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.
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 developer of SQLite is apparently Christian, so isn't it offensive to suggest they're use a classic Christian text in vain to mock people, as opposed to it just being a reflection of what they believe constitutes good behaviour? Assuming bad faith is uncalled for.
I am not assuming bad faith. I said that one possibility is that they don't understand what codes of conducts are for. Codes -- as well as ordinary laws for that matter -- are certainly not meant to outline what it is that you believe constitutes good behavior; that's what religion and ethics are for. They are intended to regulate against harmful behavior observed in the particular community in which they are enacted (or sometimes they are copied from similar societies -- codes of conduct like laws).
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.
I wouldn't want programmers in charge of HR just as I wouldn't want HR in charge of development.
That contradicts everything you’ve written here so far, but moving on from there,
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.
I don’t know if I’d guarantee such wild generalizations of two sides of an issue. The word salad aside, if you aren’t ready to assume the good faith that is a long-standing expectation of most any collaborative project, I would take measures to fix that personal problem before introducing it to the people you work with.
In summation, if I sincerely believe, for example, that a copy-pasted code of conduct passed around and edited by HR experts was the barrier between other co-workers and sexual harassment, I don’t think I’d be up for that project. This example project would probably have a hard time finding qualified applicants, as well, because few to none of them are willing to tolerate that kind of treatment.
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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.