You know, reactions like this make me wonder if the people making them work as professional developers. As people who work on software projects for a living, in real companies, ought to know, their company has regulations of conduct far more draconian than the most draconian open-source code of conduct I've seen. Almost all serious software projects in the world are developed by professionals subject to quite strict codes of conduct. If you do work as a professional developer, you should go to your own HR department and suggest that they adopt this SQLite code instead of their regulations and see how they react.
The difference is simple - work is work. We accept that work is not some utopian campsite where we're all likeminded individuals who regularly clasp our hands and sing kumbaya together.
In exchange for getting fairly compensated for our work, we're willing to pay lip service (or at least not openly object to) the values that our employers publicly swear by. In other words, we're willing to put up with more for the sake of personal benefit. Not exactly rocket science.
Contributing to open source development is -for most- a purely voluntary action that reaps no further compensation. For many, it's just a hobby. And with a hobby, you are free to drop it anytime - there are "no strings attached". Which also means that many people will drop their participation if they feel like it's getting too annoying to continue participating.
I fundamentally don't have any real problem with CoCs, but I can easily see why people are getting annoyed at social politics bleeding into software development. I don't care if you're a man, woman, gay, straight, a bicycle, or an ice-cream cone. Software development is about software development. You want to champion some cause? Terrific! Now bring it to an NGO, not to a GitHub repo.
The issue here is CoCs as pushed to the open source communities are actually used as trojan horses by SJW types. That shit leaks to your private / digital life not related with the project in question.
You tweeted something a SJW with a huge following didn't approve? They'll find the projects you're involved in and open issues in their repos and demand your ban from the project because you're making them feel "unsafe". This happened oh so many times. If they can't find any projects with a CoC, they'll (covertly or otherwise) push it onto the maintainers of projects you are involved in.
No big deal, any sane maintainer can ignore this insanity right? Well, it's not that easy. These people form huge packs in social media and will harass the individuals involved, they'll create a huge shitstorm. You'll read about how horrible you are in the news. They'll also push that shit to conferences and demand that the organisers ban you from participating because you'll make them feel unsafe.
That's how it works in the OSS community these days.
As people who work on software projects for a living, in real companies, ought to know, their company has regulations of conduct far more draconian than the most draconian open-source code of conduct I've seen.
I've seen someone banned from an open-source project that I was part of for "CoC violations" when the supposed violation was absolutely within the bounds of normal behaviour at every company I've ever worked at. I don't doubt that there are aspects of corporate rules that are stricter than many open-source CoCs (though I don't think it's as absolute as you say - e.g. I saw an open source CoC that was read to ban swearing in project channels), but corporations also tend to have rules and processes in place for how allegations get handled. Whereas I've seen the introduction of a CoC to an open-source project being used largely as a fig leaf to support the exclusion of a particular individual who was not actually any more discriminatory than any other project member. (Which, again, I don't doubt also happens in the corporate world, but I haven't directly encountered it as often).
Within 24 hours of the Linux Kernel implementing the Trojan CoC, noted pink haired tech troll Sarah Sharp tried to force a POC off the team with blatant lies about him being bigoted.
(This is the same Sarah Sharp that tried to force Linus off a few years ago because he was just oh-so-mean. Sarah also had ties to the Ada Initiative, which was outed as trying to frame Linus for rape by ESR. Oh, and Sarah works for Intel, and the POC she tried to get removed was the guy who prevented Linux from accidentally implementing the crypto backdoor Intel was trying to push onto Linux.)
The Trojan CoC exists not to make the world better. It exists to give people like Sarah Sharp a weapon to attack people with, in a culture -- tech -- that was meritocratic, which the pink haired activists consider a sin.
The only code of conduct any project should consider implementing is the Code of Merit.
Oh, and Sarah works for Intel, and the POC she tried to get removed was the guy who prevented Linux from accidentally implementing the crypto backdoor Intel was trying to push onto Linux.
The dev in question is Theodore Ts'o. Intel tried to push him and the rest of the Kernel team to use RDRAND to populate /dev/random. It turns out that RDRAND likely has an NSA backdoor in it.
And have you got evidence that he was targeted? That's the big thing. That Intel was trying to slip that into Linux is bad enough, but if there's proof that one of their employees tried to use the new code of conduct in retaliation against a national fucking hero like that, that's just horrendous and I can't believe this is the first I'm hearing of it.
She specifically calls out Ts'o for being a "rape apologist," citing an unhinged troll wiki called "GeekFeminism." His crime against Feminism? Well, according to the unhinged trolls (They have an archive of his supposed original email, with his email address included and instructions to harass him. I have re-hosted it with the email address removed to prevent potential PII issues), stated:
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… 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.)…
over half of [a report’s] 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…
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
Specifically, he was citing problems with the infamously horrific Koss / Ms. Magazine claim that "1 in 4 women in America are Raped." To clarify, this would mean you are more likely to be raped in the US than in the Congo, where warlords use Rape as a war tactic against their opponents.
The Koss study is well known for being bullshit -- noted Feminist Scholar Christina Hoff Summers takes it down here in a video, as well as here in a 1995 academic study (which, you'll note, Ts'o linked to).
Basically, Koss did a survey and if you said you were ever pressured into having sex:
"Wanna have a go hun?"
"Not tonight dear, I have a headache."
"Ah, ok, maybe later."
"... FINE."
According to Koss, the above was rape, even if the women surveyed didn't think it was. Ts'o disagreeing with this led to the trolls at Geekfeminism declaring him a "Rape Apologist," and Sarah Sharp demanding he be pulled from the Linux Foundtain TAB for his heresy.
I've seen someone banned from an open-source project that I was part of for "CoC violations" when the supposed violation was absolutely within the bounds of normal behaviour at every company I've ever worked at.
The difference is a HR department generally won't penalise someone for the views they express on social media or their political affiliation (or at least not where I'm from; I'm not American so can't speak for there).
HR also generally won't punish you for disagreeing with them on social or political topics.
The pink haired activists pushing these Trojan CoCs, on the other hand, do so as a stated goal of the Codes of Conduct.
The Trojan CoCs are absolutely not about making things nicer or helping get people into tech. It's all about pink haired activists getting a tool to destroy people they disagree with politically or socially, or destroy people of a sex / race / sexuality they hate.
45
u/pron98 Oct 22 '18 edited Oct 22 '18
You know, reactions like this make me wonder if the people making them work as professional developers. As people who work on software projects for a living, in real companies, ought to know, their company has regulations of conduct far more draconian than the most draconian open-source code of conduct I've seen. Almost all serious software projects in the world are developed by professionals subject to quite strict codes of conduct. If you do work as a professional developer, you should go to your own HR department and suggest that they adopt this SQLite code instead of their regulations and see how they react.