GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct • Hacker News Board

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#221

Post by davidjfelix » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 3:42 PM UTC

klodolph wrote: post #202

davidjfelix wrote: post #197

There's an awful lot of straw man accusations going on in this thread from people who seem to feel threatened by some invisible person who is going to persecute them for something they believe or say or are as a person. Even just an ounce of empathy and you'd realize that's possible without a CoC too and the goal of establishing these boundaries is to protect the people who feel that same way daily because of who the…

Yes, this thread feels like stepping into bizarro land. I see a lot of people equating the presence of a CoC with some kind of 1984-newspeak future. This reminds me of the complaints about seatbelts. Yeah, every once in a while, a seatbelt makes a crash worse. Requiring seatbelts takes away the sense of freedom you have in a car. That sort of thing. Sometimes, a CoC will be abused to harass people. Step back and look…

I think unfortunately this has become something of a lightning rod with culture war topics of late. I'd really encourage people to read the article. CoCs are not all the same and it's hard to codify expectations of a group that already exists because it requires consensus or severance. Many codes of conduct lay out unenforceable or questionable rules and this is not one of them. I read in the comments somebody claiming they were trying to eliminate using any project with a CoC like they were fighting against a spreading disease. It's zealotry and I urge you, if you consider yourself skeptical -- be skeptical of your own positions too because GCC's CoC FTA says nothing that has been expressed as something folks here are afraid of.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#222

Post by foldr » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 3:42 PM UTC

torstenvl wrote: post #84

foldr wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is a bit cryptic, but I assume you're trying to make an equivalence between, say, someone being fired for being gay in the 1970s and someone now being fired for saying hateful things about trans people. These scenarios are only comparable at a level of abstraction that's not useful. It's only inconsistent to oppose one thing and not the other if you think that employers should be barred from firing peopl…

How many people are fired for saying hateful things about trans people? vs. How many people are fired for saying things that many trans people disagree with?

There's a lot of overlap between those two categories, so I'd assume about the same number. But like many others in this thread you're choosing to make your point in a cryptic way. I'm sure you know that statistics on this aren't available, so what is the point that you really want to make here?

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#223

Post by Rebelgecko » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 3:42 PM UTC

nkuttler wrote: post #155

woodruffw wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide more details? I’ve been working on open source projects for about a decade now, including years of professional work, and I have never seen or heard someone chastised for using “guys” informally. This includes in communities with established, formal codes of conduct. It strikes me as something that most people wouldn’t even notice , unless the speaker was intentionally using it in a way that implies g…

I'm not sure what kind of details you're looking for?

What project?

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#224

Post by newZWhoDis » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 3:43 PM UTC

beej71 wrote: post #135

RetpolineDrama wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally never contribute to an OSS that has a CoC, and if I find my organization is using OSS that has a CoC I actively work to remove it and ban my employees from contributing to it. CoC's are poison, and if your project has a "Code of Conduct committee" it is dead to me. I fully admit this hasn't been possible for everything, but I'm making great progress

Does your organization have a code of conduct itself?

I don’t believe private, for-profit organizations and OSS communities are equivalent.

If OP’s org does have a CoC equivalent, it wouldn’t be the gotcha you seem to think it is

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#225

Post by fwungy » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 3:43 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #70

foldr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony here is that you're using the same kind of logic (the project can't survive if it's closed to transphobes!) that's mocked in the following comment when the shoe is on the other foot (LOL the project can't survive without trans people): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36430649 This does highlight the point that diversity is to some extent a zero sum game. You can welcome trans people to your project, or…

You can welcome trans people to your project, or transphobes, but not necessarily both. You don't need to "welcome" either. You just don't talk about that stuff because it has zero relevance to your project, unless you're trying to use it as a political statement (which technical projects shouldn't be at all.)

The world was better when personal sex lives were not a discussion topic of casual acquaintances.

The thought of the average person having sex is repulsive to me. I don't want to know anything at all about it, especially if they're into weird stuff, but even if not.

Most people feel this way. Why is it so hard to understand?

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#226

Post by toast0 » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 3:44 PM UTC

JonChesterfield wrote: post #15

kelnos wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One guy says "the first example deadlocks", and that makes someone feel uncomfortable, properly fixed by kicking him out of the conference. Oh, please. That's just unfounded FUD-spreading.

[flagged]

Deadlock and livelock are different things. Repurposing the term livelock to mean deadlock deeply offends me, which should deadlock this thread; completely stuck with no more observable signs of activity.

However, it will probably only livelock; the thread will continue to have obserable signs of activity, although with very little hope of meaningful completion, or at best, very slow actual progress. Most, but not all, of the effort will go towards spinning.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#227

Post by jonnat » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 3:46 PM UTC

enriquto wrote: post #212

One of the landmarks of civilization is that people who utterly hate each other can still work together for a common good. This, my dad taught me as a kid and I cherish it as a core principle. I like civilization, after all. Being hateful, insulting, or otherwise offensive is not a big deal if we can still work along. These stupid "codes of conduct" make civilization impossible. Worse, they force the language to be b…

I was with you until your last sentence. Taking you point at face value, people who despise codes of conduct nonetheless working under a code of conduct would just be another example of people disagreeing with each other (in this case disagreeing with people who favor the implementation of codes of conduct) and yet still being able to work together.

One could argue that the difference here is that codes of conduct are being enforced in a top-down fashion, that is, the people you disagree with are actually in the leadership of the project. But I can see how this argument could just as well be used to justify the value of codes of conduct.

FWIW, I've tried but I simply cannot decide if I'm ultimately in favor or against codes of conduct.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#228

Post by johnklos » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 3:46 PM UTC

unconed wrote: post #63

speeder wrote: post #35

I see a lot of people here forgetting a real case of CoC abuse. There was this famous Drupal dev that wrote a transcript of a fetish wedding on his fetish social media profile. An enemy of his on Drupal quoted that transcript and used it as examples the Dev should be punished. Drupal, like GCC proposed rules, allow punishment of someone for something they did outside the community, and not only the guy was punished,…

And not only that: when the committee for enforcing the CoC decided the CoC wasn't actually violated, the entire witch hunt continued with more and more made up reasons why this person was bad and deserved to be punished. This included the project lead writing blog posts and then silently editing them afterwards. It was never about the rules, only about creating a body of people with the aurhority to act like total c…

So what you seem to be suggesting is that the people who don't like a thing (codes of conduct) and go out of their way to try to weaponize them should be allowed to get their way (CoC should go away because of people like these).

There's plenty of precedent for people advocating for this: spousal abuse, animal abuse and sexual abuse are all areas where people said that laws about such things would result in widespread abuse of the laws and would do little to correct the problems the laws aimed to address.

We have that now with gun laws in the United States. People rather speciously say that new laws and the enforcement of those laws will be too intrusive, so we just really shouldn't have them.

(I don't want to have a discussion about gun laws specifically - an overwhelming majority of the United States want strong gun laws, and those who are OK with multiple mass shootings every week really have no compelling arguments beyond vaguely invoking "the Second Amendment", but I imagine there's plenty of overlap between people who think CoC are bad would and people who don't want new gun laws. I use gun laws in this example because of the weakness of the anti-gun law arguments.)

But what's really telling here are statements like this: "who claim to love open source but cannot stand the fact that anyone really is welcome"

So the people who are breaking CoC and making people feel unwelcome are somehow more important than the people who are enforcing CoC and making the CoC breakers feel unwelcome. Got it.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#229

Post by iudqnolq » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 3:47 PM UTC

kergonath wrote: post #193

beej71 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does your organization have a code of conduct itself?

Mine does not, but then around here we have anti-bullying, anti-harassment and anti-discrimination laws so these things are penal matters, not merely contract breaches.

CoC is not a contract. It's a non-binding promise that the project leadership will take actions up to banning someone if harassment happens.

Re: GCC Adopts a Code of Conduct

#230

Post by revelio » Thu, Jun 22, 2023, 3:49 PM UTC

sasmithjr wrote: post #41

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you believe that only married male-female couples should have sex and children? Or that people with penises don't belong in womens spaces? Or whatever other currently controversial topic? It has nothing to do with GCC, nothing with code quality, nothing with your contributions to the project, you don't say that in code, in code comments, on gcc mailing lists, anywhere gcc related. But, because of the CoC ( ht…

> because the CoC allows this. Project owners could do this before the CoC was created, and even if the CoC explicitly disallowed it, the project owners could do it anyway. The existence of the CoC changes absolutely nothing about what the project owners can and cannot do.

They could, but their justification had to be "I don't like you". The CoC process is designed to enable exclusion via opaque committees who justify their decisions by reference to vague and subjective criteria. It makes the people doing it feel better by allowing them to pretend everyone signed up for whatever random thing they decided today, and thus shield themselves from criticism.