Is it a worry, rather than simply being crass, when the author of the CoC herself has said that it is indeed a political document[1]?
[1] https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/1041465346656530432
[1] https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/1041465346656530432
On that ssamw tangent, the GPL series of license is inherently political. I personally like the political ideology espoused, but some do not despite how other licenses leave these developers with many users and proprietary forks, buf no added code, docs or community.
I agree that both CoC and GPL are political.
Developers need to understand something: CoC a political document written by someone opposing one of important principles of free software, meritocracy. https://postmeritocracy.org/
Now here's a big difference: linux was developed under GPL from the very beginning. If you didn't like the politics behind GPL, you didn't contribute. Now, there are people who try to push their politics everywhere, because "everything is political", even math. Why should you accept their politics? Why should linux change its politics? Why must CoC be accepted? Why should developers accept the politics of CoC, after making contributions under promises of GPL?
I'm not sure why this is controversial - the people who can implement the CoC are the same people who generally decide where the project goes, same as always (just ask the people behind GRSecurity).
I'm not sure why some people have this illusion that they somehow have a (moral?) veto power to stop any changes they dislike.
Not to mention the author of the CoC started this process while working at Github by making it easy to add a CoC and badgering projects that don't have a CoC to add one. Low and behold the author's CoC is the first one and recommended for all projects.
I think many people who seem to hate the CoC would be fine with a community driven and created CoC -- what they really dislike is the particular CoC and the political agenda of the author of said CoC. I wonder how it got into 40k+ projects near overnight... And then this used as a beating stick "40k others have done it why have you not?". This type of attitude is unhealthy for everybody.
The said CoC is the "Contributors Covenant".
There is so much more to say about this CoC. I can only hope that the open source community will build a proper CoC that is truy community driven and actually has the goal of bringing people together vs being a stick to hit people with.
As you said, that's not what happened here. As the writer of the "Contributors Covenant" has made clear, there is an ulterior motive. She has a political agenda.
I think if Linus chose any other CoC, there would be no uproar.
And communication is (or should be) an important component for a lead dev.
Linus is a great guy, but some remarks of his were completely unnecessary and overly abrasive. (Without exact technical details about why the code is shit.)
I'm not sure what you mean in the context of Free Software/Open Source. FOSS is something that is useful to everybody, and meritocracy ensures that the folks who are the most knowledgeable decide how it's developed.
The dynamics of open source projects is a very interesting issue, but in general in most healthy environments it works like this: someone sends a patch, and it looks really good. They send another one, and another, and everyone can see that these patches are actually useful (not fixing typos in the comments...). With time, whether in formalized or informal way, that person has more and more to say as others respect their opinion. Why? Because they demonstrated they know the project, they devote their time to it, they can make reasonable decisions. So they are trusted more than a random guy who just joined yesterday, even though the same person - with time - can prove themselves and reach the same or better position in the project. This is called "meritocracy" and it's the base of most FOSS projects.
Of course it's not ideal and there are abusers - overly protective maintainers who refuse patches from anyone, or small groups of friends who dislike newcomers - but in general it works very well and I see no reason to destroy it.
It allows us to codify the spirit of the law, to be used as a fall-back plan when the letter of the law is being gamed. CoC's allow judgement, in contrast to zero tolerance policies which prohibit judgement.
One of orgs I volunteer for had our own #metoo drama. Actual rape, assaults, harassment, etc. Some stomach turning stuff. It made the news. There have been some out of court settlements.
Per the bylaws, we didn't have any way to remove the perpetrator. Adopting a CoC allowed the org membership to impeach the leader. (Maybe like a vote of no confidence works in parliamentary systems.)
Concerns about CoC's being weaponized, misused, abused... Whatever. Of course there's always oversteer, friendly fire. As if abuse didn't exist before CoC's.
I happily accept those occasional failures and let the balance be figured out over time. Rather than going back to denial and inaction.
In other words, I choose 98% awesome over 100% terrible, and happily work to further reduce that 2% gap.
Made up percentages but I understand what you are trying to convey.
The problem is THIS CoC has an explicit agenda, which can lead to it being "weaponized, misused, abused".
If the community all came together and chose a non-biased CoC, there would be no uproar.
Virtually any one who owns a fully mechanical device has access to its workings and with the necessary tools and knowledge (which can be hired or bought) can make changes and improvements to the device. If you own an old Mercedes, Ford, or (place your favourite car here), or a John Deere or Massey Ferguson tractor before critical functions become software controlled, you can make any modifications you want and not only that anyone you sell the device to also gains the benefits of those modifications, make any changes and can pass them on the next user.
Is that a political benefit or an economic benefit?
Try doing that with your Tesla, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfV0_wbjG8KJADuZT2ct4SA/fea..., or your new John Deere.
The GPL extends this facility to computer programs. How does this become a political thing? It only becomes political when there is the desire to use the legislative and judicial systems to subvert end users ability to enjoy, enhance and repair the products they have bought.
I mean, even if one were to accept all your promises, this is exactly the world we live in, so the GPL is indeed political. You can put curtains up between Economy and Politics if you want. I guess.
[1]: https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/1041501017651793922
Edit: I'd also like to highlight that this is a classic version of the ``you're either with us, or against us''[1] argument, i.e. a false dilemma.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27re_either_with_us,_or_ag...
Is there some sort of evidence for this?
>A meritocracy would never allow harassment of people on the basis of things that have nothing to do with their code - it would take a hard stance against sexism and harassment, it would attempt to communicate in a way that doesn’t drive people away from the project in a biased manner, since those and many other behaviours drive away people who may have merit
I can buy that. But that means that you do believe in merit as a central principle. The new CoC is founded on an ideology that explicitly rejects it.
>If anything, a well-designed code of conduct can create something closer to a real meritocracy, as you don’t drive away contributors on anything but the merit of their contributions.
If that were the purpose of the new Contributor Covenant, I don't think anyone would be complaining.
What type of evidence would change your mind?
> The new CoC is founded on an ideology that explicitly rejects it.
The GPL is also founded on an ideology that rejects proprietary software, yet Linux is used by plenty of companies who develop such software. "Foundations" are just an origin story. What part of the actual text of the CoC prevents a meritocracy?
> If that were the purpose of the new Contributor Covenant, I don't think anyone would be complaining.
Reusing the previous example, the purpose of the GPL was to drive out proprietary software; yet the people using it in Linux do not yield it that way. It doesn't matter what purpose the original writer had in mind, only the purpose of those who have the power to interpret and implement it. Do you believe the TAB has any other purpose in mind?
That was an outcome that was hoped for, not a purpose. The purpose is pretty explicit in the preamble paragraphs [0] - to promote a certain style of freedom. As a body, the Free Software community wouldn't deny that if creating non-free software is legal, then free software can be used to achieve that goal. They have a more fundamental objection to the government creating and then enforcing the concept of copyright.
The kernel community has been very aggressive about securing that freedom for themselves, particularly in arenas such as allowing non-free drivers into the kernel. They don't take a politically activist stance of lobbying to change the law, but they don't seem to deal with code that they can't legally modify themselves.
The kernel community may well be cherry-picking from the GNU strategy, but the GPL is being used as intended - to promote and secure freedom for users.
> What part of the actual text of the CoC prevents a meritocracy?
The part where it sets out that the Technical Advisory Board (aka the TAB) will presumably remove people form the community who are in breach of the code of conduct, without language that exempts people who have a long history of positive technical contribution.
Everything involves tradeoffs. Being a meritocracy means that individuals of technical merit are given leeway to fumble, or even potentially abuse, the status of their position.
Good example is Hans Reiser - the case was rendered moot by him being imprisoned, but a meritocracy says "the code is good, let him keep contributing" and a non-meritocractic community would presumably say "we don't want to associate with murderers".
Obviously nobody wants the to encourage bad behavior, but the question being asked is /how much/ slack do great technical contributors get if they happen to be, say, autistic and antisocial. Historically, the answer has been lots of slack. In future, the answer looks like it will be corporate-acceptable-behavior, which is a higher standard. Presumably if there is a group who thinks this change is needed it will be followed by a purge of the community where marginal maintainers are pushed out.
Please do not make the argument that autistic people cannot learn to control their behaviour again.
In the incredibly rare cases where a person, autistic or not, cannot learn how not to abuse people, they need a full-time carer, who will be able to help them interact with the world in a way which doesn't harm other people. It is not the responsibility of people involved in an arbitrary software community to suffer abuse just to make an abuser happy.
Finally - if you allow abusive people to exist within a community, you by definition exclude everybody who they would abuse. You exclude a number of people who may have greater merit, whether individually or collectively. You just can't see that because you're supporting an abusive person over and above anybody else who might wish to contribute. You're supporting them even while they drive out countless contributors, who you can't see the "merit" of because they're no longer contributing. All you can really see is the merit of abusive people, and you ignore the merit of those they abuse.
> Finally - if you allow abusive people to exist within a community, you by definition exclude everybody who they would abuse.
You are going directly to how a meritocratic society might fail. Meritocratic communities can fail, but so can communities with any ideological underpinning.
Sometimes you have a choice between someone who knows exactly what they are doing but has questionable behaviors vs. someone who doesn't know quite as much but is better behaved. A meritocracy gives power to the first person. We can have long conversations about whether that person should strive to improve themselves over time (pretty easy to answer that question), but change is slow and in the interim a choice has to be made.
Note that this is a community issue, not a code issue. If somebody wants to sit on their own, publish patches to their own website, and somebody else wants to import those patches into a community project, fine - there’s no non-technical interaction needed there, and little actual reason to exclude their code. It’s excluding them from the community that we’re talking about here.
Nothing ideologically pure exists - technically there are no democracies in the world either, because, eg, places like the US dilute the will of the masses with the court system (which is not democratic). It is still a pretty democratic country.
> if your organisation is structured to exclude people who may (and likely do) have contributions of merit, it is not a meritocracy
Sure it is. That is like saying you can't have a democracy in Australia if people in Tanzania who aren't Australian citizens, because a a palce ruled-by-people is excluding people. It is reasonable to argue that excluding people who have great potential is a bad idea, which it is, but you can still have a meritocracy.
> Then the question is simple - who do you exclude? People who abuse others, or the people they abuse?
No, that isn't the question at all. The question is simple and it is "how do we support the people making the greatest technical contributions?". In an extreme case, that might mean putting up with some off-color characters who happen to be inspired technical experts.
It isn't perfect. What is? But that is what meritocracies do.