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.

Comments

I don't have anything to do with FreeBSD...

[sgage]

... 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.

Re:I don't have anything to do with FreeBSD...

[Snotnose]

This. It actually sounds like something I'd read on the Onion.

Re: I don't have anything to do with FreeBSD...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but several projects have had members kicked on accusations alone. A Code of Conduct is just an excuse for social justice activists to impose their will on a project. There was even a case of someone getting kicked from a project for using an eggplant emoji...

Re: I don't have anything to do with FreeBSD...

[gbjbaanb]

That's not the point anymore - people who have done nothing wrong have had their careers destroyed by others who use this kind of thing to either promote themselves, their idiotic hate-filled ideology, or generally just like bullying people around under the pretence of progressivism.

the best example was Sir Tim Hunt, who made a pretty ordinary and self-deprecating joke to kick off his lecture, and some SJW (who outright lied to get her job, incidentally, check the controversy over the statements on her CV) sets off a twitter hatemob to attack him.

Re: I don't have anything to do with FreeBSD...

[reanjr]

You think texting someone with "Hugs! :)" is generally construed as unacceptable behavior? Your social circle sounds horrible.

Re:I don't have anything to do with FreeBSD...

[organgtool]

And WTF is a dead name?

I don't know but it sounds extremely insensitive to people who are currently grieving the loss of a loved one. Perhaps they should have stated "living impaired" name so that the language in the Code of Conduct wouldn't violate their Code of Conduct.

Re:I don't have anything to do with FreeBSD...

[ckatko]

CoC falls apart for one fundamental reason: You can't legislate people to RESPECT each other.

And that's what they're trying to codify. You can't make a legal document that solves disputes. For example, I have allergies and someone else in the office has a therapy dog. The RESPECTFUL thing to do, is to keep our offices as far apart as possible and both of US try to be accommodating to each other. But blanket statements of "disability person wins." only creates bitterness ("Why does that person always win?") and when you have a dispute between TWO disabled people, then you have to create a hierarchy of "who is a more disabled person?" (=more value).

None of this actually creates a better working environment. You can't replace respect for each other with a list of rules. It's just another feel good idea by another middle manager with no basis in science.

Re:I don't have anything to do with FreeBSD...

[nctritech]

I have one of those too. I emailed Slashdot to get rid of it. They said they can't remove it. Rather than make a new account, I said "fuck it" and rolled with it. I changed my login from my Gmail one a looooooooong time ago. I don't even know if I still have access to that defunct account. Don't blame him for the stupid G+ logo; it's basically a useless scarlet letter.

Re:I don't have anything to do with FreeBSD...

[_Sharp'r_]

I've been using, supporting and promoting FreeBSD for decades. Sadly, now that I'm aware of this change to the "Code of Conduct", I no longer can, nor will.

The old Code of Conduct was fine. In contrast, this newer version comes across as taking sides in the culture war for the sake of taking sides and virtue signaling someone's proclamation of who they support.

While looking into where this update came from, I did find this note from a quarterly status report, "Anne Dickison, our Marketing Director, has been overseeing the efforts to rewrite the Project's Code of Conduct to help make this a safe, inclusive, and welcoming community." From what I can tell, she's used her position in the FreeBSD Foundation to push this through. There was no public discussion nor debate on it by the members of the FreeBSD community before the change.

Fortunately, there are other *BSDs out there.

Sounds like they need a hug

[raymorris]

Someone at FreeBSD needs a hug.

On the Linux mailing list, "deliberate intimidation" is graded like a gymnastic routine, 1-10 points. Linus has the most points so far.

Re:Sounds like they need a hug

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoa, whoa, whoa... need to get that consent first.

I wonder if this will cause a fork?

[supremebob]

I kind of want to see what happens if FreeBSD forks into Conservative and Liberal branches. I want to see which side attracts more developers, and which distribution gets more downloads!

Re:I wonder if this will cause a fork?

[rknop]

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.

Last sentence in the policy.

[CptLoRes]

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.

Good for them

[millert]

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.

Re:Good for them

[rknop]

Consider this: one person says that they are disappointed that something in the code won't be accepted because it conflicts with something else that needs to be there. A second person says, "*hugs*" as an expression of sympathy in response. That second person is now on warning for violating community standards.

Is THAT something you want in your community?

This policy goes way beyond "don't be a jerk". This is the problem with speech restrictions like this. People point to "don't be a racist" and ask what's so bad about that. Yes, being racist is bad, and expressing it is a good reason for a community to ask you to step away! But that's not the only thing in here-- especially when you realize that terms like "reinforce systematic oppression" are easily interpreted to squelch very broad ranges of speech.

Avoiding offense is a two-way street. It's not just those who speak having to avoid saying outrageous and offensive things. It's also those who listen having enough resilience to not need strict speech codes to avoid being offended, and to be able to put in context what others say to understand that there's no offense there.

Re:Good for them

[apoc.famine]

One of the most successful online communities I was ever part of had one single code of conduct: Don't be a dick.

The community enforced that. And if there wasn't consensus, the founder decided.

It wasn't perfect, but what it did was drive discussion on whether conduct someone was engaging in was dickish, or if the complainer was being a whiny dick. It forced discussion on where people's boundaries on "being a dick" were, and it helped people identify when their boundaries were way out of the norm compared to the rest of the community.

In this it was a brilliantly simple code of conduct. Instead of rules-lawyering a laundry list of dos and don'ts, the discussion centered solely on the conduct of an individual and the interpretation of that conduct by those complaining about it. I find it far superior to these expansive codes of conduct, because these are essentially checklists of ways to harass someone you don't like, even if the context of their conversation with others was pleasant for all involved. If you're forced to consider every statement for intent, and determine if it rises to the level of a community defined understanding of "being a dick", it significantly limits the ability to complain about all but the most egregious conduct.

Re:Good for them

[stephanruby]

What's so controversial about having a policy that says you need to not be jerks to each other?

Remember the school who suspended a teenager for two days because she was supposedly "inciting violence" with her anti-bullying video criticizing the school. That's what we're talking about here.

With overly vague but very strict written rules, that means the people in charge of an organization are free to interpret and reinterpret the rules however it suits them.

For instance, let's say x number of years from now, a FreeBSD committee chairman/president starts padding his/her expense reports with very large unrelated personal expenses, or holds a new election of board/committee members without telling anyone else about it but for a few of his/her personal friends.

Would the rules below be used to silence / banish the members who are asking too many questions?

Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease.

Publication of non-harassing private communication without consent.

Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes.

Yes, you can bet they will. It's not that those rules necessarily have bad intentions.

I can certainly see them being used against stalkers and bullies. It's just that those rules are so overly vague, they will certainly be abused if/when a bad actor, or bad actors, ever reach power.

Re:Why would it make people angry

[Megol]

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.

toxic documents

[lkcl]

codes of conduct are known for being extremely toxic. if you're someone reading this who doesn't understand that, look at the keywords: is there *anything* positive in them? just look at the word type, and substitute "positive" or "negative" instead of the actual word. then count the two types up, and ask yourself the question, "what kind of person do you think this would attract?"

it would attract two types of people wouldn't it: one that is absolutely terrified of making mistakes - of being the kind of person that the document ACCUSES people of being. and the other type would be precisely the kinds of people MOST LIKELY to ignore such proscriptions and do them anyway.

so what, *exactly*, do you think these kinds of documents achieve? they describe - and attract - the very things that people fear will happen, and at the very best poison (toxify) the working environment for absolutely everyone involved with the project.

a much better approach would be to use something like the bill of ethics (titanians.org). it's effectively a "forth normalised form" document, that "unpacks on demand". it defines what an "ethical act" is, and encourages and invites its upholders to act ethically. that *requires* that the participants think through incidents very carefully but WITHOUT having incredibly dangerous "toxic proscriptive lists"... which are never complete anyway.

Re:There's this book...

[xeno]

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."

Why only spaces?

[CustomSolvers2]

This code of conduct applies to all spaces

And what about tabs, f*cking pieces of steaming sh*t? How can you dare to ignore my blank space and indentation identity? What are you, animals? LOL.

Re:Looks like James Damore, Round 2

[wrf3]

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".

Re:Looks like James Damore, Round 2

[Hal_Porter]

Funny how you can't remember any of those one liners.

Re:Weasel-worded ham-handed bullshit

[Calydor]

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?"