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"the people actually doing the work on perl core don't seem to find the 'cruft' problematic." There's the crux of it. It's open source, and the developers usua

"the people actually doing the work on perl core don't seem to find the 'cruft' problematic." There's the crux of it. It's open source, and the developers usually doing the most work seem to be the ones that are less socially... adjusted, while the 'community managers' and people broadly more interested in DEI are carrying less. Seen it time and time again. I don't have answer to the situation in general. "Code of Conduct" of course only exists when people have an interest in working together - which GNUesque projects seem to be more focused on. Relatedly I observe opposite behaviour the plan9 related community generally - where everyone basically maintains their own patch trees. If you don't want to deal with other people or your changes aren't getting upstreamed for some political reason - it's not a big deal. You can just mail your patches to some friends and they'll use it. In some ways Code of Conducts is another way of enforcing 'business' culture onto programming and hacking. At the same time, these 'hackers' and major contributors should stick to their own medicine. If they're all focused on the code, then stick to the code. There's no reason to say something offensive, if your goal is to get a better quality code out there. If you think someone is a @$#%(@% or a piece of @$#%#@ or whatever cartoonishly evil phrase you want to use, who cares? just focus on the code.

sennight 5y ago
> If they're all focused on the code, then stick to the code. That might be good advice if the aggrieved could ever be satisfied, but they cannot. You will not be left alone, you must rename all your git "master" branches to "KuntaKinte".
mahkoh 5y ago
>In some ways Code of Conducts is another way of enforcing 'business' culture onto programming and hacking. The primary purpose of CoCs is to enforce power relations. For example, apple plainly committed misconduct when they unilaterally bullied the W3C into not adopting SPIR-V as the shader language for WebGPU. The implicit threat was that they would simply kill WebGPU by not making it available on iOS where they have the browser monopoly (which itself is a violation of good conduct.) All other browser vendors, game engine vendors, and users supported the adoption of SPIR-V but in the end Apple got their way and WGSL was created as a bespoke shader language for WebGPU. (Naturally afterwards many post-hoc justifications were invented for this move.) Users and game engine vendors were quite upset at this because they now have to learn and implement a new shader language. When they expressed their discontent, those complaints were quickly and forcefully shut down with reference to the CoC (which apparently does not apply to Apple.)
- zozbot234 5y ago
  There are ways of converting between SPIR-V and WebGPU. It's sad that the W3C fell into this peculiar sort of NIH syndrome, but technically speaking it's no big deal.
bitwize 5y ago
If you think that problematic language doesn't matter, consider this story. I promise there are no "SJWs" in it, rather just the opposite: When the Linux OOM killer decides to eliminate memory hog processes, it prints to the kernel logs a message of the form "Kill process [...] or sacrifice child". Currently there are panic memes spread by idiots on Facebook about their crashed smart TVs satanically demanding the sacrifice of their children (like the ATM in American Psycho demanding a dead cat). The language that you use to describe things in computing matters because you don't know who might be reading, how they may interpret it, or how important that person is to the future health of your project. The religious right is still tremendously powerful in the USA, open source still smells like communism to them, and open source that demands the blood sacrifice of their children may just mobilize them to attempt the complete destruction or discrediting of Linux itself and any manufacturer that uses it. The "parent", "child", and "kill" terminology in terms of Unix processes has been around since forever ago. And they still cause alarm! There's a strong case to be made here for changing the terminology. Think, then, how much more alarming more loaded terms like "master" and "slave" must be. That is the thing that angered Spek to the point of using the N-slur -- which is itself intolerable in a professional context. We all must work together in order to make our software more accessible to all. That means that hackers working closely with the DEI people -- and listening to their concerns -- needs to be table stakes for any open source project if you want broad adoption.
- calvinmorrison 5y ago
  > We all must work together in order to make our software more accessible to all. No, I don't need to spend time and money rewriting or changing my code because some crappy TV company decided to freely use linux or other open source software and they didn't like the terms used in it.
- still_grokking 5y ago
  > Currently there are panic memes spread by idiots How about educating, or else just ignoring, idiots? Seems simpler. The problem with idiots is that they're idiots. Besides trying to educate them you can't do anything about it. If it's not this thing they don't understand it will be some other thing they don't understand or misunderstand. That's the nature of idiots. We shouldn't try to create an "idiot-prove" world, as this world would be just idiotic in the end.
mst 5y ago
> "the people actually doing the work on perl core don't seem to find the 'cruft' problematic." > There's the crux of it. It's open source, and the developers usually doing the most work seem to be the ones that are less socially... adjusted, while the 'community managers' and people broadly more interested in DEI are carrying less. Not quite true. The crux of my argument with sawyer was that the things he wanted to be removed as cruft were, so far as I understood it, very different from the things the people doing the C level hackery (which he's just good enough to have been a bloody effective cat herder and I'm so terrible at that I couldn't even have done that so just have to trust the people who are good at it). On top of that there'd already been most of a year of very passionate arguments leading up to that and he, and I, and almost everybody else involved, were risking burnout from them. Then I misjudged a conversation horribly and pushed a dear friend over the edge into flat out burnout. I didn't apologise for that because anybody made me to - in fact, the apology he deserved was delayed by months because the TPF CAT forbade me from contacting him even to apologise and told me that would be considered harassment if I did so. Then I discovered he didn't know that, and my friend had spent the time in between getting steadily more upset because he thought the lack of apology was because I didn't care, and I decided the TPF CAT could go fuck itself with a rake and they could sanction me if they liked for caring more about my friend than their orders, and talked to him and apologised anyway. We had a good conversation after that, and I only wish I'd done it sooner.

sennight 5y ago

> If they're all focused on the code, then stick to the code. That might be good advice if the aggrieved could ever be satisfied, but they cannot. You will not be left alone, you must rename all your git "master" branches to "KuntaKinte".

mahkoh 5y ago

>In some ways Code of Conducts is another way of enforcing 'business' culture onto programming and hacking. The primary purpose of CoCs is to enforce power relations. For example, apple plainly committed misconduct when they unilaterally bullied the W3C into not adopting SPIR-V as the shader language for WebGPU. The implicit threat was that they would simply kill WebGPU by not making it available on iOS where they have the browser monopoly (which itself is a violation of good conduct.) All other browser vendors, game engine vendors, and users supported the adoption of SPIR-V but in the end Apple got their way and WGSL was created as a bespoke shader language for WebGPU. (Naturally afterwards many post-hoc justifications were invented for this move.) Users and game engine vendors were quite upset at this because they now have to learn and implement a new shader language. When they expressed their discontent, those complaints were quickly and forcefully shut down with reference to the CoC (which apparently does not apply to Apple.)

zozbot234 5y ago
There are ways of converting between SPIR-V and WebGPU. It's sad that the W3C fell into this peculiar sort of NIH syndrome, but technically speaking it's no big deal.

bitwize 5y ago

If you think that problematic language doesn't matter, consider this story. I promise there are no "SJWs" in it, rather just the opposite: When the Linux OOM killer decides to eliminate memory hog processes, it prints to the kernel logs a message of the form "Kill process [...] or sacrifice child". Currently there are panic memes spread by idiots on Facebook about their crashed smart TVs satanically demanding the sacrifice of their children (like the ATM in American Psycho demanding a dead cat). The language that you use to describe things in computing matters because you don't know who might be reading, how they may interpret it, or how important that person is to the future health of your project. The religious right is still tremendously powerful in the USA, open source still smells like communism to them, and open source that demands the blood sacrifice of their children may just mobilize them to attempt the complete destruction or discrediting of Linux itself and any manufacturer that uses it. The "parent", "child", and "kill" terminology in terms of Unix processes has been around since forever ago. And they still cause alarm! There's a strong case to be made here for changing the terminology. Think, then, how much more alarming more loaded terms like "master" and "slave" must be. That is the thing that angered Spek to the point of using the N-slur -- which is itself intolerable in a professional context. We all must work together in order to make our software more accessible to all. That means that hackers working closely with the DEI people -- and listening to their concerns -- needs to be table stakes for any open source project if you want broad adoption.

calvinmorrison 5y ago
> We all must work together in order to make our software more accessible to all. No, I don't need to spend time and money rewriting or changing my code because some crappy TV company decided to freely use linux or other open source software and they didn't like the terms used in it.
still_grokking 5y ago
> Currently there are panic memes spread by idiots How about educating, or else just ignoring, idiots? Seems simpler. The problem with idiots is that they're idiots. Besides trying to educate them you can't do anything about it. If it's not this thing they don't understand it will be some other thing they don't understand or misunderstand. That's the nature of idiots. We shouldn't try to create an "idiot-prove" world, as this world would be just idiotic in the end.

mst 5y ago

> "the people actually doing the work on perl core don't seem to find the 'cruft' problematic." > There's the crux of it. It's open source, and the developers usually doing the most work seem to be the ones that are less socially... adjusted, while the 'community managers' and people broadly more interested in DEI are carrying less. Not quite true. The crux of my argument with sawyer was that the things he wanted to be removed as cruft were, so far as I understood it, very different from the things the people doing the C level hackery (which he's just good enough to have been a bloody effective cat herder and I'm so terrible at that I couldn't even have done that so just have to trust the people who are good at it). On top of that there'd already been most of a year of very passionate arguments leading up to that and he, and I, and almost everybody else involved, were risking burnout from them. Then I misjudged a conversation horribly and pushed a dear friend over the edge into flat out burnout. I didn't apologise for that because anybody made me to - in fact, the apology he deserved was delayed by months because the TPF CAT forbade me from contacting him even to apologise and told me that would be considered harassment if I did so. Then I discovered he didn't know that, and my friend had spent the time in between getting steadily more upset because he thought the lack of apology was because I didn't care, and I decided the TPF CAT could go fuck itself with a rake and they could sanction me if they liked for caring more about my friend than their orders, and talked to him and apologised anyway. We had a good conversation after that, and I only wish I'd done it sooner.