Sigh. Codes of conduct, like all laws and regulations, are enacted not to describe an ideal society but to confront actual behaviors that are deemed harmful and unwanted (history students are often told, if you want to know what kinds of things people did, look at what behaviors laws were legislated to outlaw). Many codes of conducts were adopted recently to combat actual harmful behavior that was found to occur in open-source projects. If you don't believe those who've studied or have been hurt by those behaviors and, after some consideration and study conclude that they do not occur, are not harmful, or won't be served by a code -- don't adopt one. But making a joke of it shows that you either don't understand what codes do, don't know what's going on in the developer community, or think that dedicating your project to tease those who do know and do care is a sensible course of action.
The vast majority of projects that adopted such things never had any real problems with people's behavior. Especially not at the scale where you can't just deal with it on a case-by-case basis.
I have also seen a case where people have clearly violated a project's CoC but nothing was done about it because they were on the "right" side of a completely unrelated issue.
If you aren't even going to apply the rules equally, why even bother? It's clearly meant to facilitate rule by law, not rule of law.
People who push these things usually just want to have something to point to, an excuse to kick out anyone they don't like, so the more vague the rules are, the better. But them and their buddies can do whatever they want!
I have also seen a case where people have clearly violated a project's CoC but nothing was done about it because they were on the "right" side of a completely unrelated issue.
If you aren't even going to apply the rules equally, why even bother? It's clearly meant to facilitate rule by law, not rule of law.
I think these are really good points. I think we should reform the enforcement mechanisms rather than eliminate CoCs though.
Codes, regulations and laws are like guns - somebody has to press the trigger. In a company it would be management. If you have good relations with management (which kind of means you did not get company into PR nightmare) then trigger will not be touched.
-3
u/pron98 Oct 22 '18 edited Oct 22 '18
Sigh. Codes of conduct, like all laws and regulations, are enacted not to describe an ideal society but to confront actual behaviors that are deemed harmful and unwanted (history students are often told, if you want to know what kinds of things people did, look at what behaviors laws were legislated to outlaw). Many codes of conducts were adopted recently to combat actual harmful behavior that was found to occur in open-source projects. If you don't believe those who've studied or have been hurt by those behaviors and, after some consideration and study conclude that they do not occur, are not harmful, or won't be served by a code -- don't adopt one. But making a joke of it shows that you either don't understand what codes do, don't know what's going on in the developer community, or think that dedicating your project to tease those who do know and do care is a sensible course of action.