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Michael Larabel over at Phoronix brings us news of a stealth Social Justice coup over at FreeDesktop.org:
X.Org, GStreamer, Wayland, LibreOffice, Mesa, VA-API, Harfbuzz, and SPICE are among the many projects hosted by FreeDesktop.org that now appear to be on a contributor covenant / code of conduct.
The Contributor Covenant for those unfamiliar with it is trying to promote a code of conduct for open-source projects that is trying to promote diversity and equality of contributors to libre software projects. From the covenant's website, "Part of this problem [of "free, libre, and open source projects suffer from a startling lack of diversity, with dramatically low representation by women, people of color, and other marginalized populations"] lies with the very structure of some projects: the use of insensitive language, thoughtless use of pronouns, assumptions of gender, and even sexualized or culturally insensitive names."
The covenant states in part that those contributing should use welcoming and inclusive language, be respectful to others, showing empathy towards others, avoid insulting comments, and avoid inappropriate conduct. For the most part, it's basically common sense.
Now it seems this Contributor Covenant is being forced onto all FreeDesktop.org-hosted projects.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Monday April 10 2017, @09:35AM (1 child)
There'd probably be objections with including it. I'm sure the echo chamber tells itself because all programmers are male and white and sexist and meh and shmeh and BLEH. But in reality it's just as bad as most attempts to police words and thought. With pretty much the same infuriating language. This is the entire paragraph for "Enforcement".
Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be reported by contacting the project team at conduct@lists.freedesktop.org. All complaints will be reviewed and investigated and will result in a response that is deemed necessary and appropriate to the circumstances. The project team is obligated to maintain confidentiality with regard to the reporter of an incident. Further details of specific enforcement policies may be posted separately.
Which if you're going to get down to brass tacks means "whatever we don't like can be punished however we like and you won't know if it's just us that doesn't like you or a user". Might as well just go "Be nice or you're banned".
To be clear, bigots of a different flavor still taste like bigots to me. I literally cannot give less shits about this social justice crap anymore. The damage was done. But I question the practicality even if it were one of those occasions where a shitty maintainer turned someone away because they were too brown/religiously-differing. What's such an agreement do besides encourage spiteful non-constructive criticism in subtler ways. Also intent to offend is something so terribly difficult to recognize. Or have we learned nothing about the importance of context recently.
Also i have to say that this policing makes so little sense unless it's a server for doing localization strings like Valve's crowdsourced translation. Where exactly does this come up in code except for seriously stretched examples like Django's?
People on mailing lists being mean? I get it, but then how often do you deal with mailing lists. Also, raging pissant nerds are easy to deal with. You simply call them raging pissant nerds and move on to a project that will appreciate you.
Hell I'll appreciate you. Even if you're as black as Coal Miner Colby's ass or gayer than John Waters. I'm awesome like that.
Anyway. One point of reference I have is a PR for Django [djangoproject.com] I saw years ago. I suppose you can take that as a baseline of "offensiveness" for django to accept related matters as an issue. So refer to their own [djangoproject.com] enforcement manual for how a project has gone about this. Of course the manual is subject to change at its whim because it's Living(TM).
Also I'm into bondage and I find the whole thing offensive.
P.S. Look at this doozy [freedesktop.org] of a commit summary. Well fuck. Guess criticism is off the table. I wanna act like a human being D':
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 10 2017, @12:06PM
What stood out for me in the paragraph you quoted was that there was no consideration given to the anonymity of the accused in a reported incident. Abusing this is a common tactic of "no smoke without fire" -style smear campaigns.