The people making the product do not matter. All that matters is the software. It does not matter if the software is made by a bigot or
If I’m a user of the software it doesn’t matter. If I’m looking to be a contributor, it matters a great deal. Contributors have to deal with each other. That’s a large part of what goes on in a project. If you’ve got one who’s driving people away, that’s going to hurt the project.
Whats the big fuzz? They should have not invented 2 (!) languages to write iOS apps and just go with C/C++. Never understood that move and certainly not praising them for “open sourcing” anything after MS paved the way BIG way.
“Nobody’s going to get kicked out against all the mods’ will because they technically violated rule15.a-4” - that is actually quite possible. Mods look bad if they break their own rules, even if it only on a technicality.
But you’re right, there’s a tradeoff. Rules enable rule lawyering, but can also reduce arbitrariness.
Perhaps you are not the only person in the community? I would suspect so from the use of the word “community”.
> PHP, the Nickelback of programming languages
Auw. That’s harsh…
I understand the concern, and something similar was said on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/MehrdadA/status/672873084601376768
Is the code of conduct an anti-Linus clause? I agree with @softwaredoug when he said “it’s about being a professional”. To me, being a professional means not being rude, offensive, exclusionary, etc. Linus can get away with this crap because he’s a legend in the industry. That does not make it right, any more than it makes you or me a legend that is allowed to behave in the same deplorable manner.
Not quite… tl;dr everyone should strongly consider adopting a code of conduct on their open source project, too.
Not Miguel’s, it comes from http://contributor-covenant.org/ – and if the rules are so scary, what about a project with no rules? Shouldn’t that be the scariest thing of all because you have no idea what will be enforced?
Anyway, I think it’s more than a little bit FUD to assume that other people will use guidelines about respecting other people against you. I’m a professional, and you should be too. Objecting to this either means you are not a professional, or are not willing to hold yourself to professional standards.
When you get married, it’s standard practice to get up on stage in front of your relatives and friends and say “I promise to love and honor and cherish this person for the rest of my life”. Do you object to this statement, because nobody can actually guarantee that they will love and honor and cherish this person for the rest of their life?
I hope not, because damn. Just … damn.
Let’s not. The guy is literally crazy, at least on topics like this.
I do hope people got that, because it’s one of the central points I was trying to make, and it lies at the root of most misunderstandings around codes of conduct, and so many other controversies in software development as we become a more diverse field. Not everything is a problem to be fixed. Not all problems can be fixed. Sometimes, trying to fix the problem will make things worse. This is so counter-intuitive to male programmers, but it is deeply, profoundly true.
Exhibit A ↑ … as stated at length in the blog post, and the video I helpfully included in the blog post, the goal is not to “solve” anything.
The code of conduct is merely a starting point, a statement of belief that anchors and sets the groundwork for the effort that comes later. Undermining this effort by saying you can’t possibly have a statement of solidarity and values before doing the work is either a) incredibly misinformed or b) attempting to actively undermine the work. For your sake I hope it is (a).
Marriage isn’t “solved” by saying wedding vows that include these words, is it?
I take you to be my (wife/husband), to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish; and I promise to be faithful to you until death parts us.
Do you deny that there is power in saying these words, in public, in front of the world … even if they turn out not to be true? Because divorce is inevitable, right?
To me, being a professional means not being rude, offensive, exclusionary, etc.
That’s actually one of my qualms with the term “professional conduct”. To me being a professional means you tell the PM to go fuck himself when he suggests we could ship on time by skipping the tests. Maybe that’s a viable business case for websites, but when you make life-support systems it requires a professional. My dad would say professionalism is continuing to work your shift until you’re relieved even though you got fired earlier in the day, because you manage the power grid for a city and walking away would cause millions to billions in damages. It also means doing the job despite your personal views, like if you were employed by a baby-eating bigot-hitler. A professional realizes the job is more important than his paycheck. Did you read through that Opal thread? That Meh user was arguing for professionalism.
Wearing ties and being polite is a side of professionalism I think gets WAY too much focus.
Why not the legal definition? Including that in a CoC allows the project leaders to enforce non-judicial punishment in the case of harassment, especially when no prosecutor would bother.
I agree with what you’re arguing for, but I have one quibble. Being safe and feeling safe aren’t the same thing, and it’s very bad for people to feel much safer than they actually are. For example, if a project has a CoC, but never enforces it and never intended to enforce it it would have been better to skip the misleading CoC. It’s a bit like when a big company claims to be Agile on the grounds that they use the labels Agile folks use without adopting any real Agile practices.
I’m a little disappointed that you chose to cherrypick my comment for the portion you perceived as attacking your blog post. Your choice of calling the words written a code of conduct that you are conflating with professionalism I find professionally insulting. ‘Be nice to each other’ (I am over-simplifying for space) isn’t professionalism; it doesn’t even begin to cover professional behaviour. It’s perhaps a very small start.
As someone else stated, professionalism includes things like ‘continuing to work your shift until you’re relieved even though you got fired earlier in the day, because you manage the power grid for a city and walking away would cause millions to billions in damages’.
I’d also dispute that a code of conduct really means shared values. It’s easy to sign a code. It’s much harder to live by it. Shared values are not achieved by a piece of paper, just as wedding vows don’t create intent. We say wedding vows because we already believe in something. That is the crux of the difference of opinion. By all means have the piece of paper if you want; I am merely stating I do not believe that that is where the change you seek begins. A different analogy if you will - to me, a guideline about how working on a project should embrace diversity is significantly closer to a prenuptual than a wedding vow. The former says ‘sign this, or we’ll end things’. The latter says ‘darling we are alike, I want to be with you forever’.
What worries me the most is that reading your response, you seem to have jumped straight into not only was I attacking your choice to proclaim this as wrong, but that there shouldn’t be codes of conduct. Nothing could be further from the truth. My point is that what is on that page has the wrong focus and doesn’t come across as professional or well written. We can agree to disagree on that point if the focus is intentional to correct a specific problem around social justice in open-source rather than address the wider notion of professional behaviour.
That you jump to perceive anyone who might be proposing a dissenting view as ‘misinformed or undermining the work’ is incredibly naive, rude, and suggests that there is only one possible outcome of an opinion. This, ironically, grossly contradicts your own stated goal of embracing diversity. Diversity includes the opportunity to say ‘no I think you’re incorrect’; it’s not an echo chamber. Respect != agreement.
Consider this reaction multiplied across any circumstance where someone is trying to enact moderation against rules and I think I can see why some might be concerned about zealotry.
Edit: The above is a bit wordy so I want to try and summarise to ensure I’m clear. What you’re describing is laudable and I would place under ‘how humans should behave to one another if they weren’t lacking empathy’. Definitely worth pursuing, but probably better handled at the parenting/schooling/long-term level. However, codes of conduct typically apply to the likes of airline pilots, surgeons, engineers, and so on, who go far beyond that, and are sometimes held to account as a consequence, because they often hold our lives & livelihoods in their hands. To mix the two concepts I find deeply questionable and therefore question the wording when people say ‘you should be professional’ - what aspiration is being expressed and can you truly hold someone to it?
You aren’t wrong in this statement. You are, however, an irresponsible event organizer if you allow this sentiment to drive your decision making process. Yes, today, while they are experiencing actual safety, people will claim to desire a feeling of safety. However, tomorrow, when their actual safety has been violated, they will ask why you did not make them actually safe, and they will not care that you provided a feeling of safety.
I host events of a non-technical nature where this is frequently a significant concern, and there is a large and growing divide in our culture over this. I want to provide actual safety. People who say they prefer the feeling of safety to actual safety are being disingenuous, or possibly just lack self awareness.
This is the second time in as many days that I made what I thought was an obvious joke on Twitter that was interpreted seriously.
Indeed. And your simple gaucherie has suddenly become a banhammer-worthy offence. There are a couple of problems with codes of conduct.
Everything is offensive to someone, if they try hard enough to take offense. And many people do. Once the cry-bullies start with the dueling victimhoods, everybody who wants to do actual work may as well go home.
Secondly, women gang up on low-status males. The Patriarchy isn’t anywhere near as real as The Sisterhood. The problem being that it’s mainly low-status males who do the heavy lifting when it comes to tech.
Sure, organizers have the right to throw you out for any reason at all, but that doesn’t make any reason a good reason. “We must do something. This is something. Therefore we must do it.”
Part of me thinks Jeff wrote this intentionally to start a flame war to allow us to vent at the hypocrisy of this http://contributor-covenant.org/ mostly the people in charge of it. Thus the title “The Hugging Will Continue Until Morale Improves”
I have never been so offended by a group claiming to value everyone as a human being and then saying in the next breath “Who asked for your opinion?” And why are they so concerned about if you would allow a child molester to contribute code? How would you distinguish character assassination from them being a real child molester? Weren’t both Lewis Carroll and Socrates accused of such things. Do we refuse to read their writings and books because they are child molesters? Doesn’t a child molester need help and deserve to be treated with compassion.
Jeff, could you please address the criticism where these codes of conduct assert the right to police what people say in non-project spaces?
This discussion reminds me of the Halloween costumes debate at Yale.
The problem lies in the idea that it’s desirable to safeguard everyone from words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.
But this goes against the enlightenment ideal of free speech. Free speech only works when we have thick skins.
A CoC is an attempt to effectuate this idea of safeguarding, but in the end it can only reap censorship.
We should regard free speech a higher good than feeling safe. (notice the emphasis on feeling there)
Open source software is effectively free speech and we should be extremely vigilant against developments that endanger free speech and with it open source. The CoC, although probably not intentional, is such a development and as such is a bad idea.
A better alternative is to state the applicable law under which the open source project operates. By doing so (and by choosing the U.S. law for instance) you both state the right to free speech, and the right to equal protection. The stuff that’s needed to make people actually be safe instead of feeling safe.
Dude, my local McDonald’s has a code of conduct. Here’s a picture of it.
Only rocket surgeons are “professional” enough to have a code of conduct? I don’t agree. This is a No True Scotsman fallacy. Human beings have the rather amazing ability to be complete jerks to each other in every environment, every job, every profession, every context. Thus the value of these gentle reminders.
I don’t see anyone’s opinion being suppressed. This idea that, because someone added a perfectly reasonable code of conduct, now the politically correct boogeymen will appear and randomly whisk people away in black helicopters at night just isn’t true in my experience.
Reasonable civil people get treated in kind. If that isn’t working, I strongly suspect it’s because there was a lack of reasonableness or civility involved along the line there, somewhere.
Except… nobody is actually saying that. Consider marriage. Obviously people understand the idea is that you honor, cherish, and respect the other person until death do you part in a marriage … to the best of your ability.
But if you get on stage in front of everyone and say
You know what? I am not willing to say that I will honor, cherish, and respect this person until I die because I cannot guarantee that I will, and since such statements are not a guarantee they are meaningless. And I don’t believe in saying meaningless things.
Then… you’re kind of a jerk.
The idea is that you start with a statement to support the aspirational goals, and that statement gives people a sense of safety because they understand your goals are, in fact, noble and honorable, they share those common goals, and – here’s the important bit, so pay attention – that feeling of safety lets you foster an environment where you can then work collaboratively to figure out what specifically needs to be done.
Compare to someone who begins by saying this:
Because these codes of conduct are not guarantees, they are worthless, and not worth having.
I mean, they’re not wrong, there are no guarantees in life, but who in their right mind would want to work with this person on anything, ever?
Or compare with someone who intentionally says nothing at all before getting married, who steadfastly remains silent. Who would you rather be married to?
It’s simple – if the context of the situation is that the person is representing the project, then they’re bound by the project’s code of conduct. If not, they are not. Basic examples:
Someone interviews me about Discourse. I would be bound by the Discourse project code of conduct.
Someone interviews me about Stack Overflow. I would not be bound by the Discourse project code of conduct.
No, that’s not the idea, and that’s not the goal. Allow me to quote XKCD:
As a Swede I find this scary. As previous commenters pointed out this is not to upheld a good standard but for the politically correct to acquire power. Simple clear rules like Behave goes a long way and does what it should.
Being politically correct and applying it everywhere is a slippery slope. The latest development on political correctness here in Sweden was that a local government of a city got the bright idea to let people date refugees with the help of a web page. This is an attempt to integrate people better and the idea might be innocent.
However, they employed an ad bureau and sent out stickers to everyone in the city to put on their doors and mailboxes. The big red stickers said Openness please, a warm welcome! (paraphrase)
This was to show your neighbors that you are for openness. Well, this then means that if you do not put up a sticker, you are not for openness and therefore against it. And being against openness is a very real danger in Sweden that could get you fired or put you or your family in physical danger. Political correctness is just McCarthyism with another name.
I was hoping for this to not poison the OS movement but it seems like it is already here. I guess PC needs to run a country to civil war before everyone wakes up and stops giving in to trying to be a goodness junkie.
How can you say it’s not the goal while the XKCD comic makes the point that
it is about showing people the door?
And it’s exactly what the Contributor Convenant is stating as it’s goals as
well:
Project maintainers have the right and responsibility to remove, edit,
or reject comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other
contributions that are not aligned to this Code of Conduct, or to ban
temporarily or permanently any contributor for other behaviors that they
deem inappropriate, threatening, offensive, or harmful.
To be clear, I do not disagree with the XKCD comic.
I don’t think I have a right to being hosted while sharing my free speech,
while in a bar, at McDonald’s or on someone’s blog. I’m OK with me being
shown the door when I’m saying something that offends the host or the
guests in those situations and I take care in not being offensive in those
cases. A blog owner can censor any comment as he sees fit, without
violating my free speech rights.
But a University campus, the National parliament, the press or an open
source project are institutional in making free speech work. You wouldn’t
want a elected official to be banned from parliament while voicing his
opinion. The XKCD comic just doesn’t hold true in those cases, because in
those cases showing someone the door is a violation of free speech.
Maybe you feel that Open source shouldn’t be in that list together with the
press, the campus and the parliament. But I think it does.
You could argue that the free speech argument with relation to open source
only holds true to the actual code itself, and that the community
surrounding it with forums and blogs isn’t by extension a place that should
host anyone using their right to free speech. But we are on a slippery
slope here, and the Contributor Convenant doesn’t do justice to the
intricacies of that slippery slope and as such impedes Open source in
making free speech work.
Not quite. The right to free speech is about protecting yourself from the government.
Public service announcement:
The right to free speech means the government can’t arrest you for what you say.
So unless you equate open source projects with the government… which is more than a little odd. Are there elections in open source projects? Voting? Representative democracy? Taxes? Systems of law and police, that can arrest you? All the other stuff that goes along with a government?
