Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

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What if you believe that only married male-female couples should have sex and children? Or that people with penises don't belong in womens spaces? Or whatever other currently controversial topic?

It has nothing to do with GCC, nothing with code quality, nothing with your contributions to the project, you don't say that in code, in code comments, on gcc mailing lists, anywhere gcc related.

But, because of the CoC ( https://gcc.gnu.org/conduct.html ), which says:

> This code of conduct applies to all spaces managed by the GCC project. This includes IRC, the mailing lists, the issue tracker, events, and any other forums created by the project team which the community uses for communication.

(this ^ part is ok, you should behave like a professional when dealing with stuff like this; general (non-gcc-related) politics or whatever non-gcc-related doesn't belong in GCC mailing lists)

> In addition, violations of this code outside these spaces may affect a person's ability to participate within them.

But this part changes everything, and makes CoCs like this one a bad thing.

Been on a (eg.) Trump rally in your free time, unrelated to anything GCC? Some overzelaous CoC enforcer bans you, and it's "totally fine", because the CoC allows this.

I'm not sold on the idea that "violations of this code outside these spaces" is a bad thing, it depends what those violations are.

I'm completely happy and have spent my career working with people who's views don't always align with my own. If I have a religious co-worker who believes I will spend eternity burning in hell for my sexuality, it doesn't bother me in the slightest. They have a right to their view, I have a right to my view, and discussion of those views should be left outside of the workplace.

As long as this person treats me with respect, the fact they think I'll spend my non-existent afterlife in a non-existent hell has zero impact on my life.

On the other hand, if they spend their free time advocating for things which will have an impact on my life, such as sending me to prison for my sexuality, that's a very different story. It would be impossible for me to work with someone in a constructive way knowing they're pushing for a world without me in it.

If they're happy to throw me out of society and into prison, I'm happy to throw them out of my project.

>I'm not sold on the idea that "violations of this code outside these spaces" is a bad thing,

Let's frame it in a more relatable context.

Your employer can fire you for violating the company code of conduct, despite your behaviour having absolutely nothing to do with the company or its business.

This is completely commonplace. Yes, you can be fired for doing something outside of work that would bring your employer into disrepute.

If anything this used to be much more common before the era of codes of conduct, when people were, for example, routinely fired when it was discovered that they were gay.

> If anything this used to be much more common before the era of codes of conduct, when people were, for example, routinely fired when it was discovered that they were gay.

Do we really want to go back to those times?

Your comment is a bit cryptic, but I assume you're trying to make an equivalence between, say, someone being fired for being gay in the 1970s and someone now being fired for saying hateful things about trans people. These scenarios are only comparable at a level of abstraction that's not useful. It's only inconsistent to oppose one thing and not the other if you think that employers should be barred from firing people for anything that they say or do outside of work. I don't think there has ever been a society where this was the norm. Looking at the big picture, people nowadays have far more freedom in this respect than they ever did (e.g. women are not fired when they get married).

How many people are fired for saying hateful things about trans people?

vs.

How many people are fired for saying things that many trans people disagree with?

There's a lot of overlap between those two categories, so I'd assume about the same number. But like many others in this thread you're choosing to make your point in a cryptic way. I'm sure you know that statistics on this aren't available, so what is the point that you really want to make here?

If you can be fired for doing something in private, then your work intrudes and takes over your personal life. If it happens, than it's a huge mistake on the part of the society, as it robs humans of their life outside of work, and turns them into half-slaves where their workplace has a say over their entire life.

Instead of continuing this practice, we should work to stop it and restore the private sphere.

> This is completely commonplace.

Not in EU.

> Your employer can fire you for violating the company code of conduct, despite your behaviour having absolutely nothing to do with the company or its business.

In particular, if you're in favor of both this CoC and of labor unions, then your beliefs are inconsistent, since one of the things labor unions do is try to prevent their members from being fired without legitimate, work-related reasons.

>..., it depends what those violations are.

It decidedly does not. To quote Kovarex, a Factorio dev: “If Stalin had a good writeup on programming, would linking that be dangerous?” [1]

I believe VERY strongly in separating the art from the artist.

[1]https://old.reddit.com/r/factorio/comments/o2ly6f/friday_fac...

Yes, it would definitely be dangerous, but not in the way Kovarex is thinking of. There's a reason you wouldn't be able to find a link to it on any corporate webpage, right?

You seem to be conflating reading an idea and working together. If Stalin had some good programming idea, that idea itself isn't tainted. I wouldn't mind using a library that incorporates that idea. However I would never want to work with him together on a project. A common theme in this discussion seems to be the delusion that working together on code is some pure abstract thing without any emotions or personality involved. Even something as basic as how to name stuff is deeply emotional. And there exists the whole surrounding aspect of communication and coordination.

And in regards to the dangerous part, there is a very real danger in giving people a platform and potentially promoting them. If a known white suprematist draws beautiful pictures, I wouldn't want them at my art gallery. Their world views are so strongly incompatible with mine that I don't want to help them become more popular, even by proxy.

> A common theme in this discussion seems to be the delusion that working together on code is some pure abstract thing without any emotions or personality involved.

Yes, strive towards that. If you can't keep your emotions in check, seek help with that instead of taking it out on people you are emotional about.

> And in regards to the dangerous part, there is a very real danger in giving people a platform and potentially promoting them.

Deplatforming based on feelings and especially the normalization of that is a much much much bigger danger. Don't expect to always be on the good sides of those holding the power even if you are now.

> Their world views are so strongly incompatible with mine that I don't want to help them become more popular, even by proxy.

If their world views don't affect their contributions to the project then that's squarely a you problem.

> because the CoC allows this.

Project owners could do this before the CoC was created, and even if the CoC explicitly disallowed it, the project owners could do it anyway. The existence of the CoC changes absolutely nothing about what the project owners can and cannot do.

They could, but their justification had to be "I don't like you". The CoC process is designed to enable exclusion via opaque committees who justify their decisions by reference to vague and subjective criteria. It makes the people doing it feel better by allowing them to pretend everyone signed up for whatever random thing they decided today, and thus shield themselves from criticism.

The irony here is that you're using the same kind of logic (the project can't survive if it's closed to transphobes!) that's mocked in the following comment when the shoe is on the other foot (LOL the project can't survive without trans people):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36430649

This does highlight the point that diversity is to some extent a zero sum game. You can welcome trans people to your project, or transphobes, but not necessarily both.

(I am just using trans people as one of many possible examples.)

You can welcome trans people to your project, or transphobes, but not necessarily both.

You don't need to "welcome" either. You just don't talk about that stuff because it has zero relevance to your project, unless you're trying to use it as a political statement (which technical projects shouldn't be at all.)

You’re essentially proposing to do nothing and have faith that everyone will get along and that everyone will feel comfortable contributing. It’s a nice idea, but it tends not to work in practice.

Left to their own devices, people will talk about things that aren’t directly related to the project. How would you propose to stop them if not by enforcing certain conduct rules? You’re effectively just advocating for a different code of conduct, whose ban on all political discussions could also be portrayed in a rather Orwellian light by people opposed to it.

Those who try to inject politics, especially identity politics, where it doesn't belong should simply be ignored. As the saying goes, "don't feed the trolls".

People going off topic and talking about their lives in IRC isn't injecting politics, dude, it's human.

That’s your proposed rule (which I disagree with), but how do you propose to enforce it? It’s either just wishful thinking or a different - and worse - code of conduct.

The world was better when personal sex lives were not a discussion topic of casual acquaintances.

The thought of the average person having sex is repulsive to me. I don't want to know anything at all about it, especially if they're into weird stuff, but even if not.

Most people feel this way. Why is it so hard to understand?

As regressive as "don't ask; don't tell" sounds, I pretty much agree.

Unless it is somehow very relevant to the project, I just don't want to know about anybody's race, gender, genitals, or politics. All those things can be weaponized to become divisive. I just want to work together with other people who are passionate about great technology.

Are you sure you want race and gender in the list there? You’re going to refer to all your colleagues as ‘they’ and ask them to avoid accidentally revealing their gender? Don’t mention that you got a gift for Father’s Day! I guess they’re not allowed to put photos on their GitHub profiles in case you can determine which race they probably are. Meeting any of them in person is, of course, completely out of the question.

This ‘don’t ask don’t’ tell stuff is regressive, but in discussions like this it sometimes seems to devolve into pure nonsense. No human community functions as you're suggesting. The literal content of what’s being said is so crazy that the subtext is clear: “if you’re not cis, white and hetero, then keep quiet about it”.

So basically you want to go to a technical forum with a significant number of Irish members and tell them that in your opinion Irish people should not exist? Don't you see how that makes the place unwelcoming to them??

(Replace Irish with gay, trans, republican, ...)

That's not what GP advocated for, at all.

GP said that the behaviour outside of the workplace is not relevant to the workplace.

There are always scissor cases. Suppose X, a Ukrainian says on Twitter "I wish the Russians would get out of Ukraine" and then Y, a Ukrainian of Russian ethnicity reports X for saying that Y shouldn't exist. Who is right in this case, X or Y?

Replace Russia/Ukraine with your favorite contentious issue and you could potentially see communities splitting up over this.

There's no right or wrong in this case though. The statement is a wish, it's not punching down on Russians. And the report is invalid, because X did not in fact say what Y claims that they said.

It's not the issue itself, it's the intent. If the intent is exclusionary - if X did say Y should not exist - then there's negative, unwelcoming intent.

It's not actually as complicated as the anti-CoC crowd is trying to make it look. All CoC's should / could be summarized as "be nice", with the caveat that if you're not, you won't be treated nicely either. And even that's not the case, because nine times out of ten, you will be asked to change your behaviour and patiently explained why it's bad.

And most adults can accept that. They can accept that saying "X should not exist" is bad.

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