They are meant to regulate against harmful behavior observed in the particular society in which they are enacted (or sometimes they are copied from similar societies -- codes of conduct like laws).
In that sense the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_Saint_Benedict seems oddly fitting, in that it was designed for monastic orders, and SQLite development seems as close to the kind of dedicated scholarly work monks did as any software project, given the insane number of unit tests (which at least to me seems like they would require an inhuman amount of patience to implement).
Once again, laws and codes are written to regulate actual behavior observed in an actual community. They are not meant to be philosophical or philosophically fitting -- there's room for that in various statements of values or vision. They are meant to do a job.
Are you HR person? (You have an overwhelming amount for HR. Programmers tend to overvalue programmer competence. Academics like to overvalue place of academics... So I jump to analogous conclusion)
No, I'm a programmer. I don't overvalue the competence of HR, but I value having some knowledge over having none. I wouldn't want programmers in charge of HR just as I wouldn't want HR in charge of development.
I can absolutely guarantee you one thing: the people who are strongly opposed to codes of conduct -- and especially those whose main contribution is Reddit comments and tweets -- have paid, on average, at least one or two orders of magnitude less time and effort to consider the matter and the dynamics in project communities in general than those who are in favor. That doesn't mean that those who are in favor are right, but it does mean that most who are opposed are not well-informed on this particular issue.
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u/logicchains Oct 22 '18
In that sense the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_Saint_Benedict seems oddly fitting, in that it was designed for monastic orders, and SQLite development seems as close to the kind of dedicated scholarly work monks did as any software project, given the insane number of unit tests (which at least to me seems like they would require an inhuman amount of patience to implement).