Code of Conduct

Chris Moore

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What do you think?
I think that sounds like a bunch of Marxist / Communist junk that needs to be squelched, as in forcefully silence or suppress.
 
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danb35

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What do you think?
Utter nonsense? Absolutely unnecessary? Completely meaningless? D, all of the above.

Edit: No, actually, it's much worse than that--the "post-meritocracy" concept is downright dangerous. The fact that "merit" can't be objectively or precisely measured doesn't mean that it isn't still the most important consideration, and certainly far more so than other folks' (invariably false) perception of their "oppression" or someone else's "privilege."

Agree completely with Chris--this Marxist garbage needs to be smacked down quickly, and hard.
 
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Sounds just like a government department I use to work for. We got so caught up in red tape, we didn't actually do or produce anything meaningful.
 
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jgreco

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Can you give the backstory here? Is there an issue?

There's a lot of angst out there these days, with people trying to find reasons to take offense at things where none was meant.

This is joined by a lot of nasty jerks who are deliberately inflammatory, making it easy for the first group.

This has led to what many refer to as the "snowflake generation". It has also led to various groups, including FreeBSD, to adopt new codes of conduct that some people believe favor people trying to find reasons to take offense.

https://www.reddit.com/r/BSD/comments/7xjvcr/freebsd_has_a_new_code_of_conduct_inspired_by/

https://www.carmenbianca.eu/en/post/2018-03-09-how-we-conduct-ourselves/

So.

First, let me be clear, I think both sets of people I described (people trying to find reasons to take offense/nasty jerks who are deliberately inflammatory) can go rot in their own hell, or hells. The world doesn't need that crap.

I believe in Postel's Law, a.k.a. the Robustness Principle. Not only is it relevant to computers and programming, but it's also a good social principle. Roughly interpreted for social purposes:

Do not say things that you know to be inflammatory.

Do not take offense at things where it is not clear that such was the intent.

I find that I've made a career out of telling people the things that they do not want to hear. One of my informal terms with new clients is that they agree that they will listen to what I have to say, and that I may be blunt about it. What they end up deciding or doing is of course their own problem, but in Adam Sandler's famous words, "you will listen to every damn word I have to say."

So. As with so many things, there are many shades of gray in this issue. Just some notes from the postmeritocracy website:

  • We believe that interpersonal skills are at least as important as technical skills.
Eff no. Not everyone is gifted with both. I know lots of people who are "on the spectrum" and whose technical skills are beyond reproach. I am fine with working around a lack of interpersonal skills. There are all kinds of people in the world. Cherish the gifts people are blessed with and stop judging their shortcomings.

  • We must make room for people who are not like us to enter our field and succeed there. This means not only inviting them in, but making sure that they are supported and empowered.
Eff no. I worked hard to get where I am. I found my own causes, made my own space, worked harder than the next guy, elbowed my way to the table. These millennials, some of them are entitled little ****s that expect stuff is just going to be presented to them on a platter. You gain equity in an ecosystem through sweat. Nobody guarantees you'll be successful. Life offers you the opportunity to try, try again. The US offers you "life, liberty and the PURSUIT of happiness." There's timeless wisdom there.

Conflating "people who are not like us," probably intended as a reference to minorities of some persuasion, is also total crap. I don't care if someone is purple, reproduces asexually, and worships Avis. I care if you are smart and can be taught. If you are smart and can be taught, this very forum is proof that I will spend stupid amounts of time trying to teach you. This is really the only quality I can actually determine through the glass of the TTY.

  • We have an ethical responsibility to refuse to work on software that will negatively impact the well-being of other people.
So we'll stop working on FreeNAS because it impacts Synology's bottom line?

  • We acknowledge the value of non-technical contributors as equal to the value of technical contributors.
And there's the crux of the matter. You want things that are not equal to be equal. The State of Indiana once pondered legislating pi to be 3.2. This does not change reality. It's just stupid. Contributions are equal to whatever they happen to be equal to. There is not a reason for two technical contributions to be equal. There is no reason to assume two contributors have equal value. Certainly Bill Joy or David Greenman are much more valuable contributors than the person who submitted a one line patch. I'll take a Dru Lavigne any day over the person who corrected a single spelling error in a doc somewhere. How do you even begin to compare apples and oranges of "non-technical" to "technical" contributors?

This is stupid and pointless. Meritocracy works fine until someone realizes they've got the short end of the stick, because they're not as smart, or not as driven, or not as able to put in massive amounts of time, or any of the other factors that cause some contributors to end up with the short end. It then becomes very convenient to confuse this as being some sort of minority repressing, racist, sexist, etc., plot.

Accept people for who they are. Help them. Be nice. Don't take offense. Don't be offensive. Don't expect that the world owes you anything, though. Accept that life isn't always fair.
 
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Accept people for who they are. Help them. Be nice. Don't take offense. Don't be offensive.
Short and sweet. Informative and to the point. A cornerstone for our fraternity's Code of Conduct?
 

Heracles

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I did not knew about PI = 3.2

I knew how low human being can go but still, you surprised me with that one!
 

danb35

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We believe that interpersonal skills are at least as important as technical skills.
This must be why Linux has done as well as it has, because of Linus' noted interpersonal skills.
 

danb35

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Constantin

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I'm not going to engage the points raised in the 'code of conduct' proposal. If there is a grievance to report, then do so. To me, the bug reporter is the wrong venue for a quasi-philosophical policy 'solution' in search of a problem that the OP has shown zero evidence to exist.

So, as a start, apply the golden rule. Typically, a project with a great leadership team will do better than one run by a crummy one. The beauty of open-source is that any individual or team can fork a dysfunctional project and, given demonstrably-better performance, the greater community will likely follow them. Has the OP even attempted to contribute to FreeNAS?

That said, Linus has had his fair share of unnecessarily-caustic outbursts and even he has recognized that these behavioral failures have ultimately stood in the way of Linux progressing as fast as it could have. But I doubt a code of conduct would have helped him recognize his improvement opportunities. Rather, it was continued dialog with the community.

Ultimately it’s the community that tolerates/enables bad behavior, regardless of what written rules may state. People have to care enough to then stick their neck out and engage each other. Documents that can be interpreted sixteen different ways may later only serve to enrich lawyers.

Bottom line: Contribute as positively and effectively where you can but never expect people to notice, appreciate, and/or worship your efforts.
 
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jgreco

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Short and sweet. Informative and to the point. A cornerstone for our fraternity's Code of Conduct?

With my blessing, not that you actually need my permission or anything. BSD style copyright FTW. Doubtfully original anyways, though I didn't actually quote it from anywhere.
 

Mlovelace

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There's 10 minutes of my life I'll never get back. This post-modern, neomarxist drivel has no place in western society. It has been tried several times throughout the 20th century, with murderous results. Take this garbage back to the grievance studies programs in the Universities when it came from.
 

r0nski2000

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...
  • We believe that interpersonal skills are at least as important as technical skills.
Eff no. Not everyone is gifted with both.
...

Quote edited for brevity.

I don't contribute to open source projects, so I don't know anything about the op, but from real life experience, I couldn't agree more with this statement!
Not everyone is gifted with both, and they are definitely not equally important.
I can replace any of my technical resources, at anytime, for pennies on the dollar, with someone in India, who is just as good, if not better. My "soft skills" people on the other hand - not so much...
 

jgreco

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And in the additional comments, I ran across this:

https://www.fastcompany.com/40510522/meritocracy-doesnt-exist-and-believing-it-does-is-bad-for-you

Written by people who seem to confuse the concepts of merit, luck, and some other stuff.

Merit is, (Merriam-Webster), "the quality of being particularly good or worthy, especially so as to deserve praise or reward. "

Meritocracy is "government or the holding of power by people selected on the basis of their ability. "

Yet there is no guarantee that people with ability will always end up in the position that is most suited to their abilities. Meritocracy makes no such promise, yet the authors of this article seem to take that as evidence that meritocracy is a fallacy.

So, soapbox for a sec and then my point.

I've always had a problem with the results on the Ayn Randian philosophy, which I interpret more or less as: "Economic value is created by entrepreneurs, creating the value of goods while everyone else gets in the way." This egotistical, insufficient vision of the world has evolved into something insidious. Entrepreneurs generally do not succeed completely on their own, driven purely by their own ego, talent, effort, and sheer willpower. Usually they are the beneficiaries of capitalists, bankers and financiers who fund them, of a labor force that produces their product, of the rule of law to patent their product and to prevent thefts, of public infrastructure in the form of electricty, water, sewer, and roads that enable their business, of distributors and retailers to create an outlet for the product, for consumers who have discretionary income that allows them to choose to buy the product, etc. Yet when you talk to those who align philosophically with Rand, these factors are often conspicuously missing in their understanding of the importance of the world.

Many of these same people seem to take the viewpoint that "hey, I've been successful, therefore anyone else who tries can be successful too." In this point, I strenuously agree with the luck arguments made in the article I linked to above. It doesn't work that way. There are many factors that can combine into being successful. Luck, wealth, merit, none guarantee success. Their lack, however, certainly makes success at life much harder to achieve.

I lean libertarian, but I'm pragmatic (not "Pragmatic Libertarian"). I mean that I like many libertarian ideals, and when opportunity presents, I may prefer to see if a libertarian solution is workable. I don't get all bent out of shape about it, though, as long as there's some other reasonable solution. To be a functioning society, we need to come to some arrangement on how things should work. I usually find that no extreme is actually a good idea.

We held Thanksgiving here last year, and I was busy in the kitchen. I was listening to someone, a Republican, at the table rail against his slightly higher property taxes and how the government did nothing to deserve them. I interjected in a loudish voice that his property tax went to pay for his daughter's school, maintaining the streets, police, etc., and opined that I was perfectly fine paying property taxes here in our locality if that was the method we chose to fund education, road repairs, and keeping the streets plowed in winter.

I heard later via family elders that the not-loud-enough-for-me-to-hear response was that "He (meaning me) should go take his meds".

It struck me as the comeback of an empty-headed noise-hole.

I think that it is fundamentally irrational to argue against the current mechanisms we use to make our society functional without having some alternative to replace them with.

I generally want the best people we can find to be doing the things that we need to have done. That's meritocracy. I'm waiting to hear a rational alternative that doesn't have idiots running the show.
 

Chris Moore

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I think that it is fundamentally irrational to argue against the current mechanisms we use to make our society functional without having some alternative to replace them with.
It appears that is the philosophy of the current extremists on both sides. They just want to burn it all down to watch it burn with no real concept of what that means. The Marxists that are probably behind the extremists on both ends of the spectrum have had that philosophy for decades. Turn us against ourselves, watch society crumble from within, and come in to save the day after. That way, anything they offer will look like an improvement.
 

Constantin

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The polarization we see in our political discourse worries me a great deal and I'm afraid that it has to get worse before the voters will force a change upon the politicians. This focus on primaries rather than general elections (because the outcome of the general election is a foregone conclusion in much of the country due to habit and/or gerrymandering) has made politicians on both sides tack to the extremes, leaving few moderates in the middle to hold things together. Never mind arguably undemocratic primary processes like caucuses, closed primaries, and so on.

The work of various news outlets (whether in print, online, or on the airwaves) to increase tensions certainly does not help either.

Anyone seeking an echo-chamber for a particular point of view will have no difficulty doing so, making it that much easier to affirm whatever they want to believe in. For example, besides some sites having obvious biases' one way or the other, I've read about algorithms shaping what users get to see on a site based on the 'click history'. Yes, it makes the user perhaps stay longer, come back more often, etc. But it also inherently allows a user to reinforce their biases even on a web site that features many points of view.

In part, this comes back to the user - if the user were intellectually curious then they'd on occasion seek out opposing points of view, try to understand them, etc. before making up their mind on a topic. Few people do. It's easier swimming with the masses. As much as people may claim to be individuals, much of our daily / political life is shaped by herd instincts.

There are many ways to create smaller or larger bubbles to surround yourself with. Both documents were born out of a bubble / POV and perhaps with all the best intentions in the world. I may disagree with some of the content but someone put time and thought into it and there may be a nugget or two worth pondering.

For example, I happen to think that project interactions, feedback, etc. should be limited to the scope of the project / technical merits / etc. Personal attacks don't advance the project and should hence be avoided; i.e. keep it professional. The covenant document seems to tack in that direction - be productive, limit trolling, behave like an adult, get sanctioned if you don't. Importantly, the covenant leaves it up to the various groups to self-organize and decide what they want to encourage, discourage, and what the consequences will be if a line is crossed.

And that to me is the main issue. Someone has to call out bad behavior, a consequence has to be be imposed, etc. It's not like the covenant police will show up one day, etc. It's the community that has to bear the benefits and the consequences of enforcement. Documents by themselves may act as a deterrent for some, but certainly not all users. Even in the days of dial-up BBS, I had to ban kids who read through agreements, agreed to them, and then decided to try and hack the BBS anyway.

Which brings me to the manifesto. I have a lot more difficulty with that document because it's so prescriptive and filled with logical contradictions. For example, if I were limited to only contributing to projects that don't potentially harm people, then I'd have to stop contributing - I can't think of a open-source project where the technology cannot be potentially used or perverted for harm. But it is important to read these sorts of documents from time to time to challenge one's own point of view and not just dismiss them out of hand.
 
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