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Linux Dev's threaten to pull killswitch over CoC (somewhat clickbaity title)

Trik'Stari
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Please keep in mind that there are lots of different perspectives within our community, and the tech community in general. Just because someone is saying something that you disagree with, does not mean that they are inherently wrong or stupid, just that they are looking at this divisive issue from a different perspective. There are no right or wrong answers to this issue.

 

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  • Remember your audience; both present and future.

Can someone explain to me why it matters if a programmer is white, black, blue or if he/she/it identifies as an Apache Attack Helicopter? I still call that person a programmer.

 

They should just hire whoever is the best in the field regardless of race, gender etc.

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Wow, I didn't know being a gay white male prevented me from learning some programming language and contributing to the Linux Kernel before...

 

Man this shit pisses me off.

 

Honestly I wished people would learn to stop being so focused on labels and what not, it's annoying and it's divisive.

 

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I'm beginning to think Linus picked the perfect time to leave.
Just let this play out and sweep up the ashes and corpses.

muh specs 

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That plea is full of shit. Officially, Linus Torvalds owns the code for Linux and any modification to it (including and perhaps especially community contributions on HIS github repository) must either be kept for yourself or released in turn under the GPL 2.0 (as per the GPL 2.0 itself). I'm pretty sure you can't claim copyright for a patch to a project you ddin't create and I'm even more sure that they can't force any of the maintainers to go and delete their copies (aka their github commit history) retroactively.

 

That aside, I find it very telling that those claiming the new CoC and its supporters are abusive and discriminatory would be so quick to resort to blackmail and ruining the party for everyone. Talk about throwing everyone under the bus for the sake of politics. In the end it's clearly just a bunch of selfish assholes looking for petty revenge on those who don't want to put up with their nonsense, and I urge anyone who doesn't fit that description to take a step back and reconsider what they're campaigning for and who they are defending.

 

Quote

> You've made your point. Now stop it. The remedies you suggest, if they
> could even be legally done, would hobble the Linux Kernel project, to
> the great delight of Google, Microsoft and Apple. Long observation of
> people resenting CoCs  is they want the right to speak cruelly to
> individuals and speak cruelly about groups of people, those groups
> having nothing to do with the list's core foundation (Linux sans
> systemd, in our case). The person continuing to use terminology, having
> nothing to do with the core foundation of the mailing list, that others
> ask them not to use, has a real problem, and it's not the list's duty
> to help with that problem. The project is probably better off without
> the person --- his or her priorities are just plain wrong.
> 
> Your posts are offtopic. You've made your point. Please stop now.
> 
> SteveT

From the same article we (thankfully) have a voice for sanity in our unsung hero Steve, who reminded the trigger-happy "avenger" that he sent this to a mailing list that has nothing to do with any of it and that his propositions are ludicrous to put it lightly.

 

Also... since when is "LULZ.com" a reliable source for anything? Not that it really matters in this case but jeez... their homepage tells you a lot on where their biases lie.

 

I have discussed at length why the new CoC really isn't a problem here

and it seems clear to me that it's being used as an excuse to shift the focus away from certain people's unacceptable behaviour to a politically flavoured scapegoat. Let me reiterate - some of these people are campaigning to destroy Linux over this. THEY are the ones who intend to harm the community, not the ones who adopted a new code of conduct. Any façade of legitimate concern doesn't hold water in front of this.

 

Note: I'm not saying anyone in particular (especially any member of this forum) except the author of this email is part of what I just described. I do believe those defending this are being manipulated, through no fault of their own, into harming the community. If I've been too harsh or what I wrote came off as a personal attack, I apologise; I just really like Linux and it pains me to see it has come to this.

 

---/rant (maybe)--- On to answering posts!

 

4 hours ago, D13H4RD2L1V3 said:

More specifically, it’s something that just happens to be mostly done by white straight males.

 

There was no actual barrier to coding for Linux if you’re not a white straight male. If that really bothers you so much, I think you have bigger problems.

1) Maybe in the US, but there are plenty of non white computer scientists around the world even if the male to female ratio is similar and ignoring the fact that you can't really know if  someone is straight... considering Linux is a worldwide project I don't think your point is valid here.

2) On paper, absolutely - the question is whether or not some people took it upon themselves to enforce some sort of barrier through bullying or harassment. I couldn't answer that to be honest, but surely we can entertain the possibility...? Aside from that, the new CoC doesn't put in any barriers either, nor does it provide "fast lanes" for anyone.

3 hours ago, Coaxialgamer said:

Ok so i don't get it . On the COC website they have stuff like  this :

Capture.JPG.330ce491dae4e80948c7fa3a7e97049c.JPG

 

Isn't this work ethic 101 ? What's the big deal here ?  I'd expect this of any professional work environment.

Yeah, is there anything so incredibly wrong about putting it on paper? Does it warrant all the backlash it's gotten? I'd say obviously not, but plenty of people seem to disagree.

4 hours ago, asus killer said:

i don't get any of this, is this like positive discrimination for linux programmers?

I invite you to read it, it's just 82 lines. There's nothing of that sort in it.

4 hours ago, Brooksie359 said:

It is a bit ironic that the best way to have a world free of discrimination would be to not take background into account at all. 

That doesn't really work if you're the only one who doesn't care. Suppose a country has racially unfair laws; should you just ignore background while the rest of the country doesn't? Would that make it fair? Or would it be better to protest, even though that protest would inevitably have to acknowledge the existance of that background?

 

I'm not saying that's the case here, but it's a little naive to think that by completely ignoring people's backgrounds discrimination would just solve itself. If EVERYONE suddenly didn't care, sure - but that's not really possible.

4 hours ago, cj09beira said:

Activists from the feminist and LGBTQIA+ communities have been trying to force the Linux project  PUTS ON BRAKES....

enough said, fu** thoses snowflakes

Have you considered that that article might have been written that way explicitly to solicit that reaction from you and make sure you take their opinion at face value?

 

3 hours ago, aezakmi said:

 

CoC: *explicitly states some common sense rules of human interaction*

People who have never contributed a single line of code:

Quote
Spoiler

image.png.f88ac154536539058f475aa6c3dfa85e.png

 

jokes aside, the CoC says nothing about white people not being allowed. That's just a straw man. At least read the damn thing before you take a side.

Don't ask to ask, just ask... please 🤨

sudo chmod -R 000 /*

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3 hours ago, Bananasplit_00 said:

dafuq? so someone could be using stuff under a free lisence that then the devs do a lisence switcharoo on and then sue the shit out of you for copyright? wtf

Basically yes.

Judge a product on its own merits AND the company that made it.

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10 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Basically yes.

At least according to this guy... it's a little strange that this has literally never happened. You'd think something like this would pop up at some point since the internet became a thing.

Don't ask to ask, just ask... please 🤨

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1 hour ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Can someone explain to me why it matters if a programmer is white, black, blue or if he/she/it identifies as an Apache Attack Helicopter? I still call that person a programmer.

 

They should just hire whoever is the best in the field regardless of race, gender etc.

American nonsense. Sorry but it's the truth.

 

In most countries a person commits a robbery period, in the US they tell you the color of the person that commits a robbery.

.

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1 hour ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Can someone explain to me why it matters if a programmer is white, black, blue or if he/she/it identifies as an Apache Attack Helicopter? I still call that person a programmer.

That's pretty much what the new CoC says...

1 hour ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

They should just hire whoever is the best in the field regardless of race, gender etc.

Nobody gets "hired" by the kernel maintainers, but otherwise you're right of course - although that doesn't account for fringe scenarios and external factors. Sure, as a business it makes perfect sense to hire the most qualified for the job - but I would argue there is a case for hiring, say, disabled people or a homeless person even if there's a person who is technically more qualified but will be just fine if they don't get that position. Either way that's off topic, the Linux team doesn't pay anyone for contributing code as far as I know.

Don't ask to ask, just ask... please 🤨

sudo chmod -R 000 /*

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1 hour ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Can someone explain to me why it matters if a programmer is white, black, blue or if he/she/it identifies as an Apache Attack Helicopter? I still call that person a programmer.

 

They should just hire whoever is the best in the field regardless of race, gender etc.

That's an answer that is highly political.

Come Bloody Angel

Break off your chains

And look what I've found in the dirt.

 

Pale battered body

Seems she was struggling

Something is wrong with this world.

 

Fierce Bloody Angel

The blood is on your hands

Why did you come to this world?

 

Everybody turns to dust.

 

Everybody turns to dust.

 

The blood is on your hands.

 

The blood is on your hands!

 

Pyo.

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1 hour ago, PCGuy_5960 said:

Can someone explain to me why it matters if a programmer is white, black, blue or if he/she/it identifies as an Apache Attack Helicopter? I still call that person a programmer.

 

They should just hire whoever is the best in the field regardless of race, gender etc.

You're too normal to understand. You live in the real world and probably have never heard about all the bad things from the "Gender Studies" department. Sadly I have to crush your world and try to explain this shit:

 

The Reason for this is the 

And the "Oppression Ladder", where the "White Cis Male" is THE Oppressor of everybody. And because the "White Cis Male" Oppresses everybody, they stand at the top. And because of the Oppresion, they keep everyone else down and one has to do something about that. We need to limit the power the cis white males, because they are the Oprressors and bring in females and people of color. Because they want Equity, not equal oppurtunity.

 

 

DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK,#NSFL!!

^ that's a bit detailed explanation of this theory.


I obviously do not believe in that. But there are a couple of people that do. And they are trying to force their way in here...

"Hell is full of good meanings, but Heaven is full of good works"

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4 hours ago, Coaxialgamer said:

Ok so i don't get it . On the COC website they have stuff like  this :

Capture.JPG.330ce491dae4e80948c7fa3a7e97049c.JPG

 

Isn't this work ethic 101 ? What's the big deal here ?  I'd expect this of any professional work environment .

 

I mean , i'm aware of the whole master/slave debacle recently , but the website itself is so vague . It doesn't explicitly state what the problem is or how it will be solved . And i see no mention of pushing/hindering any ethnic groups or people of various backgrounds/orientations. The closest concrete thing is see is "people should be held accountable for their own behaviour" . 

I thought the general rule of thumb is just "don't be a dick" and "treat people as you want to be treated" , and you're fine . what's the controversy , and what is exactly wrong with an existing code of conduct?

 

The problem I have with the CoC is that while it does not define what "harassment" is (for example the author of the CoC has at several times said that people with different political beliefs than her are oppressing people) but it does have fairly clear rules for what happens when you do "harass" someone, or fail to remove someone who do not follow the rules.

 

Basically, the document says "if you harass or do something we don't like, you get banned from contributing to this project. If some maintainer fails to take action against someone not following these rules, that maintainer should be removed".

Since the terms for what is and isn't harassment are so loose, it is very much up for interpretation.

 

Take this scenario as an example.

  1. Let's say a girl called Anita doesn't like that one of the Linux developers voted for Trump in the election Let's call him Jon. Anita finds some tweet where Jon said something that supports Trump.
  2. Because this CoC applies outside of the Linux project, Jon is now breaking the rules of the CoC in the eyes of Anita.
  3. Anita goes to the maintainer (let's call him Greg) and ask for Jon to be banned from contributing to the project on the basis that he is racist and oppresses minorities.
  4. Greg now has two options. A) He bans Jon or B) He says that the tweet made by Jon does not qualify as breaking the CoC.
  5. If Greg choose option A Anita now has a great tool for threatening people. If they do something she does not like, they can lose their jobs.
    If Greg choose option B then an argument can be made that he is breaking the CoC, which explicitly says that any maintainer failing to uphold the rules risk getting removed from the project themselves. If he does not remove Jon, it is up to someone else to decide if Greg should be banned from the project based on whether or not the new judge decides if Jon's tweet was breaking the loose rules outlined in the CoC.

 

This leads to two issues in my mind.

1) If a maintainer is on the fence about if something is breaking the very loosely defined rules, then they will probably rule on the side of caution which means banning the person who created the offensive thing. If they rule that "it's not offensive" then they themselves risk losing their job if someone else finds it offensive. This encourages a work environment where everyone has to be super careful so that nothing they do could potentially be interpreted as offensive. If they do, they risk losing their jobs.

It's low risk to ban someone and remove content, high risk to not remove it. In a sense, it's similar to Youtube's monetization system where they are overly caution with flagging videos as inappropriate.

 

2) People can twist and deliberately withhold critical information to paint someone as more offensive than they are. We can already see this happening with one lead Linux developer being called a "rape apologist". Wanna know why he gets called that? Because he believed that a study saying that 1 in 4 women in college gets raped was inaccurate. Here is the mail which caused Ted to get called a rape apologist (please note that the feminazis calling Ted a rape apologist has looked through over 7 years of emails just to find something to be offended over):

Quote

From: Theodore Tso <tytso>
Date: Tue, 1 Feb 2011 02:17:14 -0500

 

If people want facts, perhaps they read some of these URL's and then come to their own conclusion:

 

http://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/183781.pdf
This appears to be the source of the 1 in 6 figure (17.6%). But it's worth going deeper. If you look at percentage of women reporting rape since age 18 (taking out the child abuse and statutory rape cases, which they also treat in detail), it becomes 1 in 10 (9.6%), and of those over 61.9% were at the hands of their intimate partner, as opposed to an acquaintance or stranger. Also in the survey, in the rapes that were reported via a randomized telephone survey, in 66.9% of those cases, the perpetrator did not threaten to harm or kill the victim. (Which makes it no less a crime, of course, but people may have images of rape which involves a other physical injuries, by a stranger, in some dark and deserted place. The statistics simply don't bear that out.)

 

http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/3925/Readings/RapeCultureSummers.pdf
This one does a pretty good job of taking apart the Koss / Ms. Magazine study, which is the source for the "1 in 4" number. For example, it points out that over half of those cases were ones where undergraduates were plied with alcohol, and did not otherwise involve using physical force or other forms of coercion. And if you asked the women involved, only 27% of the people categorized by Koss as being raped called it rape themselves. Also found in the Koss study, although not widely reported, was the statistic that of the women whom she classified as being raped (although 73% refused to self-classify the event as rape), 46% of them had subsequent sex with the reported assailant.

 

http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_campus_rape.html
This is a more popularized treatment of the issue. There is quite a bit of anti-feminist ranting in the article, which you should try to ignore while looking at the arguments, which is that some of these rape statistics don't seem to hold much in the way of water.

 

Please note, I am not diminishing what rape is, and or any particular person's experience. However, I *am* challenging the use of statistics that may be hyperbolic and misleading, and ultimately may be very counterproductive if it causes people to become afraid when the reality might not be as horrible as the "1 in 4" numbers might at first sound. Just as it was wrong for George Bush to inspire fear in the population so he could push his War Against Iraq agenda through congress, it's also wrong for people who, out of good intentions, inspire fear in others or themselves of being raped if the statistics used are misleading and manipulated.

 

-- Ted

 

 

So even if the CoC doesn't have anything all that bad in it when read at face value, you have to take it into context of how it has been used before. Other projects which has adopted this particular CoC has opened themselves up for witch hunts where people do long, detailed background checks on developers to try and find things which can kind of be seen as breaking these rules, and then argue for them to get banned from projects. The CoC for the Linux kernel was adopted just a few days ago and one lead developer is already being accused of being a rape apologist which should get banned. Even the author of the CoC says that she designed it to be a political document.

 

In the spoiler are a few examples of other projects where good developers have been kicked off projects for not being PC enough.

Spoiler

Opal, attempt to witch-hunt dev out of the project over personal opinion thwarted by maintainer being open-minded: https://github.com/opal/opal/issues/941

 

The entire GitHub Code of Conduct Drama: http://archive.is/JzOojhttps://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3g8ehh/github_puts_open_code_of_conduct_on_pause_cites/

 

Django attempt to impose "Contributor Covenant" over project for rejected pull requests from "People of Color", then labeling him an ist and saying they'll go to management: https://archive.is/dgilk

As a suggestion I recommend adopting the Contributor Code of Conduct to ensure everybody's contributions are accepted regarless of their sex, sexual orientation, skin color, religion, height, place of origin, etc, etc, etc. As a white straight male and lead of this trending repository, your adoption of this Code of Conduct will send a loud and clear message that inclusion is a primary objective of the Django community and of the software development community in general.

 

Ruby attempt to impose the Contributor Covenant over the project, founder Matz thankfully aware enough to reject it, here's his explanation: https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12004#note-95 Following that attempts by Contributor Covenant to get Matz separated from "Community Management": https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/690334282607378432 and insults year later: https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/1029170073938944000 Thankfully he knows what's up: https://twitter.com/CoralineAda/status/1041701099378540544

 

PHP attempt to impose Contributor Covenant on the project that thankfully fails after a few skirmishes and a few great explanations why: http://paul-m-jones.com/archives/6214

the Contributor Covenant, and any other codes of conduct originating in Social Justice, are to be opposed out of hand, both in PHP, and in any other place they are suggested

 

Node.js attempt to remove a contributor over sharing an article on Twitter: https://quillette.com/2017/07/18/neurodiversity-case-free-speech/ http://archive.is/h6lem

Most recently Rod tweeted in support of an inflammatory anti-Code-of-Conduct article. As a perceived leader in the project, it can be difficult for outsiders to separate Rod’s opinions from that of the project. Knowing the space he is participating in and the values of our community, Rod should have predicted the kind of response this tweet received.

After lengthy attempts to defend himself: https://medium.com/@rvagg/the-truth-about-rod-vagg-f063f6a53557 he barely survives a vote triggered to throw him out of the project, activists are pissed: https://twitter.com/ag_dubs/status/899749156209664000 After the Kangoroo court is over, people point out said activists broke said "Code of Conduct" in much more severe ways, no action is taken: http://archive.is/7cL5s

 

Drupal contributor is thrown out of the project for his personal sex life: https://www.inc.com/sonya-mann/drupal-larry-garfield-gor.html after activists in its "Diversity & Inclusion group" set up dozen pages political dossier of supposedly "problematic" comments he might have made on Twitter/Reddit or his Blog: https://www.scribd.com/document/350215190/Crell

 

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1 minute ago, gabrielcarvfer said:

Basically: a really good reason not to use and/or contribute to any open-source projects with this stupid CoC.

I'd still use software from projects who use this CoC.

I would not want to contribute to any of them though because if I do, any post I make, on any website, that might be seen as controversial can lead to me being banned from further contributions to that project. Putting in time and effort into a project just to be banned from it without as much as a thank you really sucks.

 

If I submit a patch to the Linux kernel under the name LAwLz, someone might look up this post and deem it harassment and therefore my patch will get rejected.

Remember, the CoC explicitly says that the CoC extends beyond the project itself, onto social network sites and such.

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@Sauron You seem to keep arguing that "Because these people want to kill the CoC, and they're doing insane stuff like this it's just a bunch of people like this who dislike the CoC so they can harass people."

 

These people are doing something insane but that doesn't make the new CoC itself any less ridiculous. I dislike what these people are doing because it's stupid, but also because it devalues the argument they're trying to make.

 

These people arguing against the CoC in a bad way doesn't make the CoC itself any less flawed. As @LAwLz and I have mentioned in both this thread and the thread you linked to, the way that the enforcement of rules is set up is highly abusable if you can get enough sway in the community that's enforcing it. That's not cool. There's plenty of people arguing alternative CoCs who are doing it in very respectable and respectful ways and to scapegoat the entire community arguing against it on these people's actions is a bit over the top.

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It would take a lawyer to know better, but this at best sounds like the case the author of the letter would try to argue for in court. I mean, things like:

 

Quote

The remuneration for the work was implied to be, or perhaps stated, to 
be fame

Fame as a payment promised by a specific counterpart? Really? Fame can't be promised, nor provided, by anyone. Fame is your status within the world at large, or a certain community at least. No individual or institution can possibly make a binding commitment to make you famous in general or within a community, whether that individual or institution is part of said community or not, and regardless of the status the individual or institution itself holds.

You simply can't argue that you had a contract with Stephen King by which he commits to make you famous among writers. You cannot claim to have a contract with me, or the US government, by which you will be admired and esteemed by certain 354 individuals, or 25% of high school graduates.

The part about being member of a certain club or whatever could have some legs, but when you see "fame" as a contractual reward, you know there is at least some degree of wishful thinking in these claims.

 

 

5 hours ago, Coaxialgamer said:

Ok so i don't get it . On the COC website they have stuff like  this :

Capture.JPG.330ce491dae4e80948c7fa3a7e97049c.JPG

 

 

But how can they have a CoC that basically says "don't be Torvalds"? xD

I guess I understand his timeout thing now :P 

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27 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

These people arguing against the CoC in a bad way doesn't make the CoC itself any less flawed. As @LAwLz and I have mentioned in both this thread and the thread you linked to, the way that the enforcement of rules is set up is highly abusable if you can get enough sway in the community that's enforcing it. That's not cool. There's plenty of people arguing alternative CoCs who are doing it in very respectable and respectful ways and to scapegoat the entire community arguing against it on these people's actions is a bit over the top.

Exactly.

The CoC proposed by lead Ruby designer Matz is far superior, and all he did was remove a few things from the current CoC.

Here is the modified version:

Quote

Contributor Code of Conduct

 

As contributors and maintainers of this project, and in the interest of fostering an open and welcoming community, we pledge to respect all people who contribute through reporting issues, posting feature requests, updating documentation, submitting pull requests or patches, and other activities.

 

We are committed to making participation in this project a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of level of experience, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, belief, or nationality.

 

Examples of unacceptable behavior by participants include:

  • The use of sexualized language or imagery
  • Personal attacks
  • Trolling or insulting/derogatory comments
  • Harassment
  • Publishing other's private information, such as physical addresses, without explicit permission
  • Other unethical conduct

Project maintainers may remove, edit, or reject comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions that are not aligned to this Code of Conduct.

 

Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be reported by contacting a project maintainer at [INSERT EMAIL ADDRESS]. All complaints will be reviewed and investigated and will result in a response that is deemed necessary and appropriate to the circumstances. Maintainers are obligated to maintain confidentiality with regard to the reporter of an incident.

So far I have not seen a single argument for why this CoC is worse than the unmodified one.

This modification removes the risk of abuse, while still keeping all the core principles people who say the current one is fine argues for.

 

Matz is known for being a really nice person. In fact, the motto of Ruby is "Matz Is Nice And So We Are Nice" (MINASWAN).

What happened when Matz suggested this slightly modified version which doesn't open up for a ton of abuse? Coraline, the author of the Linux CoC asked for Matz to get removed from the community he built from the ground up. Ever since that she has been really pissed at Ruby, making tweets like this:

 

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7 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

What happened when Matz suggested this slightly modified version which doesn't open up for a ton of abuse? Coraline, the author of the Linux CoC asked for Matz to get removed from the project he built from the ground up. Ever since that she has been really pissed at Ruby, making tweets like this:

 

Well you have to value her dedication to practicing the principles that she preaches :)

 

(A huge /s in case people can't infer it)

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Just now, Sniperfox47 said:

Well you have to value her dedication to practicing the principles that she preaches :)

 

(A huge /s in case people can't infer it)

By the way, I think Ruby has a great community conduct guideline. It came about as a result of Coraline trying to force her own CoC onto Ruby. This is the full one:

Quote

This document provides community guidelines for a safe, respectful, productive, and collaborative place for any person who is willing to contribute to the Ruby community. It applies to all “collaborative space”, which is defined as community communications channels (such as mailing lists, submitted patches, commit comments, etc.).

  • Participants will be tolerant of opposing views.
  • Participants must ensure that their language and actions are free of personal attacks and disparaging personal remarks.
  • When interpreting the words and actions of others, participants should always assume good intentions.
  • Behaviour which can be reasonably considered harassment will not be tolerated.

Honestly, I can't find a single thing wrong with it. I especially like the inclusion of "tolerant of opposing views", because that is something which the current one most certainly doesn't encourage even though it is a very important aspect of having a nice and inclusive community.

 

Some people (like Strand McCutchen, who seem to follow Coraline around on sites to support her), were of course pushing for the very rigid "The CoC needs specific language for how the code is enforced and people held accountable" to which Matz replied:

Quote

Enforcement requires obligation for both sides. We (or at least I) don't want that privilege and obligation.
We (or at least I) do our best to make the community peaceful. But it's at most best effort.

 

For example, when sensitive information has disclosed on the list, we cannot remove every copy of mails from the net, or even from the blade archive (which is canonical but not controlled by us) for sure.

 

Besides that, I don't want to live in the community where a member can possibly be casted out forcefully. It's not nice.
It should be resolved by law enforcement, if needed. Thus banning is out of question (for me at least).

 

I fucking love Matz. Such a great guy. Actually, I think every single one of his posts in this thread are spot on and are totally worth looking up (just search for "matz (Yukihiro Matsumoto)".

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2 hours ago, Sauron said:

That's pretty much what the new CoC says...

Nobody gets "hired" by the kernel maintainers, but otherwise you're right of course - although that doesn't account for fringe scenarios and external factors. Sure, as a business it makes perfect sense to hire the most qualified for the job - but I would argue there is a case for hiring, say, disabled people or a homeless person even if there's a person who is technically more qualified but will be just fine if they don't get that position. Either way that's off topic, the Linux team doesn't pay anyone for contributing code as far as I know.

The CoC is so broad that it can be used to eject anyone for anything, that is the problem.

 

The Linux kernel is a purely meritocratic system, if commits get prioritized because the contributor is a PoC or LGBTblahblahblah, it destroys the concept of a merit based system.

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3 hours ago, Sauron said:

That plea is full of shit. Officially, Linus Torvalds owns the code for Linux and any modification to it (including and perhaps especially community contributions on HIS github repository) must either be kept for yourself or released in turn under the GPL 2.0 (as per the GPL 2.0 itself). I'm pretty sure you can't claim copyright for a patch to a project you ddin't create and I'm even more sure that they can't force any of the maintainers to go and delete their copies (aka their github commit history) retroactively.

 

That aside, I find it very telling that those claiming the new CoC and its supporters are abusive and discriminatory would be so quick to resort to blackmail and ruining the party for everyone. Talk about throwing everyone under the bus for the sake of politics. In the end it's clearly just a bunch of selfish assholes looking for petty revenge on those who don't want to put up with their nonsense, and I urge anyone who doesn't fit that description to take a step back and reconsider what they're campaigning for and who they are defending.

 

From the same article we (thankfully) have a voice for sanity in our unsung hero Steve, who reminded the trigger-happy "avenger" that he sent this to a mailing list that has nothing to do with any of it and that his propositions are ludicrous to put it lightly.

 

Also... since when is "LULZ.com" a reliable source for anything? Not that it really matters in this case but jeez... their homepage tells you a lot on where their biases lie.

 

I have discussed at length why the new CoC really isn't a problem here

and it seems clear to me that it's being used as an excuse to shift the focus away from certain people's unacceptable behaviour to a politically flavoured scapegoat. Let me reiterate - some of these people are campaigning to destroy Linux over this. THEY are the ones who intend to harm the community, not the ones who adopted a new code of conduct. Any façade of legitimate concern doesn't hold water in front of this.

 

Note: I'm not saying anyone in particular (especially any member of this forum) except the author of this email is part of what I just described. I do believe those defending this are being manipulated, through no fault of their own, into harming the community. If I've been too harsh or what I wrote came off as a personal attack, I apologise; I just really like Linux and it pains me to see it has come to this.

 

---/rant (maybe)--- On to answering posts!

 

1) Maybe in the US, but there are plenty of non white computer scientists around the world even if the male to female ratio is similar and ignoring the fact that you can't really know if  someone is straight... considering Linux is a worldwide project I don't think your point is valid here.

2) On paper, absolutely - the question is whether or not some people took it upon themselves to enforce some sort of barrier through bullying or harassment. I couldn't answer that to be honest, but surely we can entertain the possibility...? Aside from that, the new CoC doesn't put in any barriers either, nor does it provide "fast lanes" for anyone.

Yeah, is there anything so incredibly wrong about putting it on paper? Does it warrant all the backlash it's gotten? I'd say obviously not, but plenty of people seem to disagree.

I invite you to read it, it's just 82 lines. There's nothing of that sort in it.

That doesn't really work if you're the only one who doesn't care. Suppose a country has racially unfair laws; should you just ignore background while the rest of the country doesn't? Would that make it fair? Or would it be better to protest, even though that protest would inevitably have to acknowledge the existance of that background?

 

I'm not saying that's the case here, but it's a little naive to think that by completely ignoring people's backgrounds discrimination would just solve itself. If EVERYONE suddenly didn't care, sure - but that's not really possible.

Have you considered that that article might have been written that way explicitly to solicit that reaction from you and make sure you take their opinion at face value?

 

CoC: *explicitly states some common sense rules of human interaction*

People who have never contributed a single line of code:

jokes aside, the CoC says nothing about white people not being allowed. That's just a straw man. At least read the damn thing before you take a side.

If you see an unjust law then yeah go and protest it. I was just referring to the issue of trying to force diversity. If you truly care about discrimination then people should be evaluated based on who they are as a person not by what they are. The main goal should be to stop all forms of discriminstion and not to contribute to it. 

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3 hours ago, Sauron said:

I'm not saying that's the case here, but it's a little naive to think that by completely ignoring people's backgrounds discrimination would just solve itself. If EVERYONE suddenly didn't care, sure - but that's not really possible.

This is the internet, you can commit code as an Anon, just like straight white males.

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3 hours ago, Sauron said:

Have you considered that that article might have been written that way explicitly to solicit that reaction from you and make sure you take their opinion at face value?

just joking :P 

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This raises a interesting condition that I don't believe has been tested under copyright law.  Unless a specific licensing agreement was written where the code contributor holds the right to withdraw the code from public license, I don't think it is possible for them to just turn around and claim any software containing said code used under current public license should cease to be legal.  It is possible to change license agreements however I don't believe there is a law (any  where) that will permit such a change to be instated retroactively.

 

It reminds me of the pewdepie case where that game dev threatened to DMCA all his videos with specific content in them.   You can force a cease and desist upon new content, but old content was created with license and until a judge says otherwise cannot be forcefully removed.

Grammar and spelling is not indicative of intelligence/knowledge.  Not having the same opinion does not always mean lack of understanding.  

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2 minutes ago, mr moose said:

This raises a interesting condition that I don't believe has been tested under copyright law.  Unless a specific licensing agreement was written where the code contributor holds the right to withdraw the code from public license, I don't think it is possible for them to just turn around and claim any software containing said code used under current public license should cease to be legal.  It is possible to change license agreements however I don't believe there is a law (any  where) that will permit such a change to be instated retroactively.

 

It reminds me of the pewdepie case where that game dev threatened to DMCA all his videos with specific content in them.   You can force a cease and desist upon new content, but old content was created with license and until a judge says otherwise cannot be forcefully removed.

GPL V2 has provisions for rescinding license for code.  Linux kernel is GPL V2 license.

 

GPL V3 has specific language to remove this right to rescind.

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2 hours ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Well you have to value her dedication to practicing the principles that she preaches :)

 

(A huge /s in case people can't infer it)

She was able to contradict herself in 4 words "Be nice. Fuck you"

🌲🌲🌲

 

 

 

◒ ◒ 

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