[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) Subject On holy wars, and a plea for peace Date Sun, 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:
- What is our telos?
- 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. RaymondThe 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
(Score: 4, Insightful) by requerdanos on Wednesday September 26 2018, @03:29PM (9 children)
Objectively wrong, and harmfully misleading. It was installed*, not "attempted."
I have seen plenty of bitching about the CoC (including the zinger above) but zero objection to its actual content, which boils down simply to calling for behavior that's professional and civil instead of insulting or attacking. There's nothing in the CoC that contradicts with the goals of good, quality code winning out over poor code. People seem to be working themselves into a lather over the idea of a CoC and over what they think other people will think about a CoC. If you are one of these people, I implore you to get over yourself and knock it off as soon as possible, as you and your mob mentality are the source of damage here, not anything in the (frankly pretty innocuous) CoC.
Are you kidding? Just say "republican", "democrat", "conservative", "liberal", or "Donald Trump" in a story and then compare that one to this one.
As for esr, he should know better than to stir up a fresh new controversy by pretending that it's an already extant one that he's simply commenting on. There was no serious, credible movement by authors to violate GPL by attempting to retroactively nullify it (which is prohibited by the GPL, duh) until he started stirring one up.
If you are commenting on a "killswitch revolt" as if you think it exists, then you are as much the problem as esr is. Whatever he may say, GPL'd code is GPL forever because the rights granted under the GPL *have already been granted*, past tense, already done (see GPL2 [gnu.org] terms 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and perhaps especially 7), and if a significant number of authors dispute this (wrongly, as it happens) then it will cause problems for the standing and reputation of the GPL and for free software, to no benefit for the (wrongheaded) attackers.
Again: If you are discussing code-revocation or supposed problems with the CoC itself as if they were real, actual things and not just rabble-rousing, then you are the problem and should shut up forthwith.
I mean that in all love, and in no spirit of insult nor injury, but rather in the interest of mitigating reputation and mindshare damage that's happening to all of us in the free software community as fallout from this particular firestorm.
---------
* Code of Conduct submitted by Greg KH, signed-off by Chris Mason, Dan Williams, Jonathan Corbet, Olof Johansson, Steven Rostedt, Greg Kroah-Hartman, and Linus Torvalds, and officially accepted [kernel.org] by Linus Torvalds. It's a done deal for better or worse as the case may be. Might it be revoked? Potentially so, but only because anything in the kernel might be replaced by something the kernel authors decide is a better choice. You disagree? That's nice, but this is how Linux development works, and their rules apply, not yours.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 26 2018, @03:59PM (1 child)
Yes. One should in fact *read* this Code of Conduct to learn what it contains before attacking it. For any who have failed to do so:
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/code-of-conduct/ [linuxfoundation.org] spoilered since I don't want it to throw a bunch of lines in for someone who still wants their eyes closed (or already read it).
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday September 26 2018, @09:31PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 26 2018, @04:45PM
Correction to my above... I listed the Linux Foundation CoC in relation to convention attendance. Here's the kernel CoC, pulled from the summary link, sorry!
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 26 2018, @05:16PM (2 children)
Gratuitous licenses are revocable at the will of the grantor.
You weren't _given_ anything, a license is not a transfer of ownership: it is permission by the owner to use his property.
Barring an attached interest, he can rescind that permission granted to you whenever he wishes to do so.
You paid nothing for the GPLv2 licensed code.
Do the math.
(Yes I Am A Lawyer)
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 26 2018, @05:58PM (1 child)
You are a shitty lawyer then, the owner can change the license in the next release but previously released code retains the license it started with.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2018, @08:11AM
Make whatever claims you want, programmer.
Gratuitous licenses are revocable at the will of the grantor.
If he revokes the license to his property when version 4100 is existent, then the code must be stripped from version 4101
Current users of version 4100 and prior may have an equitable defense to continue using the software.
"Future" users of version 4100 do not.
The project must remove the code, and thus version 4101 would not have said licensed property within it.
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Wednesday September 26 2018, @06:32PM (1 child)
As long as CoC is accepted and enforced by current top contributors it won't do much harm. But it won't be of help either. Because in practice outcomes are determined by people who implement them. Formal statement CoC is merely a communication from enforcers to less experienced members of the community. Though its justification of promoting participation of women and minorities is false. Everyone equally want stress-free working environment. Women and minorities should not be entitled to it more than others. Consequently singling them out creates discrimination, not fights it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 26 2018, @07:33PM
No one is being singled out in the CoC. What is with all this imaginary pre-conceived hype? Bunch of teenage girls in here apparently.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 26 2018, @10:13PM
Your lack of attention (not seeing anyone objecting to the content) is not anyone else's problem. Plenty of people are complaining about the content, namely it's so overly-broad and purposely vague that anyone with an agenda can hijack the entire process. Which is what's happened at many other projects where this garbage was instated.
Hardly a surprise, since that's the explicit purpose of it, according to the people who started this whole trend.