Yes, that is the right of free speech. But the principle of free speech is much, much wider than that. Some people here believe that 1) the wider principle of free speech should be at the heart of open source projects; 2) the principle is taking second place to political correctness under some of these “codes of conduct”.
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I’ve kept as much online distance as possible from this kind of subject for a long time now, mainly because I see so many misguided people on all sides, flagrant abuses of logic, hot tempers, and an epidemic lack of perspective.
Then I read that Opal thread until I couldn’t read it anymore, and I’m finding it really difficult to stay on the fence. What possesses these people to cast every situation as a black-and-white issue of morality, as if everything is an excuse for someone to be a victim, every action to be politicised far outside the reach and significance of the action itself.
Is this what they call “identity politics”? It looks like any situation or context now has the potential to be hijacked and turned into a platform for self-righteous soapboxing, with the demonisation of anyone who isn’t immediately on board with the hysteria.
That Opal thread seems to have ended with the unprincipled capitulation to the loudest voices, no matter how illogical and misplaced their grievances. I’m genuinely disturbed by what I read.
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By saying free press is paramount in making free speech work, I’m not
equating free press with government, quite the contrary. So neither did I
equate open source with government. I don’t think a code of conduct is a
direct infringement of my right to free speech. I do think the code of
conduct like the Contributors Convenant is a danger to free speech.
It’s not enough to be protected from the government, if that leaves me with
a situation where in every public place (be it online or offline) I’m
policed by a Code of Conduct that effectively makes them places of censor
and prohibition.
For the right to free speech to work you have to have places where you can
exercise that right. The McDonald’s is not such a place, neither is
someone’s blog. A newspaper would be such a place and in my view open
source projects should be such a place.
With a code of conduct like the Contributors Convenant, censorship and
prohibition comes from the project maintainers. And although a project
maintainer stands in his right to do so, and it’s not an infringement of my
rights in any way, I’m really, really uncomfortable with it.
Open source is really important. You couldn’t have a functioning democracy
if citizens didn’t get a good flow of information, and open source is
critical in making the information flow. So, yes, it’s really important to
develop a open source ethic. But the Contributors Convenant is a step in
the wrong direction. It’s a step that makes it harder for open source to be
of value for a democracy.
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Just call them rules. You have decided what they are, you interpret them, and you must enforce them. Once you put these things out, you must own it and become the moral authority, period. The hugs are to say; sorry, I am the boss.
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That’s correct, but misses the point.
The first amendment gives us the right to free speech. That’s a legal quandary.
Free speech is an enlightened idea that goes beyond what’s legal.
I’m a believer in free speech. I reserve the right to do whatever I damn well please with my own servers, but I wouldn’t censor people lightly.
Don’t fall into the trap of believing that supporting free speech is just something for other people, or it’s solely to keep government at bay.
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That’s exactly what I meant to say, but I needed way too much words to do so. 
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Okay. Now, if you go back to the “Opalgate” thread you’ll find that the initial push to establish codes of conduct was entirely because, on a contributor’s personal Twitter page where they were not talking about the project, they said something that the CoC advocate didn’t like. The CoC advocate’s response was to try to get that contributor thrown out of the project. It sounds like this violates the principle you’ve described above, and therefore the CoC advocate was behaving badly. Do you agree?
Yes, we have removed your “right” to say racist, sexist, and other hateful things to fellow human beings in the context of this particular open source project.
If that’s a problem for you, perhaps there might be another open source project that is more to your liking? Or you could fork the project and start your own version of it with no code of conduct, or a code of conduct that explicitly encourages completely unrestricted speech.
It seems to me you have a tremendous amount of freedom to do whatever you want, and say whatever you want. If you believe in this so strongly, that’s what you should do – and that is precisely the freedom that open source gives you.
So remind me again, what the problem is? Because I’m not seeing one.
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@codinghorror - I just wanted to take a sec to give you major props for linking to an article that wantonly bashes your own product, and not in a self-defensive manner. 
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You can’t deny that people who just don’t trust Cocs are flagged as villains who don’t care about preventing harassment. I care about preventing harrassment, I just don’t care about pretending to care.
Hey we just have a difference of opinion. I judge a project by the sense I get from reading their mailing list, how they answer questions, and how they critique my patches or ignore them and if I don’t like their tone, I move on. Cocs in many cases are just lipservice and lipservice that taken literally would require a large number of very nice OS people be thrown out of their project. If I actually read them literally, I’d have to throw half the great caring and sensitive folks who love their projects to the wolves and I can not condone that, therefore I will not say I will. Who’s being a jerk?
Hey I had Cocs in highschool and in corporate. It was just liptalk for some bozo to scream harrassment and for others to say – it’s because of your kind we need to put up with this BS. I also have issue with the people behind http://contributor-covenant.org. There reasons are totally bogus. The only harassment I ever felt was them trying to convince me I’m marginalized. I’ll take my chances with a gang of foul-mouthed white-men any day. Do you really want someone like this in your open source project - https://twitter.com/adriarichards who has pinned
“When you see a woman of color standing in the room, take a moment to
think about her journey to get there despite racism and sexism”
and who eavesdrops on your private conversation with your friend and screams harassment.
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[quote=“Sharas, post:2, topic:3830, full:true”]
I think you’re confused.[/quote]
You seem confused, as you fail to point out anything that he is confused about.
You are confused … that’s not what he said. He said “a feeling of safety is, in fact, what many people are looking for” … he didn’t mention you are all, nor did he say what the purpose of a code of conduct is (presumably its primary purpose is to put bounds on what conduct actually occurs).
You seem confused … you are not the only person on the planet, or the only relevant person, or the only person addressed.
You seem confused, because that’s a real problem for many people.
You are confused, because it definitely isn’t.
So for something to be a hobby, rather than work, one has to be free to be a jerk? Do the people who say these things actually have any hobbies that involve other people?
Please keep it constructive. Bickering will be deleted.
Personally I would like to see more actual, real world, concrete examples of these so-called “risks” of having a code of conduct on an open source project, or elsewhere. What negative outcomes resulted, exactly? Be specific. Share links.
And, if you have an issue with codes of conduct on open source projects, I would like to hear why you haven’t exercised your freedom to fork the project and institute your own code of conduct.
Well, when I say Code of Conduct, the TL;DR of it is that I want you to be treated the same way I want to be treated – with mutual respect.
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You most likely won’t see any, and this discussion is good example why.
Some people have strong feelings against CoC, either because it didn’t protect them, they were created due to controversial incident, or any other prior personal experience with them. And if they see two candidates for contribution, one of which argues hard pro/against CoC they are going to chose one, where this is not a thing.
In my mind I see huge similarity to religion in a workplace. For some it’s important to a degree they want to have religious symbols, because it makes them feel better, but (excluding few raging opposers) by deciding your workplace is religious you’re limiting contribution from non-religious people. And they will skip boat silently without doing a lot of fuss, because that’s what rational people usually do.
Personally, I don’t see any profit from having CoC. If people can’t stop themselves from being arseholes they are going to be arseholes whether there is controversial CoC or not.
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I’ve been mulling over your post for a while now, doing some serious thinking about a subject that I’ve categorically avoided investing mental energy into up until now. It’s been a struggle, because I see sincere merit to both hemispheres of the argument, but can’t feel neutral on the subject at all. I’ve got major objections to several of the assumptions/concessions that I believe you are making, which surprised me… I’ve always emphatically agreed with the outlook depicted in your opinion pieces. So I thought I’d take the time to offer my freshly minted 2¢ on the matter.
For the sake of context, here’s my own, personal perspective on codes of conduct. I’m a millennial… I acquired consciousness right at the dawn of the internet, spent all my formative years with ~75% of my social experiences being either online or digitally focused, and taught myself lucked into a career in software dev. I am a capable and professional adult, well versed in our modern virtual culture, and hearing the notion of a ‘code of conduct’ painted in this light is nearly as offensive to me as being offered a prenuptial agreement.
If ‘code of conduct’ ever appears on my radar, I expect to have stepped on somebody’s toes on accident… outside of that, I never bother reading the code of conduct for any online community I visit. I simply know what’s expected of people - lurk before posting, don’t feed the trolls, be constructive, respectful, and don’t be a pesk - because I f’king live here! I’m a native! That doesn’t mean I’ll always get it right, of course… but when I get it wrong, my internal reaction is akin to being pulled over for speeding in a school zone - “Aaahhh, sh*t… my bad” - and I feel a natural obligation to make amends for the mistake, the same as if you wouldn’t want a warrant out for your arrest in your home city. It’s simply a matter of tatemae.
Now, that’s just my own outlook. I’m fully aware that there are OODLES of proto people on the internet who aren’t of such sanguine persuasion, but my thoughts on CoCs as applied to the specific conversation here (OSS communities) would be meaningless without that context.
So, all that said (and since we’re friends ʕᵔᴥᵔʔ), considering this particular burr in our subculture, here’s my honne:
Uh..... is this really a *problem,* in the open source community? Really?? You're joking. There's ***so*** much interpersonal conflict, among team members who all ***volunteered,*** on your average OSS project today that ***pre-emptive*** measures are needed to ensure effective cooperation now? There has to have been *some* catalyst (because why would we spend energy whiteboarding all this tiresome crap otherwise)... the internet is littered with people screaming for *something* to be fixed, but for the life of me I can't find any concrete evidence of the underlying problem. The stack trace doesn't point anywhere useful.
How many of these complaints[1] are actually legitimate amongst the cacophony? Because it seems far fetched to me that the open source community should suddenly find itself so out of balance and unable to self-moderate/organize like (I thought) it's been doing successfully for decades that it now needs outside intervention and disclaimers for any who join a project... or perhaps I'm just ignorant.
My fundamental disagreement with a common, standard, template code of conduct isn’t with what it tries to achieve… it’s simply that it’s institutional boilerplate, and it isn’t even relevant to the code itself. At what point were our prior methods of conflict resolution deemed insufficient, and why, exactly? What’s the justification for this crusade? Why do we need to turn CoCs into popularized propaganda, instead of just falling back on them as-needed when people are dicks? Why the figurative try/catch around every single line?
(New users can only include two links, lol)
EDIT:
Interesting factoid: there are only 2 degrees of separation between this page I’m on right now and patreon.com/coraline?ty=h (linked to at the bottom of contributor-covenant.org), which is a personal donation page for Coraline Ada Ehmke (the author and main proponent of contributor-covenant.org), who uses those donations to pay for her gender transition medical costs! Stated right there on the page. Like… WHAT!!! How is that not a gargantuan conflict of interest?? Why does this have any credibility whatsoever?
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I was looking at this page GitHub - discourse/discourse: A platform for community discussion. Free, open, simple. trying to find your code of conduct. I noticed it seems none of your core contributors are women why is that? :). Please don’t take my concern as bickering. As a concerned woman seeking diversity, I just want make sure you are being fair and not prejudiced against women. As I see no reason why you have no women, I can only assume that A) You offended them with your dismissal of their concerns, or B) you discriminated against them. As you know diversity is a key concern in the tech industry. We must all work together to encourage diversity and stamp out prejudice.
Oh and by the way, since you are not a woman, you probably have no clue what it’s like to be discriminated against. I think to be fair you should institute me as judge and jury of your code of conduct because if you don’t people will just assume you are paying lip service 
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Jeff as others have said - it’s hard to find these because people who aren’t loud enough have been silenced and just moved on and it’s really hard to defend yourself against a mob when technically they have not violated the Coc - http://blog.robertorosario.com/sabotage-made-simple/ Here’s a guy who’s gone thru a lot of grief.
A simple code of conduct is sufficient: ‘Be civil or you may be cast out of this community’. Publicly affirming anything beyond that is dangerous, especially when it is some promise to take action like
[/quote]
Let’s not forget about the great woman of civility who won the 2015 Red Hat Woman of the year award for championing civility. You most certainly want her on your team. http://www.itworld.com/article/2989588/linux/linux-is-sarah-sharp-a-social-justice-warrior.html
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Nobody can be against casting out trolls and bigots. But everybody should be against what a contributor to this code of conduct intended to happen in the Opal case.
In the Opal case, a contributor gave a private opinion out of the context of an open source project. They gave their opinion ‘on topic’ in their own Twitter stream. They were, as far as I have seen, not actively proselytizing this point of view or behaving in hateful or harassing ways. They were not privately approached about their opinion. Context and nuances are unknown: 140 chars really aren’t enough. They may have been misunderstood, they may have been confused about certain facts, they may be a generally nice and decent person to everyone they work with, just with some weird beliefs that don’t influence his behaviour. Yet someone saw that opinion, noticed or knew he was a contributor to Opal and thought they needed to go there to complain about this contributor and demand they be removed from the project. Over ultimately a single tweet that probably nobody would ever have seen again.
Words are powerful things. Words you have publicly stood by are even more powerful, as Roberto Cialdini describes in his famous book ‘Influence’. A lot of awful things have happened in the past by initially making people publicly support something ‘nobody could reasonably object against’, only to slowly but surely move the measuring stick. For enlightening stories, read about how the Chinese, in their POW camps, slowly turned POW’s into collaborators using this technique.
For the same reasons it is likely that this kind of code of conduct would have made matters worse, with complainers pointing to the document and the project leaders feeling forced to stand by ‘their’ code of conduct, instead of trying to be reasonable about the situation.
The person that complained in the Opal case is one of the authors of this ‘covenant’. These are their words. Public affirmation of these words will lead to communities being infected with a tendency to ostracise those with objectionable opinions, instead of trying to teach them and bringing them into contact with those they see so wrongly. Instead of trying to live with people you may not completely agree with, but who don’t do harm if you can accept that such people exist.
A simple code of conduct is sufficient: ‘Be civil or you may be cast out of this community’. Publicly affirming anything beyond that is dangerous, especially when it is some promise to take action like
Project maintainers have the […] responsibility to [uphold] this Code of Conduct
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Ok so this
And this
First of all, the initial reply to that concern, whether it is valid or not, is completely disgraceful. That alone is a good argument for a code of conduct. And that is absolutely within the scope of the project, on GitHub, not on Twitter.
Her perspective on the connection between Twitter and the project
On June 18 of this year a friend on IRC expressed his frustration with tweets by a person named Elia (@elia). Elia tweets frequently about transgender people, expressing the tenet of biological essentialism that states that your assigned gender at birth is the only gender that is valid. Things reached a head when Elia, during the course of a heated discussion, stated that transgender people are delusional and out of touch with reality.
In Elia’s Twitter profile, he proudly proclaims that he is a maintainer on opal, a Ruby to Javascript transpiler that has gained some popularity this year. This raised a red flag for me.
Couple things there:
-
frequency. If it is something the person says a lot, frequently, versus a single off the cuff remark, that’s a concern. Plenty of people have been hounded to death over single isolated remarks, and that is not fair, but there is a big difference between that and a pattern of behavior.
-
mentioning the project in your Twitter profile. That does set up a stronger association, unless you include a “personal account, does not reflect the views of…” disclaimer too.
On the whole, particularly given the awful and completely dismissive reply on GitHub, I think there is a reasonable case for the CoC to apply in this situation, and to that open source project.
Protip: many situations can be defused if you initially respond in an empathetic, considered way versus slamming a door shut in someone’s face. If the CoC gets people to behave better in this regard alone, it is a win.