I don't think the language of the Contributor Covenant [1] contains anything really objectionable by anyone, even people who wouldn't consider themselves left-leaning. "Trolling, insulting/derogatory comments, and personal or political attacks" is arguably the only ambiguous part. That said, I am a bit skeptical of the CC creators' motives and goals.

[1] https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/1/4/code-of-con...

The contributor covenant is fairly in-objectionable. Yes, the list of 'privileges' is a bit of a checklist for left-wing soapboxes, but it's not necessarily a bad thing to explicitly list traits commonly targeted by bullies and harassers.

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:

https://postmeritocracy.org/

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.

Just one example from that manifesto: “We have an ethical responsibility to refuse to work on software that will negatively impact the well-being of other people.”

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.

The Contributor Covenant says nothing of the sort. It is entirely reasonable for developers to believe that the statements in the Covenant are a baseline for professionalism and, at the same time to disagree amongst themselves about whether they should contribute to military projects (or whether they buy into a "post-meritocracy" philosophy).

I was referring to https://postmeritocracy.org/

As per the comment to which I was replying.

Once again: whatever the "post-meritocracy" philosophy is, it has nothing to do with the kernel Code of Conduct.

I wouldn't say it has nothing to do with it. It's not part of the explicit language of the Code of Conduct, but the first few paragraphs of https://www.contributor-covenant.org talk about the same concepts.

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.

None of those words are in the kernel Code of Conduct.

This rhetorical technique where you pretend not to understand what people are talking about does not reflect well on you. And I normally respect your comments quite a bit.

Your direct reply to DC-3 was fine, if combative. Everything you posted below Ws32ok is ugly.

Everything he's saying to Ws32ok is factual. Nothing ugly about it.

The three comments in question can be argued as technically correct, but they're also deliberately ignoring that people are talking about a different document, and the reasons they are talking about the different document.

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.

I’d actually say they should reread the codes of conduct and consider if they are commenting in good faith in accordance with those codes.

And once again, read https://postmeritocracy.org/ and you’ll find the text I quoted verbatim. And my comment still stands in reference to the URL I provided. The wording is quite clear in that manifesto and I responded to that.

But he was explicitly referring to the manifesto and not the Code of Conduct and you jumped all over him anyway.

What's wrong with agreeing not to build military hardware? I have an explicit understanding with my company that I will leave if they take defense contracts and it hasn't affected my employment whatsoever, so clearly it's not an outlandish requirement.

> It eliminates any military, security or even anything useful.

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.

Are guidance systems on missiles OK or not?

Yes. Despite your attempts at playing philosophically dumb it is okay.

This is the dumbest form of virtue signaling while erecting scare crows I've ever seen in an online forum.

If everyone refused to build guidance systems for missiles, perhaps the missiles would never get built?

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.

> If everyone refused to build guidance systems for missiles, perhaps the missiles would never get built?

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?

> but it's not necessarily a bad thing to explicitly list traits commonly targeted by bullies and harassers.

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).

That's a common problem, and one heavily abused and weaponized.

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.

> 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.

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.

> anti-gay marriage, skepticism on transgender orthodoxy

> 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.

See, you saw "anti-gay marriage, skepticism on transgender orthodoxy" and instantly took it to "an attack on people's rights and lives". Almost no one is saying gay and trans people should not have rights, or lives. They are saying things such as: "I don't believe it is ethical to give emotional children hormonal blockers and encourage eventual gender reassignment" or "I think made-up pronouns are stupid" or "I believe gay people should not be able to marry but get legally equivalent civil-unions".

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.

Thanks, Opalgate is a really good example (along with the ousting of Brendan Eich).

> Well you said it yourself, there's no problem, thus no need for a solution.

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.)

You're basically arguing that people should fear for being run out of their jobs or hobbies or both for expressing wrong opinions. That is much greater harm than the mere knowledge that someone holds opinions that might hurt someones else's feelings. Actions, not words. The Contributor Covenant explicitly legitimizes actionable punishment for the mere possibility of offense towards certain groups (hint, it's always possible).

People who seek to hurt others will find that others don't want to work with them. Indignance will not change that fact. You cannot force people to put up with you; freedom of association is just as fundamental.

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.

> 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.

Long-standing evidence has demonstrated otherwise. Go read the commit message I linked to: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

"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.

What about religions that make others unwelcome, hurt others, or question their right to exist? Should they get protections in a code of conduct or anywhere else?

The Linux kernel Code of Conduct takes litigating the religious affiliations of kernel contributors right off the table.

Thank you for saying this.

Unfortunately, now you know what HN thinks about gay and trans people having equal rights.

The freedom to propose ideas that don't offend anyone is no freedom at all. You're arguing that people can discuss among themselves what doesn't matter much, but only an ideologically correct few get to weigh in on topics that really matter.

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.

I would cite many of the critiques of the so-called paradox in that Wikipedia article as reasons not to give it too much credence. I think it's more something to be considered philosophically rather than any sort of hard rule.

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.

People may divide neatly into factions, but ideas don't. The notion that an un-objectionable code of conduct is somehow allied with a far-reaching political philosophy is reductive and unhelpful. What you're saying is that you'd be comfortable with Linus adopting a code of conduct that made exactly the same statements, so long as the word order was changed to keep it from literally being the Contributor Covenant.

I'm not opposed to the adoption of this CoC. I think it's a positive for the Linux community, and I think it will be helpful (so long as Linus changes his attitude too). I would not like to see this ideological wedge driven any deeper into the gospel of the Linux community, however.

The fact that you think that it's an "ideological wedge" says more about you than anything about the evolution of linux community. Some people see threats everywhere, they go through their whole lives insisting X is really Y, and A will lead to B and therefore nothing should ever change. Since these people are irrational and provide no rational basis for their paranoia (or even historical examples) healthy organizations will tend to completely ignore them.

I’m very skeptical of the CC creator’s motivations as well, but ultimately its application is only as insidious as the body that adopts it and enforces it.

Hence writing it down explicitly to establish a common understanding.

And a couple of decades of unchecked (and finally acknowledged and admitted) poopy behaviour from the lead of one of the biggest open source projects was a seed and open invitation for what, do you figure? Harmony and universal happiness?

Apparently that just didn't occur to Chris Mason, Olof Johansson, Dan Williams, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Steven Rostedt, and Linus Torvalds.

> Apparently that just didn't occur to Chris Mason, Olof Johansson, Dan Williams, Greg Kroah-Hartman, Steven Rostedt, and Linus Torvalds.

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...

I don't see any FreeBSD developers in any of the four links you provided. In one of them I see a specific claim that the people in the thread don't seem to be connected with the FreeBSD community.

I am a FreeBSD developer. None of those links are or represent FreeBSD developers.

That is a non sequitur response to my comment.

Attacking ideas is fine.

Attacking people is not.

There are fine gradations that are open for interpretation.

> Attacking people is not.

Lots of SJWs attack people.

And?

This is why a governing body codifies their interpretation of the matter into rules that everyone who wants to be part of the community has to abide by.

It's a nice theory, but the reality is that those rules tend to get enforced differently for different people, so it fails to entirely stamp out problem behavior.

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.

Yea. I fail to see how something like CoC can ensure a truly harmless community, when it is the covert power (the unspoken vibes, ambiance, etc.) that ultimately dictates the level of malice in a community.

A code of conduct alone doesn't, but it's a start. A statement like this one from the project lead(s) helps as well, to set the overall direction.

This isn't the end of the process for the kernel community; it's a major step in the right direction.

It remains to be seen how this all plays out.

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.

Of course, but it's a start and a symbolic gesture.

> Of course, but it's a start and a symbolic gesture.

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).

In English:

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

I don't care about Torvalds's intentions one way or another, or whether or not he's had a true change of heart. I'm a social justice warrior, not a social virtue warrior, and I am not yet celebrating results that may or may not come one day. I just ask one question: When a man who symbolizes a certain behavior that has led to unjust outcomes professes he was wrong, is that something that, at this point in time, is in the service of a greater or lesser justice? As I didn't see any wink in his statement suggesting that he's doing it only because he's been made to, I think that until it is shown that this is just a PR stunt to whitewash and preserve the status quo, it is an action that serves justice even if it is only symbolic in itself.

My mom is German. I was just helping out a "fellow German" (so to speak) with a little translation.

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18001323

This is the really interesting part of introducing a code of conduct to me: that it flushes a particular type of person out of the woodwork. They are forced to reveal themselves. Forced. It's like you're playing one of those hidden role games, and suddenly you do something that means people have to reveal their concealed cards. It's almost magical.

As always, the people fighting against codes of conduct manage to explicitly prove the need for them.