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Comment by beardicus | Hacker News Reader

i guess if you think enforcing a code of conduct is a "scandal" and a "weapon" then maybe it's not for you? most people don't get hung up on this stuff though.

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I think that bickering over a code of conduct before anyone has even written any code is a potential sign of a project that's not going to be healthy. It's not a guarantee, but it's a big deal to switch to a new system so I wanted to be cautious.

And as for "maybe it's not for you", I agree and that's what I stated. I wanted to bring it to the attention of other potential users who may also feel that it's not for them either.

As someone who’s built a community code of conduct from scratch, you have to discuss what everyone thinks is important to come to consensus. Reducing this critical discourse to “bickering” indicates to me that you’re not the right person to be a part of that process.

I have no interest in being part of that process at all. I'm not sure what the point of your response even is. I was evaluating Forgejo as a potential replacement for my Gitlab instance. What I saw was a very young project that was already completely wrapped around the axle with drama an infighting. I made a decision to pass it by because to me, this represents a high risk of a project that will implode under its own weight. I hope I'm wrong, because I'd like to see some sort of Gogs/Gitea-like project succeed. Years ago I checked out Gogs and it was interesting but not quite ready. More recently I just about pulled the plug on moving to Gitea, but then the mess with ownership happened. Forgejo was announced and so I checked it out, but didn't like what I saw.

You may have a different opinion of the importance of these issues (or disagreement over whether they're issues at all) and I respect that. I'm simply sharing mine.

But the bickering is bad. It's almost always a clique of mostly white, mostly upper middle class, who have a lot of time on their hands and that are more familiar with how to "play" the culture. Whenever I hear about a project with permanent COC bickering and enforcing and blablabla, I just know exactly the demographic that will be part of said project. It cannot be more off-putting for non western devs and contributors if they tried.

After clicking “edited” and reading the original messages it’s very clear it’s not a healthy project; no code or further investigation necessary.

Thanks for pointing this out and potentially saving people the trouble.

Au contraire, I think most of us prefer to put engineering above politics, and prefer to stay clear when detecting warning signs of upcoming drama.

I don't know anything about Forgejo specifically though. I think it's good to have open-source projects trying to compete with Github and Gitlab.

"putting engineering above politics" is itself a political position which upholds an implicit and arbitrary status quo termed "professional behavior"

This is a very HN-eternally-online position. I've not run into any engineer in the real world who doesn't (even begrudgingly) accept that politics are a thing that are going to happen.

Groups of people are politics. At some point you need to get over it.

Some people rightfully want to see what the engineering effort and roadmap is gonna be before becoming invested in it, since there's always a cost.

Simple aesthetic changes and codes of conduct / political alignment for contributors are not enough for forks to become full things of their own. Even if they can help (branding, community, etc.). Or hurt (Forgejo is harder to pronounce. And CoC have potential downsides, possibly excluding good people, ironically, over banal minutia and hostile environment around being "not hostile" - like you saying he is "hung up" on it...).

Gitea was already a fork of Gogs, so why should contributors use this fork of a fork?

These forks (and direct clones) are like little political secessionary/independence movements, both making lofty statements and splitting would-be contributors. Sometimes it works out very well and they become full independent things of their own (GNU stuff), but it's fair to want to get on to see the actual engineering side of things.

Forgejo forked Gitea IIRC because of problems in the Gitea governance of the Gitea trademark, a limited company was founded by some Gitea contributors, without consent of the larger group of Gitea developers.

So I only find it natural that a group of people who split off of Gitea took extra care to set up some kind of governance model.

Those who dislike the idea of a code of conduct can of course also contribute to Gitea or Gogs, or fork Forgejo, etc. This is free software after all.

With 23 open and 1.381 closed PR forgejo seems like an active project, it's in use at codeberg.org which means it isn't a random fork.

HN is just anti-CoC overall so any project that actually does something with one other than it being a file sitting in the repo gathering dust earns ire.

In many cases I'd agree. Looking at the moderation actions there though, I see an abusive over-application of their Code of Conduct.

If anything, this is a prime example of what many people are concerned about when the topic of CoCs is raised.

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