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posted by martyb on Wednesday September 26 2018, @01:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the don-asbestos-garments dept.

[Updated 2018-09-26 20:30:00 to show the CoC is already in effect. --martyb]

[Ed Note: Given Linus Torvalds' recent decision to step down as head of Linux development for a while, and news of an attempt to install a a new CoC (Code of Conduct) on Linux development, I believe it important to communicate this to our community. It does, however, offer an opportunity for more, ummm, fire, flame, and feelings than the usual stories posted here. Let's try and keep things civil and discuss the merits (or lack of same). To quote Sergeant Joe Friday "All we're interested in is the facts, ma'am."

If you are not interested in this, another story will be along before too long... just ignore this one.

As for the code of conduct itself, take a look at: code of conduct and the kernel commit.]

Eric S. Raymond speaks in regards to the Linux CoC:

From(Eric S. Raymond)
SubjectOn holy wars, and a plea for peace
DateSun, 23 Sep 2018 16:50:52 -0400 (EDT)

Most of you know that I have spent more than a quarter century analyzing the folkways of the hacker culture as a historian, ethnographer, and game theorist. That analysis has had large consequences, including a degree of business and mainstream acceptance of the open source way that was difficult to even imagine when I first presented "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" back in 1997.

I'm writing now, from all of that experience and with all that perspective, about the recent flap over the new CoC and the attempt to organize a mass withdrawal of creator permissions from the kernel.

I'm going to try to keep my personal feelings about this dispute off the table, not because I don't have any but because I think I serve us all better by speaking as neutrally as I can.

First, let me confirm that this threat has teeth. I researched the relevant law when I was founding the Open Source Initiative. In the U.S. there is case law confirming that reputational losses relating to conversion of the rights of a contributor to a GPLed project are judicable in law. I do not know the case law outside the U.S., but in countries observing the Berne Convention without the U.S.'s opt-out of the "moral rights" clause, that clause probably gives the objectors an even stronger case.

I urge that we all step back from the edge of this cliff, and I weant[sic] to suggest a basis of principle on which settlement can be negotiated.

Before I go further, let me say that I unequivocally support Linus's decision to step aside and work on cleaning up his part of the process. If for no other reason than that the man has earned a rest.

But this leaves us with a governance crisis on top of a conflict of principles. That is a difficult combination. Fortunately, there is lots of precedent about how to solve such problems in human history. We can look back on both tragic failures and epic successes and take lessons from them that apply here.

To explain those lessons, I'm going to invite everybody to think like a game theorist for a bit.

Every group of humans trying to sustain cooperation develops an ethos, set of norms. It may be written down. More usually it is a web of agreements that one has to learn by observing the behavior of others. The norms may not even be conscious; there's a famous result from experimental psychology that young children can play cooperative games without being able to articulate what their rules are...

Every group of cooperating humans has a telos, a mutually understood purpose towards which they are working (or playing). Again, this purpose may be unwritten and is not necessarily even conscious. But one thing is always true: the ethos derives from the telos, not the other way around. The goal precedes the instrument.

It is normal for the group ethos to evolve. It will get pulled in one direction or another as the goals of individuals and coalitions inside the group shift. In a well-functioning group the ethos tends to evolve to reward behaviors that achieve the telos more efficiently, and punish behaviors that retard progess towards it.

It is not normal for the group's telos - which holds the whole cooperation together and underpins the ethos - to change in a significant way. Attempts to change the telos tend to be profoundly disruptive to the group, often terminally so.

Now I want you to imagine that the group can adopt any of a set of ethoi ranked by normativeness - how much behavior they require and prohibit. If the normativeness slider is set low, the group as a whole will tolerate behavior that some people in it will consider negative and offensive. If the normativeness level is set high, many effects are less visible; contributors who chafe under restriction will defect (usually quietly) and potential contributors will be deterred from joining.

If the normativeness slider starts low and is pushed high, the consequences are much more visible; you can get internal revolt against the change from people who consider the ethos to no longer serve their interests. This is especially likely if, bundled with a change in rules of procedure, there seems to be an attempt to change the telos of the group.

What can we say about where to set the slider? In general, the most successful - most inclusive - cooperations have a minimal ethos. That is, they are just as normative as they must be to achieve the telos, *and no more so*. It's easy to see why this is. Pushing the slider too high risks internal factional strife over value conflicts. This is worse than having it set too low, where consensus is easier to maintain but you get too little control of conflict between *individuals*.

None of this is breaking news. We cooperate best when we live and let live, respecting that others may make different choices and invoking the group against bad behavior only when it disrupts cooperative success. Inclusiveness demands tolerance.

Strict ethoi are typically functional glue only for small groups at the margins of society; minority regious groups are the best-studied case. The larger and more varied your group is, the more penalty there is for trying to be too normative.

What we have now is a situation in which a subgroup within the Linux kernel's subculture threatens destructive revolt because not only do they think the slider been pushed too high in a normative direction, but because they think the CoC is an attempt to change the group's telos.

The first important thing to get is that this revolt is not really about any of the surface issues the CoC was written to address. It would be maximally unhelpful to accuse the anti-CoC people of being pro-sexism, or anti-minority, or whatever. Doing that can only inflame their sense that the group telos is being hijacked. They make it clear; they signed on to participate in a meritocracy with reputation rewards, and they think that is being taken way from them.

One way to process this complaint is to assert that the CoC's new concerns are so important that the anti-CoC faction can be and should be fought to the point where they withdraw or surrender. The trouble with this way of responding is that it *is* in fact a hijacking of the group's telos - an assertion that we ought to have new terminal values replacing old ones that the objectors think they're defending.

So a really major question here is: what is the telos of this subculture? Does the new CoC express it? Have the objectors expressed it?

The question *not* to get hung up on is what any individual's choice in this matter says about their attitude towards, say, historically underepresented minorities. It is perfectly consistent to be pro-tolerance and pro-inclusion while believing *this* subculture ought to be all about producing good code without regard to who is offended by the process. Not every kind of good work has to be done everywhere. Nobody demands that social-justice causes demonstrate their ability to write C.

That last paragraph may sound like I have strayed from neutrality into making a value claim, but not really. It's just another way of saying that different groups have different teloi, and different ethoi proceeding from them. Generally speaking (that is, unless it commits actual crimes) you can only judge a group by how it fulfills its own telos, not those of others.

So we come back to two questions:

  1. What is our telos?
  2. Given our telos, do we have the most inclusive (least normative) ethos possible to achieve it?

When you have an answer to that question, you will know what we need to do about the CoC and the "killswitch" revolt.
--
                Eric S. Raymond

The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions, that I wish it always to be kept alive. It will often be exercised when wrong, but better so than not to be exercised at all. I like a little rebellion now and then. -- Thomas Jefferson, letter to Abigail Adams, 1787

LKML URL: http://lkml.org/lkml/2018/9/23/212

Possibly in reference to: http://lkml.org/lkml/2018/9/20/444


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by urza9814 on Wednesday September 26 2018, @03:12PM (6 children)

    by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday September 26 2018, @03:12PM (#740231) Journal

    The GPLv2 also states:

    10. If you wish to incorporate parts of the Program into other free programs whose distribution conditions are different, write to the author to ask for permission. For software which is copyrighted by the Free Software Foundation, write to the Free Software Foundation; we sometimes make exceptions for this. Our decision will be guided by the two goals of preserving the free status of all derivatives of our free software and of promoting the sharing and reuse of software generally.

    The proposed CoC contains conditions which state that code which violates the CoC must be removed and cannot be distributed:

    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.

    That means they are changing the distribution terms of the project, meaning that according to the GPL they must receive explicit permission from every single author in order to remain in compliance.

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +3  
       Insightful=2, Interesting=1, Disagree=1, Total=4
    Extra 'Insightful' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   5  
  • (Score: 5, Informative) by exaeta on Wednesday September 26 2018, @03:22PM (5 children)

    by exaeta (6957) on Wednesday September 26 2018, @03:22PM (#740239) Homepage Journal

    It doesn't work that way.

    The GPLv2 is a copyright license to the code, not a license to the project. You might be able to argue a breach of implied contract with the Linux kernel project, but that doesn't give you a right to violate the license of GPLv2.

    It's the same reason Red Hat is able to stop people from distributing Red Hat, they have "trademark" ownership. CentOS just re-brands Red Hat and can distribute the modified version after they change the name. Trademarks and copyright are different.

    Likewise, the project can reject any commits they want, without violating copyright. However, you can make the modifications you want, and distribute them yourself. You just can't force anyone to distribute them for you, that's not what copyright is about.

    --
    The Government is a Bird
    • (Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday September 26 2018, @05:08PM (4 children)

      by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday September 26 2018, @05:08PM (#740317) Journal

      They can reject whatever future commits they want, sure...but the CoC defines new distribution terms which appear to apply retroactively to existing code. You can't just add new terms which already licensed code must adhere to and claim it's not part of the license agreement simply because it's defined in a separate document. It's not about how they handle new contributions in the future, it's about the change to the contributions which have already been made. You can't force them to distribute it for you, but they also cannot force you to agree to new terms after they've already started distributing it.

      • (Score: 2) by exaeta on Wednesday September 26 2018, @05:17PM (3 children)

        by exaeta (6957) on Wednesday September 26 2018, @05:17PM (#740322) Homepage Journal

        The terms don't apply to the source code. Try to make sense. What the fuck are you talking about "applying to old code"?

        --
        The Government is a Bird
        • (Score: 3, Informative) by urza9814 on Wednesday September 26 2018, @05:25PM (2 children)

          by urza9814 (3954) on Wednesday September 26 2018, @05:25PM (#740329) Journal

          The terms don't apply to the source code.

          The terms themselves claim that they do:

          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.

          • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 26 2018, @05:41PM

            by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday September 26 2018, @05:41PM (#740336) Homepage Journal

            That's not distribution terms, that's a maintenance obligation for a specific project group. There's probably a judge somewhere that you could convince otherwise but they'd be full of shit in their interpretation and it would almost certainly be shot down at the appellate level.

            --
            My rights don't end where your fear begins.
          • (Score: 3, Interesting) by exaeta on Wednesday September 26 2018, @05:43PM

            by exaeta (6957) on Wednesday September 26 2018, @05:43PM (#740337) Homepage Journal

            That's only with regard to the code accepted in the official Linux kernel.

            Scope

            This Code of Conduct applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community. Examples of representing a project or community include using an official project e-mail address, posting via an official social media account, or acting as an appointed representative at an online or offline event. Representation of a project may be further defined and clarified by project maintainers.

            So this ONLY applies when accepting commits into the official linux tree, it doesn't stop you from doing anything. Projects are free to restrict how their members represent them, that has nothing to do with copyright.

            --
            The Government is a Bird