I see a lot of people here forgetting a real case of CoC abuse.
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.
Back when I had my public account, I posted a link to my work. Someone found my personal twitter, went back a few years, and saw I made a joke about obesity.
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.
> 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".
It is not something that automatically comes with a COC, they explicitly state it in theirs:
"In addition, violations of this code outside these spaces may affect a person's ability to participate within them."
That's a big nope from me. The scope of the CoC should not extend beyond interactions in the confines of their project otherwise you get people digging up something people said when they were 12 or making value judgements based on their public lifestyle and trying to get them removed because of it. Pretty much the opposite of "inclusive".
As a counterpoint, restricting the scope of the CoC to the confines of the project allows people to harass others directly, via DM's, email, etc with impunity. I am at least relieved by may in "violations of this code outside these spaces may affect a person's ability to participate within them."
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.
Then you get the ongoing debate in the C++ community about whether it's appropriate for someone with a criminal record of sexual abuse to have a trusted role at in person events.
Maybe some are written better. GCC's says "no racism" which can be interpreted as allowing hatred of white people because under some academic definitions it's impossible to be racist against white people.
Compare federal law which says "no racial discrimination" which clearly applies equally to all races.
I think it's a good case of visibility; nobody hears about the justified enforcement of a code of conduct, but the odd cases (like the Drupal dev, or Donglegate, or what have you) get tons of media attention and are used as references as to why codes of conduct are a bad thing.
Exactly. I don't keep a mental checklist in my head of every time someone has ever gotten kicked out of a project's social spaces for being a jerk, it's just a thing that happens and everybody moves on with their life.
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.
i would also recommend you research who came up with and popularized the CoC that everyone uses, and what comments this person had about what would happen when popular projects adopt it.
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.
After a brief Google search, I think you're referring to Coraline Ada Ehmke, but I can't find anything problematic about her, what she's said, or her goals — unless you're referring to the fact that she's transgender and cares about social justice. Is that why you're being deliberately vague? Would you mind elaborating instead of vagueposting? What are your specific concerns? What is "extremely objectively poor" about the standard CoC?
Not the OP, but from what I remember they would seek out every possible opportunity in every single possible open source community they could find and propose the CoC that they wrote. 0 contributions to the projects, with the exception of demanding that people implement incredibly verbose CoC's in their projects under the guise of "protecting the minorities contributing to the projects".
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.
It was pretty funny when she shook down the venerable SQLite project, and they responded by adopting the Rule of Saint Benedict. (They later capitulated.)
That's the thing though, it's hard to ignore them since they pose themselves as coming from a morally righteous place, and they have the followers to back them up with their demands. Just look at the Opal thread I posted, it's started as a demand, and then a bunch of people who've had 0 to do with Opal start spamming the thread to back up the OP and hurling insults around at all the contributors for "daring" to associate themselves with one of the most prolific contributors to the project.
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.
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.
Every time I've seen a project get targeted by these CoCs, all the maintainers approach it from a good place assuming no malice
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.
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 is pretty invasive behavior, I won't lie. However, if [this](https://blade.ruby-lang.org/ruby-core/72916) is the tenor of the "valid points" brought up against her CoC, I'm... not impressed. It's just standard conservative whining. The language you use towards other people does matter, actually, to the kind of culture and environment you build, and wanting to have guidelines around that doesn't make you "perpetually offended." And sometimes people's opinions outside a project do actually matter, it's not accusing people of a "thoughtcrime", its pointing out that cultural and political opinions aren't just team sports or games of pretend, they have real consequences for other people, and tell you about the character of the person who holds them. Who wants to work with someone who thinks they're completely delusional freaks?
If we're talking software projects, and especially large open source projects with dozens, hundreds or even thousands of contributors, we also have to realize that there's many, MANY people from all over the world with all sorts of opinions to be found amongst the contributors. One man's (or woman's) idea of what is offensive can be entirely innocent to another, and vice versa of course.
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?
well guess what, as everyone likes to say, "we live in a democracy", part of the rules is respecting that other people have other opinions. If you work within the system in a legal and peaceful manner, then that is fair game, and what these people are trying to do is discriminate against others, that which they claim to oppose so wholeheartedly. It truly exposes them for what they are
> part of the rules is respecting that other people have other opinions.
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
> They were literally _FIRED_ from Github because they abused a female coworker.
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.
i couldnt possibly care that anyone is transgender or not, but i find the contributor covenant to be a ridiculous document, that feels the need to point out a whole slew of shit that you cant discriminate against. How about just say "cant discriminate" ? or perhaps "cant discriminate against anything non-technical" ? why do I need to read a long list of peoples ailments and problems in life? why does it have to be so complicated?
If a project has toxic people in it, will a CoC make them into pleasant people? Will they drop all those people from the project after they adopt the CoC? What if it's the leadership that's toxic? If the leadership on the project wasn't toxic, why didn't they drop the toxic people earlier? What about a CoC helps them do it now?
> In most instances it is not the rules that are the problem, it is the people enforcing the rules that is the problem
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.
Most CoC, unlike law, only list some general idea / ideology...
In this specific CoC GCC use, "Be friendly" / "Be respectful" can be _very_ subjective.. This is super flexible and open to abuse.
The problem is that there's a committee that largely operates in the dark.
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.
there was a time, not too long ago, when it was very obvious to everyone that the Internet and the real world were not the same thing, and it was plain as day that the inherent disparities that exist between cyberspace and meatspace (e.g., on the Internet, nobody can tell what sex/race/sexual orientation/religion/etc. you are, unless you go out of your way to tell them) should necessitate different social norms.
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.
when I was in middle school (2004-ish?), I collaborated on a video game development project with four other dudes I met online, two of whom I became close friends with. we all knew the project leader was Australian because he told us as much, because he insisted we spell "armour" with a "u", and because of the times of day he was online. it was easy to infer that the rest of us were North American, but it wasn't until months and months of IMing back and forth that I came to learn that one of the other guys, the one whom I was closest with, was black. it just never came up in conversation, until he was explaining some personal anecdote to me in private and it was contextually appropriate. why would it? we were five dorky middle/high schoolers who enjoyed video games and learning to create them together, and we only knew each other by our handles, and, later, our given names. why would we talk about what color of skin we had? nothing could be less relevant to a bunch of kids who were eagerly doing collaborative creative work together, across the globe, through the magic of the Internet.
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.
> It sounds like arrogance, group-think, and a lack of empathy for outsiders was pretty much at the heart of your cyber-libertarian dream utopia.
that sure is one way to characterize being a lonely teen who discovered a feeling of belonging in an emergently developing meta-culture set in an incredibly diverse environment of digital creativity, inspiration, and hope for the future, that anyone could feel like they belonged in if only they lurked for awhile to acclimate to the social norms of whichever communities seemed interesting to explore—only to watch it all turn into a shit garbage nonstop 24/7 orgy of pot-stirring clickbait, endless screeching about identity politics, opportunistic social posturing and grifting, and just general daily misery, all funneled right into the palm of your hand, ready for you to scroll through and get agitated about whatever the fuck latest nonsense thing is going on elsewhere in the world—and then when you're done with that, swipe your thumb a few more times, and easily access a dozen more endless feeds containing the same digital excrement, just with different seasonings.
"normies" got thrown into being online 24/7 way too fast, before anyone could acclimate to the cultural norms that had already been established there, such that said cultural norms were immediately supplanted by a deluge of what was essentially mass immigration from a foreign, incompatible culture. and it wasn't even their fault, really, it was the corporations who were overly eager to usher in the New Age of Everyone Being Online At All Times, So As To Market More Things To More People.
> It was just comfortable _for you_ because in that utopia, you had power.
were you there for the Old Times? or do you genuinely know no other Internet than today's grotesque hellscape? because that's kind of what it sounds like.
if I had any "power", it was the power to create, share, and consume creative content in a way mankind had never thought possible before—contrast this with today's Internet, in which 99.9% of users only engage in consumption, and not just any consumption, but consumption of the highest-bandwidth, lowest-effort, most-brain-cell-killing kind. if you call this "power", then you can hardly claim I was alone in having it, or that some identity/demographic property permitted me access to it—desktop computers were cheap and popular, and pretty much every household had one. anyone with the requisite curiosity and either patience to lurk or humility to be told to lurk could find something to enjoy, no matter what their interests were.
there were no endless social feeds to scroll through just to intentionally read things that make you angry for political reasons because they were engineered to do exactly that, no highly centralized websites where everyone could yell at each other online—it was all smaller communities, like this one, with their own value systems, social norms, and so forth. it was good times.
> But let's not kid ourselves that it was somehow free from all the failings of normal human society.
this is why I asked if you were there at the time, because this sounds like the perspective of someone who either was not, or has since forgotten how much things have changed in such a short period of time—the Internet and the Real World used to be different things, not long ago at all, and everyone used to understand that. you used to have to sit down at a computer in order to interact with the Internet, and it was like jacking into the Matrix—when you logged off, you were back in the real world. that doesn't happen anymore, because even if you log off, everyone around you hasn't—if not physically then at least mentally.
Peak Desktop Internet was twentyish years ago man, and the Web was only mainstreamish for, what, tenish years before that? if that?
a lot has changed in the past 20 years, culturally, with the rise of the smartphone, and it's useful to reflect upon that—I don't know why you're insisting on being a dick about it. I have to assume you grew up in the smartphone era, and that's all you've ever known.
I disagree; you need rules to give guidelines to the moderators and participants both. The alternative is that there are no rules, or moderators get to decide themselves what is and isn't allowed, on a whim and inconsistenly, causing infighting and confusion.
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.
This is making the incorrect assumption that moderators are somehow limited by the rules. They're always able to justify anything via sufficiently vague rules ("this isn't an exhaustive list" etc) or even just ignoring the rules and banning people they dislike, because for the most part, people don't notice unless they go after someone well known.
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.
Ah yes. Don't try because it can't be perfect. Better to just leave it up to vague chance. Do y'all even consider what it is you're actually saying? Ever?
But if 2 does not exist, abuse could still continue just by terrible people being in charge. I don't see how adopting or not adopting a CoC allows for people to abuse their power less or more.
>In most instances it is not the rules that are the problem, it is the people enforcing the rules that is the problem
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 remember that. It was a massive shitshow from all sides in my opinion.
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.
Do you have documentation of that? Can you prove that it was non-consensual? Was there a prosecution of human trafficking that followed on?
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.
There is no such implication. And you yourself described it as a slave relationship. So I’m not really sure what your point really is?
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).
The problem is these CoCs ceasing being guidance and become all-consuming forces unto themselves who become the reason for existence rather than the organization being the reason for existence. The whole things throws things upside down but it's due to how easy it is to manipulate politically as opposed to being productive and contributing to the organization --why do the hard work to get an apartment when you can rat out your neighbor for listening to the VoA?
I got hit with a "code of conduct violation" once for, in a social chat space with many people, saying that I thought "homeopathy is a load of bullshit", or something to that effect.
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...
Calling homeopathy bullshit is a kind way to put it, given the potential harm it could cause if people choose it over evidence-based medicine. I like the Mitchell and Web take on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLoMGb5CaXE
Clearly we're in agreeance about this, but you don't need to say everything you think. "Homeopathy is bullshit" might be true, but it's not going to convince anyone so in that sense it's a pointless statement. I was wrong to put it like that in a public space with about a 100 people. I do think it's a topic that should be discussable, in reasonably polite and respectful ways, and my main gripe was that any criticism had essentially been declared forbidden.
And not only that: when the committee for enforcing the CoC decided the CoC wasn't actually violated, the entire witch hunt continued with more and more made up reasons why this person was bad and deserved to be punished.
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.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
― C. S. Lewis
"a body of people with the aurhority to act like total cunts in the name of civility"
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?
So what you seem to be suggesting is that the people who don't like a thing (codes of conduct) and go out of their way to try to weaponize them should be allowed to get their way (CoC should go away because of people like these).
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.
> Drupal, like GCC proposed rules, allow punishment of someone for something they did outside the community
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.
The only effect of a Code of Conduct I have ever personally witnessed was that people were being bullied for greeting others. The greeting they used was "hey guys", and instead of recognizing that language is fluid and different to different people they tried to impose their linguistic views on others. The people who encouraged this behavior were people on the Code of Conduct committee and at the top of the project's hierarchy, and to this day nobody has apologized for this behavior, but the behavior was silently dropped.
I'm from a part of the US where "guys" is used as a gender neutral collective noun. My mom and grandma would call out "guys, dinner is ready!" to the whole family to call us to the table for example.
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 work in Japan - naturally I've Japanese colleagues, and a significant number from other Asian countries too. The "you guys"/"hey guys"/"that guy" thing is practically universal.
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.
> The idea of a native (probably white) English speaker lecturing them on it being sexist or non-inclusive is repugnant to the extreme
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.
To what Japanese phrases are you referring? Most of the various phrases I'd expect to use to refer to a group (minasan, [name]-san-tachi) are gendered at all in typical use, and the ones I can think of that are gender only one member of the group (e.g. kanojo-tachi to refer to a group including one known female).
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.
When non-native English speakers are taught English, they are taught that "Hey guys" is gender neutral. So you'll meet lots of non-native English speakers who will be completely shocked at that it's not.
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've noticed that white people as a group regularly get abuse in anti-woke HN threads. Seems bizarre 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.
It's specifically the phenomenon of rich 1-percenters trying to cancel each other that's grating.
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.
My pet theory is that most 'woke' people are people that feel ashamed at not being at the bottom of the hierarchy, and so try to compensate their 'privileges' by being overly sensitive to any kind of injustice, to the point of seeing moral or symbolic violence where there is none.
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".
And of course, complaints about white people are one of the things that wouldn't be punished under these code of conducts despite the "no racism" clause, because they're usually not evenly enforced.
Another data point: I’m from Ireland and grew up in the 80s. For as long as I remember, the plural form “guys” always referred to groups of any gender. I’d be just as likely to use it to greet a female-only group of colleagues as a mixed or male-only group of colleagues.
There are lots of languages where the gender-neutral term and one of the gendered terms are the same. Consider the Spanish "ellos", meaning either "the masculine group" or "the masculine and feminine group". The word "ellas" denotes a feminine-only group.
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.
"Guys" tends to be neuter in the second person and masculine in the third person.
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.
A nuance of that usage of "guys" to refer to a group consisting of both men and women is that the group of people being referred to is typically immediately present in some way.
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.
The person he's responding to is choosing to be obtuse in order to police other peoples' language based on rules derived by their political ideology, and does not care about context
Glad it's not up to you to "buy" the words I choose!
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
Oh my god you are being so dramatic. Someone says something you disagree with about whether a term is gender-neutral and you're suddenly talking about "speech totalitarians" and authoritarians and gulags. Get a grip.
If everyone I dated were in a room, then I, a heterosexual male, very much might address that room as guys. As in, "hey guys, what are you doing here?"
It's an interesting bit of context. I also grew up with guys as a generic plural, but it's not really generic, rather it's a mixed group plural. It would feel just as natural to say "the people I date", as "the women I date", but never "the guys I date.
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.
Why would they use it to refer to a group of exclusively women? 'guys' refers to a group of men or a group of men and women, not to a group of women. Is that so hard to understand?
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.
A CoC might be just fine. GCC's looks nice -- basically "act professionally".
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.
Again: details would be nice. People do indeed take offense on others' behalves (and probably should do so less often), but that's more of a human nature thing; it's not evidence that CoCs actually make that phenomenon worse.
> 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.
> 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.
You're entitled to an opinion about it, but a Slack bot that pings you when you say "guys" is not remotely comparable to bullying (which is the top-level claim in this thread).
I would consider it a form of harassment and such petty language policies would certainly impact my desire to participate in a community. I would feel unwelcome.
You said you personally witnessed something; I'd like to understand more about it.
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.
I witnessed everything, the bullies used the CoC to justify their behavior and told me their committee encouraged their enforcement of the CoC in this way. People on the committee have published articles on the matter calling for such enforcement. Bullying is well defined https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullying, I specifically mean it in the sense of repeated abusive behavior by people with more power.
Having a CoC is what gives moderators of a community the ability to drop the ban hammer and give a decent reason (in other words, establish some rules and keep out people who routinely break them). Enforcement is rarely public, for the same reason you don't fire someone in front of the entire office.
I mean CoC violations can also result in people losing their jobs; it's better to handle things in private. That also removes any cool factor from someone who's blatantly being a troll, the "us vs them" mentality that's easy to pick up.
I personally never contribute to an OSS that has a CoC, and if I find my organization is using OSS that has a CoC I actively work to remove it and ban my employees from contributing to it.
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
Mine does not, but then around here we have anti-bullying, anti-harassment and anti-discrimination laws so these things are penal matters, not merely contract breaches.
Right, but the legal system gets involved in cases of wrongful termination of contract or if the code enforcement itself leads to discrimination, harassment, or other issues.
I wait for the day soon to come when AIs will "actively" participate in. And we have to find a term that encompasses both humans and AIs. And anyone not using the currently correct one will have their lives destroyed. Or if someone finds recording from using previously correct one and does the same.
Overall it seems like a pretty decent CoC. Altough, I am REALLY not a fan of this line: "In addition, violations of this code outside these spaces may affect a person's ability to participate within them."
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.
Enforcement of this code of conduct would seem to inherently put the enforcers in violation of the Code.
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.
> 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.
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.
No, "take time off" is just more condescending. It's fake care, concern trolling, punishment couched in the overly clinical language of millennials who are afraid to upset people because of mental health reasons
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.
On more than one occasion, I’ve witnessed a moderator of a web forum or email list asking a participant to “take time off” and the participant later came back and thanked them for it. In those cases, the communities were small enough and it worked because the moderators knew the participant reasonably well and figured (correctly) that they were over-reacting because they were having a bad day.
Well some of us see the inherent problem with "enforcers get higher privileges " some of us desire equality. I know many people do not any more but whether we are talking about a community or a government giving some members "higher privileges" is a huge problem.
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
Without this line, you could directly email everything the CoC bans (e.g. violent threats) to any contributor, and the CoC wouldn't give the community the right to ban you. It should probably be reworded in a way that makes this purpose more clear, but it shouldn't be removed entirely.
It increases the cost of overstepping in private messages, which would help prevent them. It decreases the likelihood of future private messages, since the offending contributor will no longer work together with other people from the project. It gives their targets a chance to continue working on the project without having to work together with that person. Why do you think it wouldn't help in any way?
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.
Possibly a big mistake to make this post, but I've written my own code of conduct template, which I use on my projects (mostly since snyk, github and similar scanners rank you down if you don't have it).
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 had people who send a pull request that has 1 commit, changes 2000 lines and fails all the tests and expect me to merge it and spend the time myself to fix that mess.
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.
Fair warning, I do not like codes of conduct. They're an authoritarian power play justified by fear.
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.
In addition, open source projects are generally balancing on a knife-edge between irrelevance and obsolescence. Any bureaucratic tool that draws attention away from their core focus carries a risk of derailing them.
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.
> 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.
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.
I suspect we agree that, in all there world, there might be literally a single-digit number of people who would found the FSF. If it doesn't look like a good idea now, it looks like an even worse idea when Stallman did it. Nobody believed there was a possibility of it working, let alone that there could possibly be a need.
The issue I have is the people who are confident that cancelling that person is a good idea. It seems like a mistake.
> There is a long queue of people lining up to criticise him, but nobody has successfully cobbled together an alternative to the FSF.
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.
> 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.
They generate outrage because they are accompanied by people trying to change the definition of open-source, not with the idea of alternative licenses.
> They generate outrage because they are accompanied by people trying to change the definition of open-source
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.
Open Source is a term invented in 1998 a direct alternative to Free Software which is the term used by RMS/FSF. Bringing up RMS is irrelevant. If you want to promote licenses which don't meet the definition of FOSS, that's fine! Just call it something else. Here are some ideas:
These conversations invariably get hijacked by OS/FS advocates who intentionally pick language designed to put any license that doesn't follow its dogma into one big bucket, despite the sometimes significant material differences between them.
The problem is that Open Source / Free Software is a Brand. I don't mean registered trademark, I mean a term that denotes specific things to people. CGP Grey's Pirate [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YFeE1eDlD0] video actually does a really good job explaining what a brand is the core sense.
Open 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.
Language is power. It is simply a power grab where people invent new language and initialisms intending to claim ownership and control of them and use them as a tool to, like you say, exclude people.
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.
Deadlock and livelock are different things. Repurposing the term livelock to mean deadlock deeply offends me, which should deadlock this thread; completely stuck with no more observable signs of activity.
However, it will probably only livelock; the thread will continue to have obserable signs of activity, although with very little hope of meaningful completion, or at best, very slow actual progress. Most, but not all, of the effort will go towards spinning.
I can't tell if you're joking or trying to prove a point (after all this is a comment section that's worked itself into a froth about the Orwellian behavior of imaginary people) but I notice that you haven't made this request of anyone else, so I'm pretty sure it's not sincere.
As I see it communities nowadays need a way to exclude a-holes or else the community will eventually evaporate since staying is not worth the cost of putting up with the a-holes. I say nowadays because as I see it the cost of creating a community has gone down and the number of options has increased. As a result people won't stay around in a community simply due to lack of other options. So at it's core the question is "do we have a process for doing this removal" or "do we leave it up to the pure discretion of whomever controls the block button."
> the burden of proof for triggering evisceration by committee is usually negligible
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.
Perhaps the dead part which is the trigger for some? I've read recently that phrase unalive is being used as substitute of various dead, suicide related words, to avoid being auto-censored or demonetized in the social media - but that's a bit different thing, innit
On that matter, i can see the point when used to describe a master/slave configuration, but I don’t see how it can make sense when talking for example about the git master branch: there is no such thing as a slave branch, and “master” in there only refers to a “master copy” (concept borrowed from cd-crom mass production from what I know, where the final iso image to be burned to all disks is indeed called the master copy).
>>It seems to be "excluding unpopular people and ideas",
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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 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.
> 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.
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).
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?
>What part of having absolutely nothing to do with the company or its business do you not understand?
We were presumably talking about cases where people might be fired or excluded from a project for e.g. making transphobic comments in public outside of a work context. If you agree that this isn't a case where the actions have 'nothing to do with the company or its business' (because of reputational issues), then it seems that we're in agreement.
>If anything, it seems like nowadays people can be routinely fired when it's discovered that they are straight.
Say you're a car mechanic and you work at a car shop. The car shop fires you for saying the Moon is made of cheese during a BBQ at a friend's on Saturday, because it's against the nebulous code of conduct.
Now let's say you're a programmer and you like volunteering code to GCC. The project bans you because your beliefs expressed anywhere, including in the privacy of your own home, violate the nebulous code of conduct.
That's the kind of world we're slowly but surely moving towards.
>Say you're a car mechanic and you work at a car shop. The car shop fires you for saying the Moon is made of cheese during a BBQ at a friend's on Saturday, because it's against the nebulous code of conduct.
Or maybe we’re slowly but surely moving to a world where the rights of women and minority groups are being slowly eroded after decades of progress, and before long me and all the other gays will be rounded up and sent to conversion camps in Florida run by a newly-nationalised Disney corporation.
I’m gonna guess you don’t find the line of argument in the preceding paragraph super convincing. I feel the same way about what you wrote.
I already responded to that question here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36431254 I may have misunderstood what you meant by it, in which case it would be helpful if you could explain what you did mean.
If an employee makes "transphobic comments in public outside of a work context" then upon what grounds does the employer have to terminate him for that? An employer should not be able to terminate an employee for something they do in their private time.
Likewise, GCC should not be able to ban someone for doing something not related to GCC. That GCC's code of conduct allows for that is preposterous.
>An employer should not be able to terminate an employee for something they do in their private time.
My point was just that this is nothing new. It's always been the case that you could be fired for certain things that you did in your private time (e.g., historically, being gay). This is because what you do outside of work can affect the reputation of your employer. Within legal limits your employer has the right to freedom of association (just as you do).
It has always been the case, with volunteer work and work-for-hire, that you could get canned for things you say or do outside of work.
But I'm going to have to call slippery slope on the cheese moon thing. We're not moving towards a world where literally every thing you can possibly say will get you fired.
> What part of having absolutely nothing to do with the company or its business do you not understand?
Maybe don't respond to someone who ignores core elements of the statements they are ostensibly replying to? If your posts are coherent and compelling, a respondent moving the goalpost or changing the conversation is obvious.
If you are being charitable, quoting a historical summary of the back-and-forth to clarify your own understanding and where it went wrong, would be helpful. Otherwise, this game of "nuh-uh" is not constructive.
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):
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.)
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”.
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?
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".
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.
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??
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.
I've been collaborating with a bunch of free software projects during decades. Despite my origins and my bad English never ever have I felt excluded, on the contrary, people were more than happy to help. I've never heard of someone excluded from a free software project due their origins.
I would have expected from a highly technical community to implement measures based on facts and studies, not based on a hunch. Where are the studies showing the amount of discrimination before and after implementing a code of conduct in different projects?
I agree. Establishing processes and telling people what they are is good practice. Just telling people not to do bad/unwelcome/etc. things by itself probably doesn't do much other than maybe remind someone at the margins to think twice before telling that joke.
Most projects when adopting a CoC started their political infighting over alleged allegations exponentially, whilst the technical decision making troubled to the point of full stagnation.
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.
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.
I've lead the moderation team for BeamMP (beammp.com, 150k+ User Discord) for a few months, and been part of it for much longer, and the two most positive changes I've seen are:
- 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.
Do you just moderate stuff that happens on the discord, or do you ban people if they do some "wrong" stuff outside of discord? Because the CoC draft allows excluding people for doing "wrong" stuff even outside of GCC (-trackers, -mailing lists, etc.).
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.
It depends, I think, on whether those people represent and reflect on the GCC organization; does the project want to be associated with morally objectionable people?
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.
The reason that clause is there is to deal with dedicated harassers who will try to skirt the rules while still attacking their victims.
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.
CoCs like all codes of law, exist to have something to point to when it is decided that you did something wrong. They also exist as a signal, both to attract people who agree with it and to deter those who oppose it.
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.
A Code of Conduct is like a contract. It formalizes norms and expectations so everyone is bound by the agreement on what to do when things go wrong. If you need one to set that culture, something's already wrong, and a contract/CoC won't help you.
However if you wait for things to go wrong, determining what your code of conduct _should have been_ will be done in the heat of the moment, which is a far more dangerous place to be.
One of the landmarks of civilization is that people who utterly hate each other can still work together for a common good. This, my dad taught me as a kid and I cherish it as a core principle. I like civilization, after all.
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.
I was with you until your last sentence. Taking you point at face value, people who despise codes of conduct nonetheless working under a code of conduct would just be another example of people disagreeing with each other (in this case disagreeing with people who favor the implementation of codes of conduct) and yet still being able to work together.
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.
> 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 seems that mediation would be a good thing. Yet we never hear about that, even in "progressive" workplaces that are all about Diversity, Inclusion, Equity & all the other keywords.
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.
Aren't the "diversitylady" and the committees supposed to be the mediators during conflicts between 2 people? Can you guarantee that you'd be happy with those mediators, and won't just request another level of mediation?
No idea what the diversity lady's job description is, but she did not mediate the conflict nor was she of any assistance at all. That experience fixed my opinion of D&I and the CoC movement, all window-dressing, no further questions required.
In a different workplace I have worked through mediation and the outcome could be accepted.
How can people work together when one person insults the other? It's not sustainable, especially in a volunteer-based project (which most open source projects are).
I honestly really prefer an abrasive community. I think one thing we lost with the adoption of CoCs was the ability of the community to naturally filter out low-quality or abusive (do my homework or project for me) participants, and encourage dedication by requiring new users to earn actual real respect before being given it. It felt rewarding and… real to me to participate in these sorts of spaces, and is one of the reasons I used to love online communities. CoC communities have always felt like tofu in comparison, but tbh I think my life improved by not spending so much time on the computer anyways.
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.
projects usually start off like this, but often a dedicated userbase moves in and requires broader language control. the wild west stagnates from stability.
This CoC is fine as far as it goes (unlike a certain copypasta CoC that was being spread years ago).
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.
The GNU one seems really great tbh. Like, actually useful advice about communication and conflict resolution and emotional intelligence, instead of barebones rules.
Not necessarily a bad thing provided the individuals charged with enforcing it have a stake in the project, as opposed to just being moderators. In my own experience that's where the trouble often begins.
There's an awful lot of straw man accusations going on in this thread from people who seem to feel threatened by some invisible person who is going to persecute them for something they believe or say or are as a person. Even just an ounce of empathy and you'd realize that's possible without a CoC too and the goal of establishing these boundaries is to protect the people who feel that same way daily because of who they are. If you feel more attacked than protected, it might be time to look inwards instead of accusing outwards.
Yes, this thread feels like stepping into bizarro land. I see a lot of people equating the presence of a CoC with some kind of 1984-newspeak future.
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 think unfortunately this has become something of a lightning rod with culture war topics of late. I'd really encourage people to read the article. CoCs are not all the same and it's hard to codify expectations of a group that already exists because it requires consensus or severance. Many codes of conduct lay out unenforceable or questionable rules and this is not one of them. I read in the comments somebody claiming they were trying to eliminate using any project with a CoC like they were fighting against a spreading disease. It's zealotry and I urge you, if you consider yourself skeptical -- be skeptical of your own positions too because GCC's CoC FTA says nothing that has been expressed as something folks here are afraid of.
> I see a lot of people equating the presence of a CoC with some kind of 1984-newspeak future.
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 “hey guys” thing is always some friend-of-a-friend who says it happened. I’m sure there are receipts for it happening somewhere, but it sounds like it’s uncommon.
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.
> The “hey guys” thing is always some friend-of-a-friend who says it happened. I’m sure there are receipts for it happening somewhere, but it sounds like it’s uncommon.
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.
> I’ve encountered it directly multiple times, so I’m feeling slightly gaslighted.
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.
> 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.
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.
So I think I hear you but it's hard for me to really grasp what you're trying to say because you're not using specifics. I'm not sure if that's an attempt to protect yourself from backlash, but as somebody who doesn't see the same thing as you, these are some things that I feel the need to clarify:
* "the majority of coc documents" - this feels unquantifiable, but maybe you mean a particular template? Could you point me to one that you take issue with?
* "one particular in-group of people who share extremist beliefs" - which group? Is it the same group for all of the communities or one group per community? Could you help me with an example? Which extremist beliefs? Again, is this per-community or one group with one set of beliefs?
With these concrete examples, what do you personally think could be done by these communities to make would-be well-intentioned-codes more like their abstract, theoretical tool?
The idea of latent meanings encoded into CoCs is unfamiliar to me, and I don’t find this line of reasoning credible.
Words are imperfect, and there are multiple ways to interpret CoCs. But CoCs provide additional transparency, relative to the secret, unwritten rules people use without CoCs.
I know that dang hates culture war shit when it shows up here, but this is one of those times when I can't bite my tongue.
> the majority of CoC documents have been templated and written by one particular in-group of people who share extremist beliefs, and so it has been instrumentalized to drive their communities further into extremism and exclusionary tactics which eject people who believe differently or have dissenting political views.'
> [...]
> And that is why Codes of Conduct are vehemently opposed by people of good will, because they are designed to push an agenda and exclude individuals, not to keep the peace or make safe environments.
Lordy lordy lordy, what a mess. Let's zoom out a bit and add some context to what you've said here. The original open source CoC drama happened because one trans person got tired of being targeted with anti-trans harassment.
One of the primary arguments made against CoCs since then have matched yours in both spirit and even exact wording, as an attempt to frame harassment as "free speech" and shield harassers from the consequences of their own actions.
Your post copies, thought for thought and sometimes word for word, arguments from that time that were created by people that desire to silence and eliminate trans voices.
The real giveaway that demonstrates this is the "eject people who [...] have dissenting political views" thing. This specific talking point was invented to frame the mere existence of trans people as a thing of politics that is open to debate somehow. The emphasis of "one particular in-group" attempts to elevate trans peoples' attempts to stop being harassed for existing as some grand crusade by a strong united front of some kind.
So, for anyone that reads this thread before it's nuked from orbit, the post I'm replying to is the core counterargument from the anti-CoC crowd: they want to be allowed to be bigots and experience no pushback, nor suffer any consequences.
It all comes down to a clash of worldviews between those who believe that "woman" and "man" are determined by each individual's self-declaration, and those who hold that "woman" and "man" are categories based on being, respectively, of the female or male sex. There's no right or wrong answer to this, so it's not really appropriate to enforce via a Code of Conduct.
HackerNews overall seems to lean deeply reactionary, to the point where apparently "don't be a jerk if you want to participate in this project" is read as a threat. I'm not sure why all of these people think the situation is better without a CoC, abusive mods are still going to be abusive but without any expectations upfront. I just don't see any downside to making it clear that GCC-related conversations are expected to be civil and on-topic and that yes, the things you do and say in public can have social consequences. That's always been true, now it's just a little more plain what the expectations are.
I can't wait until the silent majority stops being silent and throws out CoC and their people from projects. It is seriously a toxic thing that creates debates over stuff where there is no need for it to be a debate to begin with.
But if you speak up you're a pedo… I wrote on a debian mailing list a while ago, when they wanted to sign against rms.
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.
Also, Stallman is clearly a neurodivergent individual, so shouldn't we at least try to be accepting and inclusive of that, too (within limits, of course) instead of jumping on every awkwardly worded remark and interpreting that in the most negative possible way? "Assume good faith" etc.
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.
Most people do not assume good faith, especially online. Depending on the person, they will often go directly for the least charitable interpretation possible. The goal isn't to be humans together, it's to win.
Because you can gauge it by how many people complain vs how few people push it through. It’s a tiny minority of people who are zealots about a CoC which is why I intentionally exclude them from my project especially the absolute disaster covenant code of conduct made by a poser on a power trip
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.
> 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.
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 don't know anything about your social circles, but my experience suggests that people learned to mostly ignore it until it happens to touch them. Until that point they just indicate their real thoughts in private groups. The argument repeats itself here, because the forum is pseudo-anonymous and lends itself to a 'private group' image despite not really being one.
<< conduct of project participants is in fact a good thing.
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.
Your assertion here that a code of conduct could get dragged into a culture war directly contradicts your previous assertion that there is no war outside of HN.
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?
> Your assertion here that a code of conduct could get dragged into a culture war directly contradicts your previous assertion that there is no war outside of HN.
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.
Well to be honest I don't. But I am guessing because it's stupid and meaningless and usually that won't prevail in the end. People may be tricked into it for a while but when they see the true power play that are in place they will quickly come to hate it.
I don't know, I live in one of the most woke countries on earth most likely so I have some experience in speaking out. I have only ever lost like one job over it and I always speak my mind about matters like this.
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.
It seems you know a lot about what the silent majority wants, given they're apparently silent.
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.)
> 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.
Your C compiler is the result of a committee of hundreds, if not thousands of people; every line of code used is the result of collaboration, with the actual line of code being an implementation detail.
You can't have a product like this without its community, and you can't have a community without rules.
I would hope that the contributors to a core infrastructure project like gcc are able to do so because of their technical merits and not because they fit in with a set of arbitrary rules declared by a small, power-hungry group.
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.
Needs a rename to be taken seriously, It's vague (prohibits "unfriendliness"(what does that even mean?)), Not needed (gcc existed for over 30 years so far without one), 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.
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.
> This isn't an exhaustive list of things that you can or can't do. Rather, take it in the spirit in which it's intended - a guide to make it easier to enrich all of us, the project, and the broader communities in which we participate.
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"?
The most relaxed, jovial, and ultimately productive environments I've been in have been ones in which people have a healthy sense of humour.
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.
I've come around to the idea that codes of conduct are generally sensible. In business we write contracts to explicitly state expectations, and it seems fair enough that socially we could be explicit about our values.
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.
It looks pretty much fine, except for the part that says:
> 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.
Like with many things, the devil is in the details. Many people seem to have had some bad experience with a moderator and are blaming it on a CoC. Whether a CoC exists or not, it's down to the moderators to be fair and professional. So don't blame the CoC, when you should instead be blaming individuals.
The issue is you only have relational statements in the "Code of Conduct", but that can have a very real consequence of a ban hammer come down on you from the "Code of Conduct Committee" for reasons that are not relational at all.
What I don't get, sorry for my own reductive attitude, is that if you volunteer for one of these projects you're working for free. If you don't like terms of project, just don't work for free?
Considering that GCC is basically a super obscure project with near-zero users and no previous history, it sounds pretty accurate to me. I mean, the project could disappear overnight and no one would notice.
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.