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Fair warning, I do not like codes of conduct. They're an authoritarian power play justified by fear. Codes of conduct are more about changing who is in the com

Fair warning, I do not like codes of conduct. They're an authoritarian power play justified by fear. Codes of conduct are more about changing who is in the community than about changing the conduct of existing community members. Periodically someone runs afoul of the ruling elite who pass judgement upon them behind closed doors, usually leading to excommunication. The atmosphere of knowing what you say will be reported upwards and optionally stripped of context and rephrased to your detriment promotes an environment of inclusivity and safety. I'm not totally clear what "inclusivity" means at this point. It seems to be "excluding unpopular people and ideas", which should be termed "exclusivity". I've been known to say openly critical things about parts of our industry in public - basically because a lot of software dev is done really badly - and that sort of general negativity has no place relative to enthusiastically praising whatever nonsense is going on at the time. E.g. you go to a talk on concurrency. You know it's nonsense, the code on the slides was wrong and the speaker has totally misunderstood the domain. So you talk with fellow attendees about how it was really interesting and excellent. One guy says "the first example deadlocks", and that makes someone feel uncomfortable, properly fixed by kicking him out of the conference. This is very inclusive and good for industry. Then you all go off to write code that doesn't work. edit: can't believe I forgot the best part. If there's someone in the community you don't like - maybe their work makes you feel inferior, or they're a competitor in some sense, the burden of proof for triggering evisceration by committee is usually negligible. Tell some people they made you feel uncomfortable, let some of them talk you into reporting it and put them down as witnesses, bang - problem solved. Very convenient. Most of the developed world has really clear ideas about the scary things - sexual assault, harassment and so forth, dealt with by a judicial system. So the honourable goals of the CoC systems could be achieved by following norms of society with the existing structures in place. That seems better to me.

atq2119 3y ago
> the burden of proof for triggering evisceration by committee is usually negligible I think this line of thought deserves some exploration. If the burden of proof truly was negligible, CoCs would probably be weaponized more often. My impression is more that the burden of proof is reduced selectively, in favor of people who are good at a certain type of politics / playing social games. So CoCs can be perceived as a shift of power away from technical merit and towards social skills. No wonder there's a backlash from a lot of technical folks. It's also objectively questionable whether such a shift of power is useful for projects. (Humans are always gonna politic, even if it's only nerds, but the normative shift of whether politicking is officially condoned or even valued is what matters) I don't think it's a surprise that we're seeing CoCs in this age of commercialized open source. In the 90s and 00s, open source projects could only survive by technical merit. Nowadays, corporate sponsorship is a very important factor in project viability, and with corporations comes the bigger focus on politics.
- glonq 3y ago
  > So CoCs can be perceived as a shift of power away from technical merit and towards social skills Towards social merit. If you can't/won't convince the new "powers that be" that you are sufficiently aligned with their dogma, then goodbye.
kramerger 3y ago
[flagged]
- ajsnigrutin 3y ago
  What if you believe that only married male-female couples should have sex and children? Or that people with penises don't belong in womens spaces? Or whatever other currently controversial topic? It has nothing to do with GCC, nothing with code quality, nothing with your contributions to the project, you don't say that in code, in code comments, on gcc mailing lists, anywhere gcc related. But, because of the CoC ( https://gcc.gnu.org/conduct.html https://gcc.gnu.org/conduct.html ), which says: > This code of conduct applies to all spaces managed by the GCC project. This includes IRC, the mailing lists, the issue tracker, events, and any other forums created by the project team which the community uses for communication. (this ^ part is ok, you should behave like a professional when dealing with stuff like this; general (non-gcc-related) politics or whatever non-gcc-related doesn't belong in GCC mailing lists) > In addition, violations of this code outside these spaces may affect a person's ability to participate within them. But this part changes everything, and makes CoCs like this one a bad thing. Been on a (eg.) Trump rally in your free time, unrelated to anything GCC? Some overzelaous CoC enforcer bans you, and it's "totally fine", because the CoC allows this.
  - 074edc15 3y ago
    I'm not sold on the idea that "violations of this code outside these spaces" is a bad thing, it depends what those violations are. I'm completely happy and have spent my career working with people who's views don't always align with my own. If I have a religious co-worker who believes I will spend eternity burning in hell for my sexuality, it doesn't bother me in the slightest. They have a right to their view, I have a right to my view, and discussion of those views should be left outside of the workplace. As long as this person treats me with respect, the fact they think I'll spend my non-existent afterlife in a non-existent hell has zero impact on my life. On the other hand, if they spend their free time advocating for things which will have an impact on my life, such as sending me to prison for my sexuality, that's a very different story. It would be impossible for me to work with someone in a constructive way knowing they're pushing for a world without me in it. If they're happy to throw me out of society and into prison, I'm happy to throw them out of my project.
kelnos 3y ago
> One guy says "the first example deadlocks", and that makes someone feel uncomfortable, properly fixed by kicking him out of the conference. Oh, please. That's just unfounded FUD-spreading.
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
    These people need to read Nineteen-Eighty-Four and reflect on how it shines a light on their own behavior.
    - bacchusracine 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - kalkin 3y ago
      Which people? The imaginary people who are offended by "deadlock"?
      - mistercheph 3y ago
        [flagged]
        kalkin 3y ago
        I can't tell if you're joking or trying to prove a point (after all this is a comment section that's worked itself into a froth about the Orwellian behavior of imaginary people) but I notice that you haven't made this request of anyone else, so I'm pretty sure it's not sincere.
  - toast0 3y ago
    Deadlock and livelock are different things. Repurposing the term livelock to mean deadlock deeply offends me, which should deadlock this thread; completely stuck with no more observable signs of activity. However, it will probably only livelock; the thread will continue to have obserable signs of activity, although with very little hope of meaningful completion, or at best, very slow actual progress. Most, but not all, of the effort will go towards spinning.
marcinzm 3y ago
As I see it communities nowadays need a way to exclude a-holes or else the community will eventually evaporate since staying is not worth the cost of putting up with the a-holes. I say nowadays because as I see it the cost of creating a community has gone down and the number of options has increased. As a result people won't stay around in a community simply due to lack of other options. So at it's core the question is "do we have a process for doing this removal" or "do we leave it up to the pure discretion of whomever controls the block button."
brvsft 3y ago
Language is power. It is simply a power grab where people invent new language and initialisms intending to claim ownership and control of them and use them as a tool to, like you say, exclude people. DI became DEI became DEIB in less than a decade. They are working on new initials as we speak, to confuse and demoralize anyone who opposes this make-it-up-as-we-go-along sophistry. Inventing all of this language infrastructure around what used to just be the Golden Rule is clear nonsense.
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - mhoad 3y ago
    It’s really ok to not share every thought that happens to pop into your head.
    - phpisthebest 3y ago
      I can assure you that was a very light and self-censored post on my feelings about DEI or rather DIE
      - predictabl3 3y ago
        Very brave of you. I'm so sorry you were censored for your courageous take.
- maleldil 3y ago
  Can you explain what the abbreviations are for those of us out of the loop?
  - Plasmoid 3y ago
    D - Diversity E - Equity (not equality) I - Inclusion B - Belonging
  - 3y ago
znpy 3y ago
> deadlocks uh, i might be out of the loop, what's wrong with the word "deadlock" now ?
- pndy 3y ago
  Perhaps the dead part which is the trigger for some? I've read recently that phrase unalive is being used as substitute of various dead, suicide related words, to avoid being auto-censored or demonetized in the social media - but that's a bit different thing, innit
  - atq2119 3y ago
    Somebody decided that the word "master" is bad enough to become taboo, so the same thing happening to "dead" is not particularly far-fetched.
    - znpy 3y ago
      On that matter, i can see the point when used to describe a master/slave configuration, but I don’t see how it can make sense when talking for example about the git master branch: there is no such thing as a slave branch, and “master” in there only refers to a “master copy” (concept borrowed from cd-crom mass production from what I know, where the final iso image to be burned to all disks is indeed called the master copy).
- LtWorf 3y ago
  Well i'm disabled… a process running reminds me i can't run.
  - LtWorf 3y ago
    I see i got downvoted… precisely my point of how idiotic such reasoning is…
roenxi 3y ago
In addition, open source projects are generally balancing on a knife-edge between irrelevance and obsolescence. Any bureaucratic tool that draws attention away from their core focus carries a risk of derailing them. The CoC people are relatively transparent that they want to be able to push people like Torvalds and Stallman out of projects. Raising the question; do we have a limitless supply of Stallmans and Torvalds out there to draw on, or are these people actually quite rare? From what I can tell they are quite rare and need to be encouraged in the good they do rather than ostracised for the flaws that all humans have in some way or another. Stallman is a great example. There is a long queue of people lining up to criticise him, but nobody has successfully cobbled together an alternative to the FSF. It wouldn't be hard. GPL 2.0 hit a better sweet spot than 3.0. Nobody has stepped up to the plate.
- LexiMax 3y ago
  > There is a long queue of people lining up to criticise him, but nobody has successfully cobbled together an alternative to the FSF. This isn't true. I have actually seen several non-FSF/OSI attempts at licenses in the recent past, most notably License Zero with its Prosperity and Parity licenses, as well as alternative licenses like the Server Side Public License and Business Source License. The trouble is that attempting to learn from the lessons of past licenses tends to draw a lot of dogmatic outrage because said licenses either don't conform to the open source definition or four freedoms - or at least, not in the opinion of the OSI or FSF. If developers are unwilling to think outside those boxes en masse, then we are in effect "stuck" with the existing power structures. And that power structure is what led to things like the wide preference of permissive licenses and promoting and prioritizing the GPLv3 over the AGPLv3.
  - dmm 3y ago
    > The trouble is that attempting to learn from the lessons of past licenses tends to draw a lot of dogmatic outrage because said licenses either don't conform to the open source definition or four freedoms - or at least, not in the opinion of the OSI or FSF. They generate outrage because they are accompanied by people trying to change the definition of open-source, not with the idea of alternative licenses.
phpisthebest 3y ago
>>It seems to be "excluding unpopular people and ideas", careful there you will get some very bad takes, and memes on Popper's paradox of tolerance, which has been completely bastardized to justify all manner of intolerance these days...
- josephcsible 3y ago
  [flagged]
asylteltine 3y ago
[dead]
CJefferson 3y ago
The ruling elites of open source projects were banning people from IRC in the 90s, this didn’t require CoCs to be introduced.

atq2119 3y ago

> the burden of proof for triggering evisceration by committee is usually negligible I think this line of thought deserves some exploration. If the burden of proof truly was negligible, CoCs would probably be weaponized more often. My impression is more that the burden of proof is reduced selectively, in favor of people who are good at a certain type of politics / playing social games. So CoCs can be perceived as a shift of power away from technical merit and towards social skills. No wonder there's a backlash from a lot of technical folks. It's also objectively questionable whether such a shift of power is useful for projects. (Humans are always gonna politic, even if it's only nerds, but the normative shift of whether politicking is officially condoned or even valued is what matters) I don't think it's a surprise that we're seeing CoCs in this age of commercialized open source. In the 90s and 00s, open source projects could only survive by technical merit. Nowadays, corporate sponsorship is a very important factor in project viability, and with corporations comes the bigger focus on politics.

glonq 3y ago
> So CoCs can be perceived as a shift of power away from technical merit and towards social skills Towards social merit. If you can't/won't convince the new "powers that be" that you are sufficiently aligned with their dogma, then goodbye.

kramerger 3y ago

[flagged]

ajsnigrutin 3y ago
What if you believe that only married male-female couples should have sex and children? Or that people with penises don't belong in womens spaces? Or whatever other currently controversial topic? It has nothing to do with GCC, nothing with code quality, nothing with your contributions to the project, you don't say that in code, in code comments, on gcc mailing lists, anywhere gcc related. But, because of the CoC ( https://gcc.gnu.org/conduct.html https://gcc.gnu.org/conduct.html ), which says: > This code of conduct applies to all spaces managed by the GCC project. This includes IRC, the mailing lists, the issue tracker, events, and any other forums created by the project team which the community uses for communication. (this ^ part is ok, you should behave like a professional when dealing with stuff like this; general (non-gcc-related) politics or whatever non-gcc-related doesn't belong in GCC mailing lists) > In addition, violations of this code outside these spaces may affect a person's ability to participate within them. But this part changes everything, and makes CoCs like this one a bad thing. Been on a (eg.) Trump rally in your free time, unrelated to anything GCC? Some overzelaous CoC enforcer bans you, and it's "totally fine", because the CoC allows this.
- 074edc15 3y ago
  I'm not sold on the idea that "violations of this code outside these spaces" is a bad thing, it depends what those violations are. I'm completely happy and have spent my career working with people who's views don't always align with my own. If I have a religious co-worker who believes I will spend eternity burning in hell for my sexuality, it doesn't bother me in the slightest. They have a right to their view, I have a right to my view, and discussion of those views should be left outside of the workplace. As long as this person treats me with respect, the fact they think I'll spend my non-existent afterlife in a non-existent hell has zero impact on my life. On the other hand, if they spend their free time advocating for things which will have an impact on my life, such as sending me to prison for my sexuality, that's a very different story. It would be impossible for me to work with someone in a constructive way knowing they're pushing for a world without me in it. If they're happy to throw me out of society and into prison, I'm happy to throw them out of my project.

kelnos 3y ago

> One guy says "the first example deadlocks", and that makes someone feel uncomfortable, properly fixed by kicking him out of the conference. Oh, please. That's just unfounded FUD-spreading.

JonChesterfield 3y ago
[flagged]
- kevin_thibedeau 3y ago
  These people need to read Nineteen-Eighty-Four and reflect on how it shines a light on their own behavior.
  - bacchusracine 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - kalkin 3y ago
    Which people? The imaginary people who are offended by "deadlock"?
    - mistercheph 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - kalkin 3y ago
        I can't tell if you're joking or trying to prove a point (after all this is a comment section that's worked itself into a froth about the Orwellian behavior of imaginary people) but I notice that you haven't made this request of anyone else, so I'm pretty sure it's not sincere.
- toast0 3y ago
  Deadlock and livelock are different things. Repurposing the term livelock to mean deadlock deeply offends me, which should deadlock this thread; completely stuck with no more observable signs of activity. However, it will probably only livelock; the thread will continue to have obserable signs of activity, although with very little hope of meaningful completion, or at best, very slow actual progress. Most, but not all, of the effort will go towards spinning.

marcinzm 3y ago

As I see it communities nowadays need a way to exclude a-holes or else the community will eventually evaporate since staying is not worth the cost of putting up with the a-holes. I say nowadays because as I see it the cost of creating a community has gone down and the number of options has increased. As a result people won't stay around in a community simply due to lack of other options. So at it's core the question is "do we have a process for doing this removal" or "do we leave it up to the pure discretion of whomever controls the block button."

brvsft 3y ago

Language is power. It is simply a power grab where people invent new language and initialisms intending to claim ownership and control of them and use them as a tool to, like you say, exclude people. DI became DEI became DEIB in less than a decade. They are working on new initials as we speak, to confuse and demoralize anyone who opposes this make-it-up-as-we-go-along sophistry. Inventing all of this language infrastructure around what used to just be the Golden Rule is clear nonsense.

phpisthebest 3y ago
[flagged]
- mhoad 3y ago
  It’s really ok to not share every thought that happens to pop into your head.
  - phpisthebest 3y ago
    I can assure you that was a very light and self-censored post on my feelings about DEI or rather DIE
    - predictabl3 3y ago
      Very brave of you. I'm so sorry you were censored for your courageous take.
maleldil 3y ago
Can you explain what the abbreviations are for those of us out of the loop?
- Plasmoid 3y ago
  D - Diversity E - Equity (not equality) I - Inclusion B - Belonging
- 3y ago

znpy 3y ago

> deadlocks uh, i might be out of the loop, what's wrong with the word "deadlock" now ?

pndy 3y ago
Perhaps the dead part which is the trigger for some? I've read recently that phrase unalive is being used as substitute of various dead, suicide related words, to avoid being auto-censored or demonetized in the social media - but that's a bit different thing, innit
- atq2119 3y ago
  Somebody decided that the word "master" is bad enough to become taboo, so the same thing happening to "dead" is not particularly far-fetched.
  - znpy 3y ago
    On that matter, i can see the point when used to describe a master/slave configuration, but I don’t see how it can make sense when talking for example about the git master branch: there is no such thing as a slave branch, and “master” in there only refers to a “master copy” (concept borrowed from cd-crom mass production from what I know, where the final iso image to be burned to all disks is indeed called the master copy).
LtWorf 3y ago
Well i'm disabled… a process running reminds me i can't run.
- LtWorf 3y ago
  I see i got downvoted… precisely my point of how idiotic such reasoning is…

roenxi 3y ago

In addition, open source projects are generally balancing on a knife-edge between irrelevance and obsolescence. Any bureaucratic tool that draws attention away from their core focus carries a risk of derailing them. The CoC people are relatively transparent that they want to be able to push people like Torvalds and Stallman out of projects. Raising the question; do we have a limitless supply of Stallmans and Torvalds out there to draw on, or are these people actually quite rare? From what I can tell they are quite rare and need to be encouraged in the good they do rather than ostracised for the flaws that all humans have in some way or another. Stallman is a great example. There is a long queue of people lining up to criticise him, but nobody has successfully cobbled together an alternative to the FSF. It wouldn't be hard. GPL 2.0 hit a better sweet spot than 3.0. Nobody has stepped up to the plate.

LexiMax 3y ago
> There is a long queue of people lining up to criticise him, but nobody has successfully cobbled together an alternative to the FSF. This isn't true. I have actually seen several non-FSF/OSI attempts at licenses in the recent past, most notably License Zero with its Prosperity and Parity licenses, as well as alternative licenses like the Server Side Public License and Business Source License. The trouble is that attempting to learn from the lessons of past licenses tends to draw a lot of dogmatic outrage because said licenses either don't conform to the open source definition or four freedoms - or at least, not in the opinion of the OSI or FSF. If developers are unwilling to think outside those boxes en masse, then we are in effect "stuck" with the existing power structures. And that power structure is what led to things like the wide preference of permissive licenses and promoting and prioritizing the GPLv3 over the AGPLv3.
- dmm 3y ago
  > The trouble is that attempting to learn from the lessons of past licenses tends to draw a lot of dogmatic outrage because said licenses either don't conform to the open source definition or four freedoms - or at least, not in the opinion of the OSI or FSF. They generate outrage because they are accompanied by people trying to change the definition of open-source, not with the idea of alternative licenses.

phpisthebest 3y ago

>>It seems to be "excluding unpopular people and ideas", careful there you will get some very bad takes, and memes on Popper's paradox of tolerance, which has been completely bastardized to justify all manner of intolerance these days...

josephcsible 3y ago
[flagged]

asylteltine 3y ago

[dead]

CJefferson 3y ago

The ruling elites of open source projects were banning people from IRC in the 90s, this didn’t require CoCs to be introduced.