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.
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.
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 "
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.
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).
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...
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.
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.