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Comment by m1el | Hacker News Reader

> The CoC being a political document is expected

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?

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You should accept the politics if you agree with them. Linux should change its politics if its major contributors agree they should be changed, and at least seven of them - including Linus himself - do.

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.

I think the problem has to do with how this potcular CoC came about to be the de facto CoC. There is a lot of evidence in screenshots and wayback machine that suggest that this CoC was strongarmed into a lot of projects, and the ones that resisted have been put into a bad light.

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.

I believe most of the community would be totally fine with a CoC that banned things commonly agreed as bad (sexual harassment, trolling, etc) with no ulterior motive.

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.

Meritocracy is meaningless without an utility function.

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.)

> Meritocracy is meaningless without an utility function.

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 issue is that calling a system meritocratic doesn't give a functional definition of merit, and people tend to evaluate merit in very biased ways; see e.g. the halo/horn effect [1]. Possibly the simplest and most pervasive bias, though, is that work by familiar people is viewed as more valuable than work by unfamiliar people (cf. nepotism, cronyism, NIH).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect

OK but this is a completely different discussion: defining what meritocracy means vs. rejecting it altogether.

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.

I'm a huge fan of CoC's.

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.

> 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.

I think many people would be fans of CoCs.

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.

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