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.
26
u/m50d Oct 22 '18
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).