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[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: 5, Insightful) by vux984 on Wednesday September 26 2018, @03:52PM (15 children)
"But this licence can be revoked at any time."
No.
The license was granted by you to those you distributed it to. The license you distributed with the code granted those people you distributed it to redistribution rights.
You can absolutely choose to stop distributing it any time you like. But that doesn't "revoke" the license from people who already received it. They are still licensed. They retain all the rights in their license, including the license to redistribute. Any attempt at "enforcing the license" would be pointless - the license doesn't have any clauses allowing you to claw back distribution rights. Any attempt at "enforcing your copyright" would be fruitless because everyone who has the code, HAS a valid license to redistribute it.
Lots of projects have gone this route... version 1, 2, 3, were gpl, and then they decided they wanted to go proprietary so they made v4 proprietary. But v1, 2, 3 are still GPL, and even if you take them off your website, discontinue support, and stop distributing them, they are still GPL. And if they have enough momentum, the community may decide to ignore your v4, and just fork v3 and carry forward from there.
Thus lots of companies go for dual licensing; with new proprietary features that live on top of a lesser GPL product; to try and have the best of both worlds. Since they own the copyright they can do this. And it actually works fairly well, because your competitors can't take your GPL product and do the same thing, because they DON'T have the copyright. So they can take your GPL product, and resell it and support it... but they can't dual license it themselves, or link proprietary features to it, because only the copyright holder can do that.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 26 2018, @04:42PM (7 children)
Gratuitous licenses are revocable if the grantor wishes to rescind said license.
You paid him nothing, he is not bound to any non-existent agreement.
He gave you license out of the goodness of his heart, and can take it away if said heart hardens.
It may "break opensource", but copyright law was not envisioned with opensource in mind.
(Score: 4, Informative) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday September 26 2018, @11:09PM
The GPL isn't non-existent and will always apply to the code released under it.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 27 2018, @03:41AM (5 children)
You're replying to someone who already explained why that isn't so. Let's read the money quote again:
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 27 2018, @07:40AM (4 children)
And he is wrong: you can revoke the license.
It is not a copyright assignment.
Once you revoke, those "rights" listed in your grant are null. They cannot be passed on.
The best you can hope for is an estoppel defense where you may continue to use the software you rely on.
Yes, I am a lawyer.
Copyright and property law are not nullified by whatever you scribbled in the license memorandum.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Friday September 28 2018, @03:08AM
"And he is wrong: you can revoke the license."
No, I think you are wrong.
"Yes, I am a lawyer."
Which at best just means you are prepared to argue any side of any case. :p
https://sfconservancy.org/news/2018/sep/26/GPLv2-irrevocability/ [sfconservancy.org]
But by all means, I welcome your well reasoned and sourced rebuttal. I mean it basically says what you said, except instead of estoppel being the best you can hope for, estoppel just wearing a belt with suspenders; where the legal counsel doesn't believe the suspenders are very likely to fail; and that the license will be deemed irrevocable...
https://copyleft.org/guide/comprehensive-gpl-guidech8.html#x11-540007.4 [copyleft.org]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 28 2018, @04:25AM (2 children)
You have a reason you're going to continue to say that over and over again?
Apparently not in a relevant field.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 29 2018, @05:25AM (1 child)
As has been stated in easily accessible terms elsewhere:
"Most courts hold that simple, non-exclusive licenses with unspecified durations that are silent on revocability are revocable at will. This means that the licensor may terminate the license at any time, with or without cause." +
Version 2 of the GPL specifies no duration, nor does it declare that it is non-revocable by the grantor.
(Also note: A perpetual license may violate the rule against perpetuities in various jurisdictions where it is applied not only to real property but additionally to personal property (and the like), which is why the GPL-3's term of duration is set as the duration of copyright on the program (and not "forever"))
+[https://www.sidley.com/en/insights/newsupdates/2013/02/the-terms-revocable-and-irrevocable-in-license-agreements-tips-and-pitfalls]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 29 2018, @12:35PM
(Score: 2) by dwilson on Wednesday September 26 2018, @08:06PM (6 children)
Somewhat off-subject but still on the subject of licensing and the GPL...
Why is this not the obvious solution to this whole CoC issue? It was added in a git commit, right?
So assume the worst case, Linus actually has been forced out and isn't coming back. What's stopping him from forking the kernel, renaming it, oh, I don't know, Tinus or something, reverting the CoC commit and... life goes on.
He can continue to merge in any new code that the linux source gets, if it passes his muster. Right? Nothing legally stopping him, it's all GPL. Once word gets out, the new project will rapidly attract the old core of developers, and a lot of the current users of the linux kernel will at least take a good look at it. As long as full compatibility can maintained with the old kernel, it's a drop-in replacement. Eventually something will come along to break that, but I would expect for a few years at least it can be done. Long enough to get some steam and take off in it's own right.
It's the code that counts at the end of the day, not the organization that's in charge of development or the name the compiled binary gets. And this code is GPL'd, freely forkable and redistributeable. What could the old project do, realistically? A few years on and it will resemble the openoffice/libreoffice situation. A big deal at the time, but not so much now.
This whole SJW/CoC thing has sort of blown up in the past few years and is currently rampaging through the IT world looking unstoppable, but it really isn't. It's just blind-sided large organizations that never expected anything like it and didn't have defences in place to stop it. It ought to be quite possible to make a new project/company/organization being formed today impervious to this bullshit. Especially one that isn't dealing with customers and the general public.
My opinion, anyway. There are probably aspects of the situation I don't know about or haven't considered that make the fork-and-move-along idea unworkable.
But one thing I do know: You don't win many battles when fighting on your enemy's terms. Or, when you're dealing with a group of people that regularly uses public outrage and social media shitstorms to accomplish their goals, getting angry and engaging in an outraged public debate over their policy choices is a sure way to lose.
- D
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 26 2018, @08:29PM (2 children)
The same threat as was used to force him out in the first place?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 26 2018, @08:37PM
Photos of him sticking it to a penguin? But it was consensual.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday September 27 2018, @03:23AM
They would still have to take over enough of the culture in order for the threat to have teeth. Given that the new group would be composed in large part of refugees, it's not going to be as easy as the first attempt was.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by chromas on Wednesday September 26 2018, @09:06PM
Linus personally owns the Linux trademark, so if anyone had to rename their project, it'd be the current 'official' Linux.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday September 26 2018, @11:14PM
AFAIK he wouldn't have to rename it at all because HE owns the Linux name.
Because they beat you with experience.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Reziac on Thursday September 27 2018, @06:57AM
So long as Linus owns the trademark, he gets to call his version "Linux". The *other* factions have to rename *their* fork.
Otherwise, all agreed.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.