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Last week, Phoronix broke a story about the kernel DRM group over at FreeDesktop.org submitting a pull request for their code of conduct to be included in the kernel docs for the DRM subsystem. The next day it was merged.
I'm particularly interested in if they think this will keep Linus from saying hurtful things to them over lousy code. Discuss.
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Torvalds Merges DRM CoC Into 4.12 Development Repo
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New crypt. See /usr/news/crypt.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by melikamp on Monday May 08 2017, @08:52PM (2 children)
I think the parts you quoted are mostly reasonable. There is, however, a couple of clauses you omitted:
Emphasis mine. These are personally subjective (a comment is threatening as long as a single project member feels threatened), or relative to a community standard at best (a comment is threatening as long as a critical mass of contributors feels threatened). Unlike with sensible objective restrictions (like sex talk bans), there is no objective measure of these things, and there can't be any in principle. Absolutely any behavior can trigger a member being offended and/or threatened, paving a way for the arbitrary ostracism a la Garfield of Drupal. This opens up a truly golden trolling opportunity for any schmo who is willing to claim being offended by a project member they don't like. All they need to do is be persistent and look for like-minded individuals to keep up a stream of complaints legitimized by the CoC.
I can only wish lots of good luck to every project using Contributor Covenant: they will need it. They are pretty much asking to be trolled in the way I just described, and there is nothing they can do against these trolls, as everything will be legit and by the letter of the CoC.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday May 08 2017, @09:05PM (1 child)
I think the parts you quoted are mostly reasonable. There is, however, a couple of clauses you omitted:
Project maintainers have the right and responsibility to remove, edit, or reject comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions that are not aligned to this Code of Conduct, or to ban temporarily or permanently any contributor for other behaviors that they deem inappropriate, threatening, offensive, or harmful.
Emphasis mine. These are personally subjective (a comment is threatening as long as a single project member feels threatened), or relative to a community standard at best (a comment is threatening as long as a critical mass of contributors feels threatened). Unlike with sensible objective restrictions (like sex talk bans), there is no objective measure of these things, and there can't be any in principle. Absolutely any behavior can trigger a member being offended and/or threatened, paving a way for the arbitrary ostracism a la Garfield of Drupal. This opens up a truly golden trolling opportunity for any schmo who is willing to claim being offended by a project member they don't like. All they need to do is be persistent and look for like-minded individuals to keep up a stream of complaints legitimized by the CoC.
I can only wish lots of good luck to every project using Contributor Covenant: they will need it. They are pretty much asking to be trolled in the way I just described, and there is nothing they can do against these trolls, as everything will be legit and by the letter of the CoC.
I consciously didn't include that clause, as it opens a real can of worms. That's not to say I was trying to minimize the potential issues, I wasn't. Rather, I wanted to point up the fact that the general goals of this specific CoC (and most others) are pretty reasonable.
I did mention that making a CoC successful was dependent upon having reasonable people administering/enforcing such CoCs, and that there was the risk that some folks could hijack the process for their own ends.
You are quite correct that there are issues with proper execution. At the same time, given that there are some who simply will not treat others professionally, or at least with simple human respect, I'm not sure what else can be done.
If you have some alternative ideas to address the dickheads, I'd love to hear them.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @03:11AM
> making a CoC successful was dependent upon having reasonable people administering/enforcing such CoCs,
Fundamentally that is the basis of all governance. In that respect CoCs are no different from HOAs, professional organizations like the bar, or government.
Good governance takes dedication and work. Some people seem to think that its better that there be no governance. At best those people are just wishful thinkers, believing that some "invisible hand" will automagically produce good results - at worst, like the submitter, they are nihilists.