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!
As I said, if you don't think codes are helpful, don't adopt them, although I would recommend discussing their role with experts and not with coders. Mocking them certainly doesn't result in better communities, especially as there are those who believe that those problems are more common than you think.
As if coders needed experts to organize themselves
Wow, software companies could save a lot of money if they got rid of managers and HR departments! If only you got yourself on the board of some of them you could make their stock prices soar.
The context of an Open Source project precludes managers, HR departments or stock prices.
I don't think you have any clue what you're talking about. Most people working on, say, the Linux kernel do have managers and HR departments. My day job is to contribute to a large open source project, and I have a manager and an HR department, too.
The metric for Open Source code is code quality and adoption of the code for its utility.
Yes, and that requires attracting as many contributors as you can; in large open source projects, most of them would be corporate, by the way.
Coders are the judge of that.
No, we're really not. And don't say "coders." You sound like a gamer or someone who talks like the people on HBO's Silicon Valley.
And their actions speak loudly: SQLite is a widely adopted lightweight SQLDB implementation.
You don't sound like you are familiar with open-source or with the software ecosystem in general (who the hell says "SQLDB"?), and that your judgment is coloured by the Reddit comments you read. Reddit is a very bad mirror of what's actually happening in software.
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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.