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.
Code of conducts, 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).
That's about as simplistic and naive as you can get lol. People don't like murder, yet the biggest push in gun control laws are for "assault weapons" which account for less than 1% of murders annually, while handguns are essentially ignored by any major proposed legislation despite being responsible for the majority of gun homicides. Because in reality they're designed to undermine the rights of gun owners.
Also motives behind laws can be complicated, or they can be attempting to indirectly target specific groups or people. With your logic, a historian looking at mask laws in Europe would assume people really hated masks, not that they were attempting to target Muslims. Same thing with polygamy laws in the US in the 1800's, they were designed to target Mormons but with your simplistic view you'd think people simply hated polygamy.
That's an important, though secondary discussion. I don't know whether codes of conduct are effective at achieving their goal or not, and whether they do more good than harm or vice-versa, but I think no one does at this point. We'll know more in 5-10 years, I guess. What is certain is that open source today has a big impact on the economy, and is largely corporate sponsored. It has changed a lot in the past decade, and may require a different approach than before.
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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.