> Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting
which is essentially a carte blanche for any actions based on 'violation of the code of conduct', especially with the inclusion of public spaces in it's scope. We've seen it being (ab)used many times recently in open-source projects.
Most recently it's been considered legally binding, and the wide net it casts seems to be a huge liability for contributors (not a lawyer, so feel free to school me on this one).
Different people have very different beliefs what is to be considered "heated", "hateful" and "treating well" or not.
[1] https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/1/4/code-of-con...
The problem many people have with it, as you imply, is that it's the thin end of a doorstop, at the thick end of which is the Post-Meritocracy Manifesto:
Written by the same author and often championed by the same people as the Contributor Covenant, it espouses some rather more radical ideas which, while carefully stated to sound superficially agreeable, are not ones I would consider beneficial to the open source community.
This a terrible slippery slope. It eliminates any military, security or even anything useful.
A thief’s well-being is meant to be negatively impacted by a security measure. A guidance system in a missile is intended to negatively impact the well-being of the enemy.
I feel negatively impacted by this manifesto. So by definition every signatory is in violation of that manifesto.
As per the comment to which I was replying.
I think these attempts at redefining meritocracy are concerning, and I don't blame anyone for questioning the Contributor Covenant as a result, even if the Code of Conduct itself is reasonable and pretty much common sense.
Your direct reply to DC-3 was fine, if combative. Everything you posted below Ws32ok is ugly.
It's not useful to repeat that those words are not in the kernel code of conduct when nobody thought they were. It muddies the waters of the conversation. What really bothers me is the statement that it has "nothing to do with" the philosophy. From a certain point of view this is true, but the implied message is that the other person has not even a ghost of an argument because they're mixing up codes. That implication isn't right at all. He's also implying that he doesn't even know what this document is.
But before he made any of those comments, he made a reasonable reply to DC-3 that addresses the argument. His response was very simple, that the code should be treated as separate from its author.
So he clearly understands the argument and read the post explaining what this manifesto is and why it's being discussed.
But he comes in under Ws32ok's comment not to point out the difference between the two documents, but to instead imply that people are confused and accidentally opened the wrong file, and he's never even heard of this file.
I find that ugly.
Haha, I love the implicit signaling you're doing. I mean not only is it just not true but your qualifications for "useful" and "not useful" are really stupid.
This is the dumbest form of virtue signaling while erecting scare crows I've ever seen in an online forum.
I think likely yes, because if the zeitgeist among engineers was strong enough to make it nearly impossible to find one willing to build a missile guidance system, it would also be strong enough to make it impossible to find someone willing to build the actual missile.
To directly answer your question: no, I believe no weapon of war is OK. The reasons are all of the typical pacifist ones but I don't think it's necessary to reiterate verbatim here unless you feel otherwise.
Correct but incomplete.
In that scenario, unguided rockets get built instead of missiles. Rockets, being unguided, will miss their targets more often than missiles. Rockets, being unguided, will also tend to be used in slightly-scattered volleys, so as to increase the chance that at least one rocket hits the target.
Any explosive ordnance that misses its target has some chance of instead killing some civilians.
Do you see the problem here?
I see a big problem by them omitting protection for people of different political opinions (whereas e.g. religion, which is essentially opinion, is protected).
If you want to argue about the level of taxation, the right size of government, regulations on business, whether public or private is the most efficient way to accomplish a goal, or myriad other areas of policy like those, go right ahead. Those kinds of things are absolutely reasonable subjects for healthy and reasonable debate. (They're rarely on-topic for a software project, but in some types of communities, or in companies, or in random side conversations, sometimes they are.) Those are almost never the kinds of political opinions that people have in mind when they're suggesting that "political opinions" should be an explicitly protected category, though.
It's funny how the people worried most about whether they'll feel unwelcome for their political opinions are often those whose political opinions revolve around making others unwelcome, or hurting others, or questioning (or asking with superficial politeness about) others' right to exist. Those kind of "political opinions" do not and should not get any protections, in a code of conduct or anywhere else. You're legally allowed to say them, but you should not expect to do so without any consequence.
You list a bunch of self-approved topics that you believe are okay to talk about. How about arguing for stricter immigration laws, anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, skepticism on transgender orthodoxy, skepticism about the existence of a female wage gap, anti affirmative action, anti gun control, climate change skepticism etc. Are those not okay?
These are common political opinions that are routinely twisted into "questioning other's right to exist", or denial of basic human rights/decency, or sexist/racist, while they are usually no such thing. Even partial disagreement and skepticism is often elevated to that level. This is the real abuse and weaponization here. I think you'd need to look long and hard to find anyone in open source projects seriously advocating for some group to be wiped off the face of the earth.
Yet these topics are likely to make some uncomfortable, or depending on the person, even unwelcome. So are they verboten? Remember this CoC explicitly states it applies both inside and outside project spaces. Ask Brendan Eich how that turned out.
The problem, put simply, is that very often people will take someone's political opinion, even nuanced disagreement, as a personal attack, regardless of the actual interpersonal relationship. This is why either "political opinion" needs to be protected, or the whole thing scrapped. IMO preferably the latter, then we can once again realize that everybody has opinions that others might consider outrageously wrong and stupid, but can still work together/be friends as long as people are not actively dicks to each other.
> routinely twisted into "questioning other's right to exist", or denial of basic human rights/decency, or sexist/racist
Interesting list. Doesn't take much twisting.
You're providing a good demonstration of the point here. You don't get to feel comfortable advocating those things, at the expense of the people who live those things. Your comfort, versus their lives.
(Forestalling the obvious response: yes, I did intentionally select the most problematic points you raised to respond to, because they demonstrate the primary problem with attempting to protect "political opinion" in a code of conduct.)
> So are they verboten? Remember this CoC explicitly states it applies both inside and outside project spaces.
Inside a project they're almost universally off-topic. In the rare cases where they're not, it's often because a project actually intersects with such issues, such as needing to handle personal data or similar.
As for outside a project, the topics you listed vary greatly. I seriously doubt you'd find anyone's role in a project at risk because of their thoughts on climate change. On the other hand, if you actively campaign against other people's rights, you may well find that people don't want to work with you.
> I think you'd need to look long and hard to find anyone in open source projects seriously advocating for some group to be wiped off the face of the earth.
Not particularly long nor hard, no; I run into them regularly.
> This is why either "political opinion" needs to be protected, or the whole thing scrapped.
Even leaving aside whether there's any problem here at all, since when have the choices been "perfect solution or no solution"?
If you've got a limited amount of water you start by using it on the houses that are on fire, not the ones who want their grass watered.
Should people not be able to feel comfortable discussing such opinions outside of work or project spaces? I'd also like to point out that being against gay marriage is extremely common among devotes of the Abrahamic religions, which is a category that appears in the "protected list".
Opinions such as those have already been used to try to oust (not sure how it turned out) a member of at least one open source project (Opalgate, no CoC needed ironically) speaking entirely unrelated to the project. He was not directly maligning anyone from the project itself, in fact an outsider had to come in to stir drama (and that outsider happened to be the author of the Contributor Covenant. Hmm...).
What people do on their own time that does not personally affect you is their own business. Remember that principle is how gay rights came to be accepted in the first place. And no I don't need a link to the Paradox of Tolerance.
> I seriously doubt you'd find anyone's role in a project at risk because of their thoughts on climate change.
I would not be so sure. As before, often any skepticism of prevailing climate change wisdom is instantly escalated to "science denial". Not a good label to have in a tech project, and besides you'd be advocating for "crippling temperature rises, mass natural disasters, entire cities wiped away by see-level rises, destroying the planet basically". That sounds kinda life changing, if you believe it.
> Not particularly long nor hard, no; I run into them regularly.
Would be really interested to see some examples of this. Not just random twitter twattery, but people actually involved in OSS projects, literally advocating genocide.
> Even leaving aside whether there's any problem here at all, since when have the choices been "perfect solution or no solution"?
Well you said it yourself, there's no problem, thus no need for a solution. The Contributor Covenant is a solution in search of a problem. Are there any examples of the Linux kernel project being bogged down by external social politics (not that this CoC would fix that, much the opposite), or excessive trolling? Far as I can tell the problem was Linus's own abrasive attitude.
And let me tell you, he's hardly alone with that attribute. There's plenty of people out there who are difficult to work with because they are full of themselves and have little tolerance for dissent. At least Linus was upfront about this, rather then preferring to feign politeness then stab you in the back via bureaucratic bullshit, kinda like this CoC encourages.
You misread my comment rather heavily there. Codes of conduct are (one part of) a solution to a very real problem. There's no problem to be solved with "protecting 'political opinions' that hurt people", and even if there were it'd be far lower priority than people's lives.
And to answer your first sentence: people have learned to couch their intolerance in less blatant ways, but that doesn't make them less of an attack on other people's rights. People regularly think, incorrectly, that their discomfort is more important than other people's lives and rights. People push back, point-by-point, on each individual right or ability to exist and thrive in society. And most commonly (though not always), the people saying such things already have their own rights respected.
> Should people not be able to feel comfortable discussing such opinions outside of work or project spaces?
No, they most certainly should not. They should feel about as "comfortable" as people slinging around slurs and advocating segregation. That's nearly unthinkable today; there was a time when it wasn't. People's comfort "discussing" such things comes directly at the cost of the people they're hurting or advocating against. (And in any case, don't overestimate the weight due your opinion if you're not part of the group in question.)
Nobody is being run out of a project over the slightest misstep; the first response to most issues will be communication, not bans. Bans from a project are the last resort, not the first. People who work in projects with codes of conduct don't go around afraid they're going to be booted.
Beyond that: what work do you need to do that you can't possibly accomplish without hurting people? It's really not hard.
In that case "be excellent to each other" should be more than enough.
"Explicit guidelines have demonstrated success in other projects and other areas of the kernel."
Many people do not start out sharing a common understanding on this topic. This HN thread is more than enough evidence for that. Hence writing down a framework to give people that common understanding.
Unfortunately, now you know what HN thinks about gay and trans people having equal rights.
This is the governing philosophy of the Ayatollahs of Iran, who let lay people debate and hold elections, but who reserve real power for themselves. What you've proposed is no different.
It's obviously true to an extent, like for some rhetoric which directly leads to violence, but a lot of people seem to use this concept as justification to suppress all speech they could consider remotely intolerant.
But to Rafael Avila de Espindola (LLVM):
> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=LLVM-Raf...
> http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/llvm-dev/2018-May/122922.htm...
and many FreeBSD developers:
> https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/is-the-community-become-f...
> https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/7xapx2/freebsds_ne...
> https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/7y43fk/censorship_...
> https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/7yby9i/donations_t...
Attacking people is not.
There are fine gradations that are open for interpretation.
Lots of SJWs attack people.
Shit runs downhill. Whomever is at the top is the DNA for how things actually work.
To me, the good news is Torvalds is taking some time to figure himself out. That is likely to make a major difference.
Few people bother to really deal with the man in the mirror in earnest.
This isn't the end of the process for the kernel community; it's a major step in the right direction.
Personally I remain skeptical, because in one community I saw first-hand how the people at the top used something like CoC to justify their malicious acts, in the name of being welcoming.
It is the same old morality game that does not ensure any genuine harmony.
In Germany, they say: "'Gut' ist das Gegenteil von 'gut gemeint'" ("'Good' is the opposite of 'well-intentioned'"; I am aware that the pun does not translate well into English).
"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."
Also, this is my original comment above, where I make it clear that I don't really care about the code of conduct per se, but I'm thrilled to see Linus deal with the man in the mirror.
> Other conduct which could reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting
This statement here from the CoC is pretty much an open invitation to send whoever you don't agree with to the gulag/camp/whatever. What concrete definition is there of "reasonably be considered inappropriate in a professional setting"? These change across cultures and countries. Linux is a global effort. Not everyone on the planet follows the silicon valley, American or any single culture.
You either have fixed and clear guidelines on what is acceptable or not, or have no guidelines at all. Something open ended like this is nothing more than a potential witch hunt in the making.
Keep in mind that this is all based on the enforcement done by the project maintainers. If you're inclined to do things the project maintainers will consider unacceptable behavior, you're already going to have a problem. This just documents that.
I am not saying that the samples should be very particular for particular situations. They should address a class of actions, like no racism or no sexism. But leaving it open to whatever the maintainer thinks applies is just too much power.
> If you're inclined to do things the project maintainers will consider unacceptable behavior, you're already going to have a problem.
As long as I am not openly abusing someone in the context of the project, the only thing that should matter is my code. The fact whether my political or personal views that I air on some other platform do not match those of the maintainer or some contributor should not matter at all. This CoC opens the gate for exactly this kind of abuse. Infact, it has been used for this kind of abuse. That is why I am hesitant about this.
Linus might not use it like this, but regimes can change.
What CoC enforcement eventually becomes is a prohibition on project contributors professing political opinions that the CoC enforcers find reprehensible. You don't need a CoC to get civil behavior.
To quote a comment I made elsewhere in the thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18001722):
If you want to argue about the level of taxation, the right size of government, regulations on business, whether public or private is the most efficient way to accomplish a goal, or myriad other areas of policy like those, go right ahead. Those kinds of things are absolutely reasonable subjects for healthy and reasonable debate. (They're rarely on-topic for a software project, but in some types of communities, or in companies, or in random side conversations, sometimes they are.) Those are almost never the kinds of political opinions that people have in mind when they're suggesting that "political opinions" should be an explicitly protected category, though.
It's funny how the people worried most about whether they'll feel unwelcome for their political opinions are often those whose political opinions revolve around making others unwelcome, or hurting others, or questioning (or asking with superficial politeness about) others' right to exist. Those kind of "political opinions" do not and should not get any protections, in a code of conduct or anywhere else. You're legally allowed to say them, but you should not expect to do so without any consequence.
> You don't need a CoC to get civil behavior.
If you're lucky enough to have a community that all has a common understanding of how to behave well and treat others well, perhaps. But even then, writing that common understanding down helps others in the future.
Usually, when we have undocumented information that people need to know, we call it "tribal knowledge", and we try to fix that by documenting it.
This conduct was unacceptable then and it's unacceptable now. Nobody gave CoC enforcers a monopoly on virtue.
> political opinions
Being hateful and hurting others goes beyond "political opinion".
> which are, by the way, quite mainstream
And, after today, just a little bit less.
The Contributor Covenant is horrific and harks back to the days of the Catholic Church(Or insert religion here) and morality and it's enforcement. It's a power trip that will end badly.
Morality should come from within, a learned and practiced behaviour, personally and within communities, not prescribed.
Manifesto's are purely implemented to bully people, they allow for the lynching and harm to others without remorse.
They also very quickly mutate once they take hold, they are evil at its worst.
edit: You assert that "morality should come from within", though I'm assuming you're OK with projects and teams not reinventing things like PEP8 or language/framework best practices.
But then you complain about manifestos "mutating". Isn't mutation a consequence -- many would describe it a desired feature, i.e. iteration -- when a community decides to develop a rule framework from within?
(and I would argue that a community adopting something like the Contributor Covenant is quite clearly a decision made by that community)
The scope of the Contributor Covenant was widened in an attempt to l̶y̶n̶c̶h̶ harass and ban Elia Schito for an opinion he had expressed on his personal twitter[1].
Because Elia's twitter conversation wasn't connected with the project (beyond the project being listed in his bio), a new clause needed to be added to the Contributor Covenant in order to get him. To get it in, the new clause was presented to the Opal project as a pull request labelled "Update Contributor Covenant to include ethnicity"[2].
The Opal project noticed the extra change and guessed its real intent (that intent - needing it to go after Elia - was confirmed later by people arguing for the change[3]), so Opal edited that clause before accepting the change, but everybody else using a Contributor Covenant now has it, including Linux. (The Linux one has customized enforcement/judgement guidelines, so in its case the presence of the "Elia clause" might be less easily weaponizable by the twitter mobs it was written for)
The attack on Elia was instigated by the creator of the Contributor Covenant[4], who was unrelated to the Opal project but tagged in via twitter - it turned out this kind of drama was the Covenant's purpose.
After watching that I no longer see codes of conduct as community measures written in good faith. It hasn't just been the Contributor Covenant one that's bad faith either, however, projects that adopt them are changing and rewording them in good faith, so they can get better - it's just not the CoC intent.
Opal eventually got rid of their Contributor Covenant.
Links because of how unbelievable this stuff is:
[1] https://twitter.com/elia/status/611319469982527488 [2] https://github.com/opal/opal/pull/948/commits/817321e27eccff... [3] https://github.com/opal/opal/pull/948#issuecomment-113486020 [4] https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941
I'd like to think ideally she could come off as less snarky, perhaps. You don't actually believe she's referring to an actual conspiracy, right? Usually infiltrators, even the most gloaty of ones, don't call attention to their current effort to infiltrate something.
Poe's law in effect?
Maybe you believe that the CoC is what made this attack possible, but that's a far-from-self-evident line of thinking, because such bad faith attacks and power plays have long existed in projects with no code of conducts. I'm not for now getting into the argument of how a CoC may be overall beneficial, I am simply challenging u/aaron695 on his claim that CoCs have led to "lynching" and "are evil at its worst". I'm assuming that he, like many programmers, believes terminology have meaning, and that his choice of words reflects actual quantifiable and tangible wrongs.
I'm not even particularly bothered by aaron695's implicit comparison of what CoCs' allegedly inflct compared to the violence of real-life lynchings. But I think his use of the overdramatic term is a symptom of poor thinking here. Lynchings generally imply acts of horror arising from the absence of agreed-upon norms, or actual law. People who advocate for CoCs in good-faith, ostensibly do so because they believe a CoC can instill some trust (because actual laws aren't possible nor desirable) that behavior won't be punished/ignored for nebulous/arbitrary reasons.
The two examples given so far are examples in which:
1. The attempt to use the CoC in bad faith failed, as in your example with Schito.
2. Both the CoC's impact and its correctness are debatable, if we attempt to avoid taking or refuting Vegg's side. For starters, Vegg resigned. And if he hadn't, there's no indication the Node.js overseeing committee felt empowered to take action to remove him. And yet if the CoC did provide for that action -- again, such a rules-guided process (even if ultimately stupid) is still the antithesis of what a "lynching" entails.
I'm not trying to just be pedantic here, nor am I arguing that you and aaron694 are morally bankrupt bigots for your anti-CoC positions. I am arguing, though, that you have taken this stance without justifying evidence or logical reason. For an example of the latter, look at how you bring up the problem of "everybody else using the Contributor Covenant" that now includes the "Elia clause". Think about how absolutely absurd it would be if, in that argument, you replaced "Code of Conduct" with "[some library well-known to be broken/insecure]", and then used that line of reasoning to assert that open source software is "evil at its worst" or even, "kind of evil".
edit: correction, the user who brought up Rod Vagg was not aaron695, but another commenter.
Regarding the CoC, I had spared you the details. Opal didn't have a CoC when this happened, they were pressured into Ada's by the outrage mob from twitter - told it would help prevent problems like this. Upon success at getting it adopted the group from twitter realized the CoC didn't have the clause they needed, so they added it. Opal was spared by customizing their CoC. The CoC everyone else got means twitterers have a codified excuse to shift their harassment to smearing the maintainer if they don't side with the mob in censuring a target of a pile-on.
My example isn't that an attempt to use the CoC in bad faith actually failed (do you really think Elia was unaffected?), it's that the attempt nakedly exposed how the whole purpose of the CoC had been bad faith. That was the revelation to me - CoCs had appeared so positive and community-minded before.
Anyway, I mistook your call-out for a question, so I realize the intent/history of the CoC wasn't of interest here.
> look at how you bring up the problem of "everybody else using the Contributor Covenant" that now includes the "Elia clause". Think about how absolutely absurd it would be if, in that argument, you replaced "Code of Conduct" with "[some library well-known to be broken/insecure]", and then used that line of reasoning to assert that open source software is "evil at its worst" or even, "kind of evil".
Lets leave evil and awkward analogies out of this. I meant literally the projects that adopted the Contributor Covenant now contain a clause that was written specifically to be bendable to to attack Elia. The clause isn't there to improve communities, it wasn't worded for that, it's in there to help facilitate attacks.
That said, I think your framing of the Opal/Schito situation unfairly short-changes the pro-Schito side. Granted, while I do remember following the issue at the time, I now only vaguely recall its details. That its resolution isn't more memorable to me could admittedly mean that I think/thought Schito got what he deserved. But I don't (nor would other CoC supporters, I would think) claim that Schito was unharmed -- that's beside the point for now, since this isn't the time for a debate on what's offensive/exclusionary to the trans community. But if we just accept the premise that Schito should not have faced criticism (i.e. "harm") for tweeting (i.e. saying something across in a world-wide public channel) things that a community finds extremely offensive -- then there's no argument to be had.
I personally think that -- at least on the face of it -- what Schito said was more troubling than what people complained about regarding Torvalds and Rod Vagg.
But that issue IMO is orthogonal to the value of CoCs -- there is no CoC that would have stopped Schito from getting angry replies from the trans community. And as I read through that massive pull thread you referenced, I see that many of the prominent maintainers were in a state of reasonable debate and disagreement. Several pointed out that, as offensive as Schito's tweets might have been, there was hardly a "mob" in the pull request discussion; Coraline Ada is far outnumbered by people calling her unreasonable and accusing her of a "witch hunt".
Ada's pull request was closed and its discussion shut down. As you pointed out, there was no CoC before Schito got ripped on, so it is wrong, in a literal and figurative sense. Moreover, the opal project has since created and adopted a Code of Conduct. It is far less than what Ada pushed for. But I'm not trying to defend Ada's CoC, but to point out how it is beneficial to Schito and other maintainers of large, multi-collaborator projects to create and discuss a CoC, as Schito has apparently done, because it protects him.
The opal community was already lukewarm to Ada's complaints against Schito's 2015 complaints. Now anyone who wants to complain to opal's github community will be tolerated if they hate what Schito does on his personal Twitter account:
https://github.com/opal/opal/pull/961/commits/28738a25147ec9...
To me, this effort is beneficial to both sides; it protects community members from being punished by the project for breaking an "unwritten" rule. And it informs outsiders about the standards and decorum of the community, and they're free to join up or pass.
There are more benefits IMO to having a well-developed CoC, but I'll end my already wordy comment by saying that we should evaluate the value of CoC's independently from the political beliefs of their vocal proponents. Schito's situation isn't a good one; I'd like to see examples of how a community's agreed-upon CoC, whether it's the Contributor's Covenant or something lighter-weight, has led to capricious/unjustifiable action by that community.
> I mean if you can't contribute code why simply mess around with things like the Code of Conduct.
there are many more parts to a community, even a community of developers, than just contributing code.
True, but OSS and business software development is frequently short-handed in people who can actually make the software, not the planners, organizers, etc.
The political debate gets polarizing because many of the "makers" think it's a lack of skill, and the other side comes across as blaming the maker's attitudes/community/etc.
But you're begging the question here. I'm not the parent commenter, but it is not self-evident that the programmers/developers are the main class of "people who can actually make the software", not even in a literal sense, since software is not just its lines of code, anymore than hardware development is factory assembly.
For example, in "business software development", there are product managers and other business-facing people who have input on and make decisions, for better or worse, about software development. How is a programmer's contributions to making the software more significant than those of their product/business colleagues', if the latter have failed to cultivate paying customers?
Because these actually improve the project.
a code of conduct tends to improve projects when having one can help attract additional people to the project, or keep people there.
The most recent commit, right before the release, deletes Linux's "Code of Conflict" and replaces it with a real Code of Conduct, the Contributor Covenant.
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...
https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/code-of-condu...
Quoting the commit message:
> Explicit guidelines have demonstrated success in other projects and other areas of the kernel.
> Here is a Code of Conduct statement for the wider kernel. It is based on the Contributor Covenant as described at www.contributor-covenant.org
> From this point forward, we should abide by these rules in order to help make the kernel community a welcoming environment to participate in.
Something worth emphasizing here: adopting a code of conduct, and choosing to be welcoming and inclusive, does not mean a project and its developers avoid disagreement, or avoid feeling passionate about their work, or avoid discussing and fixing issues. It just means not letting things turn heated or hateful, and treating people well.