared set of values altogether) treat a CoC like a DEI program and just bolt it onto their project to tick a box and stop people from complaining. This misleads those who treat CoCs seriously into joining while also weakening the signalling effect of CoCs for other projects. In my experience this is the case for most OSS projects and in the worst cases it leads to overeager admins enforcing the letter of the law because there really was no spirit of the law to begin with, going through the authoritarian motions of enforcement without any ulterior purpose - and of course these projects will still selectively spare particularly influential individuals regardless of their misdeeds.
Being hateful, insulting, or otherwise offensive is not a big deal if we can still work along. These stupid "codes of conduct" make civilization impossible. Worse, they force the language to be boringly insipid.
> Being hateful, insulting, or otherwise offensive is not a big deal if we can still work along.
and those that think:
> I can't work along somebody who is hateful, insulting, or otherwise offensive.
I'm not sure either group is completely right, but it seems that being nicer would solve this whole problem...
I agree 100%. Being nice is the best and solves nearly everything. Problem is, COCs give undue power to some non-nice people via "enforcement committees" and whatnot.
It's remarkable - your supervisor behaves in an increasingly unhinged manner towards you, and you go look for informal conflict resolution and none is to be had. Yes, there is a code of conduct, there is the diversitylady, but no way of putting a conflict to bed, just the CoC committee that we are asked to trust.
Pfui!
In a different workplace I have worked through mediation and the outcome could be accepted.
One could argue that the difference here is that codes of conduct are being enforced in a top-down fashion, that is, the people you disagree with are actually in the leadership of the project. But I can see how this argument could just as well be used to justify the value of codes of conduct.
FWIW, I've tried but I simply cannot decide if I'm ultimately in favor or against codes of conduct.
Abrasive behavior has side effects, so it excludes both good contributors and abusives like your definition.
The alternative is more or less silent treatment, abusives dont get engagement with their “contribution” because no one has time to waste on it. This also discourages them, and it doesnt scare off helpful but emotionally sensitive contributors.
This isnt to say you dont prefer the abrasive community! I just doubt the efficacy of that approach to getting shit done.
However, the real gold is in the GNU Kind Communications Guidelines [0] that is linked to at the bottom, which has existed for years (published 2018, updated 2022). I wish they would have just merge the two documents instead of incorporating by reference.
[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.en.html
This reminds me of the complaints about seatbelts. Yeah, every once in a while, a seatbelt makes a crash worse. Requiring seatbelts takes away the sense of freedom you have in a car. That sort of thing. Sometimes, a CoC will be abused to harass people. Step back and look at the overall impact of CoCs (and seatbelts). CoCs help moderators make consistent decisions. When decisions are more consistent, people can worry less about whether they are breaking the rules and focus more on getting work done.
I don't think this is unreasonable. As another commenter has alluded to, one of the more typical implementation details of this meme is to forbid the common greeting "hey guys" and to instead insist people use "hey folks".
Anyone can understand that the word "folks" is superficially more inclusive than "guys", but I don't think performing that switcheroo actually helps anyone[^1].
There are many examples of don't-say-this-word-but-instead-say-this-other-one in this space, so I don't think the 1984-newspeak future characterisation is unfair.
---
[^1]: Ok, I can imagine someone feeling othered in some scenario, but I don't think blanket language bans are a good solution. Empathy and thoughtfulness would be better than pearl clutching and minutiae keeping.
The CoC is mainly used to eject serial harassers out of a community, as far as I can tell. Serial harassers generally try to skirt the rules and hide their behavior, so the CoC has that “violations of this code outside these spaces” clause in it. You know, somebody making sexual remarks to other community members at a bar after a conference, or worse.
I have seen a lot of projects push to use inclusive language along the lines of whitelist/blacklist -> allowlist/denylist, or master/slave -> leader/follower. I’ve seen the CoC used to justify the changes, but nobody’s getting ejected from the community for refusing to use the terms.
(Please don’t interpret universal quantifiers mathematically.)
I’ve encountered it directly multiple times, so I’m feeling slightly gaslighted.
> but nobody’s getting ejected from the community for refusing to use the terms.
How do you know this? And which communities are you referring to? Surely you can’t be suggesting that no company has ever reprimanded an employee for refusing to stop using certain kinds of language? There are ramifications other than direct ejection, so this issue isn’t quite as black and white as you seem to be portraying. At least anecdotally, I can tell you that it was a problem when a former colleague refused to stop saying “that’s what she said.” It’s not a fireable offence per se, but it does move the needle with management sentiment on whether or not the professional relationship ought to continue.
Could you elaborate on this? It’s just not something I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve never heard any direct accounts of it, so I would be very interested in hearing more about it.
> Surely you can’t be suggesting that no company has ever reprimanded an employee for refusing to stop using certain kinds of language?
You are correct—I am not suggesting that. That’s what “please don’t interpret universal quantifiers mathematically” means—it means, exactly as you said, that I am not suggesting that “no company has ever”.
It sounds like you’ve shifted the discussion from communities (like GCC developers) to companies. Companies have HR departments, and they have their own ways of managing employee behaviors—so the discussion about how someone got in trouble at some company does not seem germane.
> At least anecdotally, I can tell you that it was a problem when a former colleague refused to stop saying “that’s what she said.”
If an employee refuses to stop saying “that’s what she said”, then it is good for the employee to get in trouble. I’m not sure what kind of inferences you are making here. If you’re making the argument that someone should be able to say “that’s what she said” in a work environment without consequences, then we disagree there. To me, it’s obvious that the joke is inappropriate at work.
It's been the policy at two companies I've worked at, and the policy has been enforced. Also I have seen it in some open source communities. For example, if you type "hey guys" into the Elm language Slack channel, you get this automated response:
> Terms like guys can make people feel like they're being left out! :scream: Let everyone and all the folks know you're talking to them! :hearts: :robot_face:
---
> It sounds like you’ve shifted the discussion from communities (like GCC developers) to companies. Companies have HR departments, and they have their own ways of managing employee behaviors—so the discussion about how someone got in trouble at some company does not seem germane.
Companies are communities too. Often with shared, codified values. Like, you know, a code of conduct.
> If you’re making the argument that someone should be able to say “that’s what she said” in a work environment without consequences, then we disagree there. To me, it’s obvious that the joke is inappropriate at work.
That's not the argument I'm making, so don't construct a strawman, thanks.
It's clear to me you are not listening and instead you are relying on logical fallacies, so let's end the discussion here.
I have been away from hacker news for about 2 to 3 years and quite frankly I am shocked that this place is still having this same tired argument whereas outside it seems to be an accepted fact of life that having rules surrounding the conduct of project participants is in fact a good thing.
Isn't that the problem? Accept it. Don't ask questions, or else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance
The problem is that the specific phrase "Code of Conduct" has been dragged into a culture war. And if the problem is the parlance, the solution is to just call it something different, like "Conduct Policy", "Rules", or something similar.
It might seem trite, but in my experience using a different name seems to shut off the part of some folks brain who automatically assume said rules will be enforced in bad faith.
Rules getting enforced in bad faith as people coalesce power in their sphere is a story as old as human history. Why would you argue that we have an exception in this case?
Whoops, ya got me! :)
In all seriousness, there's no contradiction. The phrase "Code of Conduct" was part of a culture war, but in my experience the conversation outside of places like Hacker News has shifted significantly in recent years. Reading this thread was like stepping into a time machine, and not in a pleasant or nostalgic way.
<< conduct of project participants is in fact a good thing.
Is it though?
I think this talks past concerns.
"Just kick out the rude people" is probably a good thing. "Just kick out the people the admins don't like" is probably a bad thing (or at least isn't as impartial as the former).
With sections like "In addition, violations of this code outside these spaces may affect a person's ability to participate within them" it really seems the intention of the rules goes above/beyond "rules for the space where project participants communicate in".
That is intentional, as I believe that these discussions attract rules lawyers who I feel are missing the point.
If the people running the project enforce rules in bad faith, a CoC like the Contributors Code of Conduct is not materially different from an informal list of bullet-point rules, or even an tacit "Don't be a jerk."
I had to get attacked for a joke I put on social media before I realized how insane CoCs on voluntary work are.
> I was indifferent/supportive of CoCs until it was used against me over some trivial thing
How can we avoid needing to get to that point?
The whole CoC is a project of an ideology that is categorically against merit and competence and in favour of identity politics.
To see these CoC's in terms of specific rules is missing the forest for the trees.
I didn't address all the accuses against him, just the one about being ableist, and how as a disabled person I don't think non-disabled people should decide just to push their agenda.
Anyway, I got some thanks in private, for speaking up, but nobody publicly replied.
the mail in question, if you care to read it: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2021/03/msg00142.html
I wrote a "Stallman is not a good leader, but he's not a transphobic ableist monster" article and I got more feedback over email and Twitter PM than everything else I've written combined.
On HN it was flagged after a brief discussion shrug. I think it upset both the pro- and anti-Stallman people because I do think we're better off without Stallman, but not for the reasons in that ridiculous letter. For all his failings, I do think he's a good person.
I think people are afraid when there is no reason to be. If you lose your job, just get a new one it's not like it's hard in the tech sector anyway.
What would you replace it with? And what is the stuff being debated? I thought a code of conduct (or any form of "rules") was to prevent debates, avoid ambiguity, and clearly outline what is and isn't allowed in a community. (or outside one, which I do have a problem with. One of the rules of my forums, alongside an all-encompassing "don't be a dick", is a rule saying you shouldn't take drama from other sites to ours.)
The inverse is also a problem, and it's the one addressed by that type of rule. Taking drama from this site to other sites. If someone has pre-existing beef with someone else in your community, it's not ok if they bring that to your site, sure. But if Joe gets on Sally's nerves on-site, it's fine if she sends him a direct email filled with all sorts of flavorful harassment over it? And it's fine cause she stepped one inch over the border before doing it? Nah, they're both problems.
You can't have a product like this without its community, and you can't have a community without rules.
You’re inverting what is written in the CoC and reporting that here. The CoC does not prohibit unfriendliness.
I am guessing that the reason “be friendly and patient” is in the CoC is because projects like GCC are having trouble attracting new maintainers. As far as I can tell, the project is in trouble—for a long time, GCC was the only game in town, and now that people could just as easily decide to contribute to LLVM/Clang instead, GCC needs to take some effort to make sure that it still has maintainers long-term.
The idea that a CoC “not needed” doesn’t seem credible, I think you’d need to provide some kind of reasoning to support that argument. You haven’t provided any reasoning besides “GCC existed for 30 years without one”, and that argument doesn’t make any logical sense. The landscape has changed, there are competitors (LLVM), and some of GCC’s previous decisions at the highest level have made it somewhat hostile to contributors—something which the project can no longer afford to do.
> allows anti-GPL companies (see latest RHEL upstream source portal incident) running the steering committee to decide what the vague language actually means without disclosing what financial interests are behind the decisions to shut down discussions.
This seems like an unreasonable and invalid complaint to me. It hypothesizes that the CoC will be wielded as a weapon to achieve some kind of “anti-GPL” corporate goals, or something to that effect.
If anything, I’ve only seen, in the GCC project, “pro-GPL” abuses, where Stallman has directed GCC developers to make technical decisions not based on technical merits, but based on the desire of Stallman to advance the FSF’s pro-GPL goals politically. I’m talking about stuff like having a serializable IR here—technical decisions which make a lot of sense, but which the politics of GCC quashed in order to support the pro-GPL mission.
And here LLVM is, with its serializable IR, and pro-corporate licensing scheme, taking away mindshare from GCC.
The CoC is not really a pro-corporate tool any more than it is a pro-GPL tool. It is a tool for fixing problems in a community, and the GCC project needs to put a lot of thought and care into how it runs its community, because the long-term viability of that community is now in jeopardy. The CoC is there to improve the community—and if you think CoCs should have more detail, that’s something that can be fixed over time—rules tend to get more detailed as they are modified and updated.
As others have already pointed out, paradoxically, CoCs in OSS have done more net social harm than good. God forbid your project's top contributor use the word "guys" or "blacklist" else he'll be immediately ousted from the project.
Very good.
> If you believe someone is violating the code of conduct, we ask that you report it by emailing conduct@gcc.gnu.org.
What happened to "a guide to make it easier to enrich all of us"?
If the basics like "don't be a racist dickhead" need to be codified to someone then they won't last long in most spaces anyway. People generally call that kind of thing out fairly quickly and distance themselves.
Unless we're on 4chan.
That said, it is true that there are malicious actors who weaponise codes of conduct.
I wonder if there's an equivalent to vexatious litigation in the CoC space. Perhaps there ought to be some means to punish CoC abuse, and to ensure that the accuser has some skin in the game.
Although, perhaps that has more serious ramifications also. I'm not sure. Seems like a hard problem.
Nobody cares about a CoC and people will do what they will regardless of what the CoC says.
Totally, that's why no one is whining about it in this thread.
> In addition, violations of this code outside these spaces may affect a person's ability to participate within them.
which sort of negates all the other good aspects. If a CoC is a contract or agreement, it should provide guarantees for both sides, i.e. that inappropriate behavior will be punished but also make it exactly clear which things are inappropriate.
There are absolutely no reasons to extend the CoC to spaces outside the project other than to give the enforcers more opportunities to arbitrarily target people.
Kind of like reddit moderator situation atm
But more importantly, most people who complain about the CoC are not contributors.