I love FreeBSD! I have a GitHub record to show that! :3 It's my sweet little darling angel. But it's sick. :<

We need routes to ensure safety and respect for everyone. If someone makes others feel endangered, it is not unreasonable for there to be immediate recourse and resolution. That's what a Code of Conduct is all about.

My problem with Codes of Conduct is mostly how to write them.

The Swing dancing scene had a big scandal this year, and everywhere CoCs are popping up.

But do you really need to write down that an adult (quite old, in that case) dance teacher is not allowed to sleep with just-teenage dance students? Or that racist remarks are not welcome?

No, so you adopt very broad language. Usually something like "harassing", "making uncomfortable" etc.

If your community needs those two sentences to police such behaviour, you've got a much bigger problem.

I simply don't believe that you can convince anybody to take action because some very broadly written CoC authorizes them to do so. They either see that the behaviour is a problem, and are willing to act, or they will just start to debate whether the CoC's specific wording is really covering the behaviour in question.

Then again, I have zero practical experience with policing a community.

Damn! Missed midnight. :-)

I mean, we do, evidently, have a much bigger problem in the open-source community. It would be nice if we didn't, but there's no easy way around it.

So there are really two options: one, hope the community stops existing or stops having influence (unlikely), or two, accept that, yes, we do need to spell out every little detail about behavior as if people don't know appropriate behavior on their own.

Nobody advocating detailed codes of conduct particularly likes the fact that they are necessary. But how you feel about the situation that led up to them doesn't really affect whether they are in fact necessary.

There is no community, just a mob, if there are no shared values WRT behavior. On the other side there is no justice system if the system is defined based on one persons feelings while ignoring the survival or existence or basic human rights of the other participants. Two sides of the same coin of lack of a community. You can't just sweep up a mob, an almost randomly selected jury, call it a community, and assume it'll work like an actual community. You'll just get anarchy, some will provide intimidation, some will provide legalistic supremacist totalitarianism, most will watch the drama from the sidelines and shake their heads and hope neither side rises to power.

So your answer is not to have enforceable routes for women to be safe and respected because nobody can write specifically enough?

I run an organization (hypatia.software [Hypatia Software Organization]) where the Code of Conduct is enforced and it is effective.

No, my answer is to have a community where you ban those people without discussing the semantics of some sentence.

In the end, it's probably equivalent to your answer. Because when the people in your organization feel someone is harassing people and you decide to kick him out, you're probably simply describing his behaviour and referencing your CoC, but not doing some detailed analysis how and why he did so.

Yeah, it's just that it is sad that it is practically required to be spelled out. But even bigger yet, is that we have to find ways to enforce it and its purpose.

As somebody who has experience moderating groups without explicit rules - the result of this in a group of more than a dozen people is inevitably that some of them will feel that (a) the banning is unfair, no matter how egregious the behaviour, and (b) there should be a set of written rules for the leaders/moderators to follow, so that people understand clearly what is expected of them. You really can't win.

Personally, I tend to steer on the side of a broadly defined CoC backed up with a very clear dispute resolution policy (there's plenty of examples of both of these - Debian has a pretty decent set for large projects). In a functioning community, reaching for this should only be required very rarely, so they shouldn't affect anyone most of the time - and they quite obviously don't in the case of open-source projects, or we'd hear about actual cases where people have been kicked out of projects for very little a lot more than we do.

Can you give some references to problems that existed in your organization before the CoC, and to what extent the CoC procedures have demonstrably helped?

>If someone makes others feel endangered

That's a bit stretching it basic threat, management is to judge each threat agent by the level of intent and the ability to act on that intent for the most part the usually aholes don't pose any actual threat. I also don't understand why some one being an ahole for a specific reason is worse than some one being an ahole just for sake of being an ahole, we all had our nemeses over the years people that you just don't click with that do everything in their power to get to you - outplay them, ignore them or move on.

If there was a priest who was homosexual, and involved himself with gay-pride rallies on his own time, would you say it is acceptable for the church to excommunicate him since he had "freedom not to associate" with the group?

If don't feel that disallowing personal thinking is good for society.

I also feel that it is possible for people to agree on some topics while disagree on others. Guilt by association should not be the measure we use to judge people. I'd say it is very unlikely that the person who "attacked" Harper also supports the "legalize rape" comment from RooshV.

In my opinion, attempting to draw a connection between RooshV's legalize rape comment and the person the article is about is a slanderous tactic to automatically make him "the enemy" with no evidence. This seems evident when you notice there is no source for any of the tweets made to Harper. This is contrasted with the readily available links provided to support deplorable comments made by RooshV.

Harper makes statements like "He started enlisting the support of his neo-nazi friends." which are obviously being used to create an us/them dichotomy for the reader. "I'm not a horrible racist like the Nazi's, that means I must hate this person who must be a Nazi." the readers would think to themselves.

I have no doubt that some of the content in this article is correct. I am just taken aback by the lack of sources provided, the attempts to slander the "opposition" and the wording of the piece. Being well read on the past of Harper, I would say that the claims have merit, but were blown entirely out of proportion.

I'll happily, and publicly, eat my own words if someone can source proof for her claims. I have no objection to recanting any of this.

> the lack of sources provided

Sources are: emails between myself, core, and the FreeBSD Foundation. I'm not providing those. A phone call with the FreeBSD Foundation, which I did not record and will not provide.

I could mention the names of the people I spoke with in FreeBSD, but why? I could provide the tweets of the guy I spoke about, but to what end?

I'm not going to name names. People can find a way to dig it all up if they really want to, but I don't want this to turn into a "this person is terrible" type thing. It's not about him, and I don't want a mob going after him or any individuals inside FreeBSD. That wouldn't be right, and it would detract from the point in writing about this at all.

Instead, I hope people talk about the issues of harassment and legal shadiness regarding trademark claims.

> I could provide the tweets of the guy I spoke about, but to what end?

To provide credit to your claims, otherwise what you are doing is defamatory.

>Sources are: emails between myself, core, and the FreeBSD Foundation. I'm not providing those. A phone call with the FreeBSD Foundation, which I did not record and will not provide.

Sadly, none of that is verifiable from an outsider perspective.

>Instead, I hope people talk about the issues of harassment and legal shadiness regarding trademark claims.

This is the only thing I can claim to have an educated opinion on. Any entity who owns a trademark has the rights to ask you to stop representing their likeness. By using "freebsd" in your name and actively participating in politics surrounding the open source/FreeBSD community, you are representing their likeness and in this case you are not protected by fair use.

For example, I can't make a twitter called TacoBellGuy and post about food related politics. If Taco Bell got upset with me, I'd have to change my name. Very clear cut.

I've consulted a lawyer. You are incorrect.