SQLite Adopts 'Monastic' Code of Conduct (sqlite.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Undoubtedly in response to this politically motivated sort of claptrap, SQLite has released their own Code of Conduct. From the preamble:

Having been encouraged by clients to adopt a written code of conduct, the SQLite developers elected to govern their interactions with each other, with their clients, and with the larger SQLite user community in accordance with the "instruments of good works" from chapter 4 of The Rule of St. Benedict. This code of conduct has proven its mettle in thousands of diverse communities for over 1,500 years, and has served as a baseline for many civil law codes since the time of Charlemagne.

Not everyone has found SQLite's attempt informative or funny (though many did). A developer wrote, for instance, "So is the SQLite CoC thing a joke or not? If it's not a joke, f*ck this. If it is a joke, that's even worse. Your CoC should be taken seriously." A security researcher, chimed in, "This sort of stunt will make actual code of conduct discussions harder. It's not funny, helpful, or wise."

Comments

If someone tells you that a joke is not funny

[Anonymous Coward]

that tells you more about them than about the joke. Congrats to SQLite. That's one project that "gets it". Anyone who thinks that "this sort of stunt will make actual code of conduct discussions harder" hasn't even got the message (which coincidentally is one data point in favor of using more direct language...)

A useful shibboleth

[alvinrod]

This seems like a useful shibboleth. Anyone who's whining about this online is the kind of prat you probably don't want anywhere near your project. I think the first example is especially illustrative:

So is the SQLite CoC thing a joke or not? If it's not a joke, f*ck this. If it is a joke, that's even worse.

Here's the type of person that is likely to go out of their way to take umbrage over something relatively minor. The kind of person who's happy to shove a CoC down your throat as long its theirs, but will scream about having to follow some other set of rules that they don't like.

Re:A useful shibboleth

[mopower70]

A million upvotes to that truth bomb. I think the message is clear: the kind of people that need a CoC are the kind of people no one wants to work with.

Re:A useful shibboleth

[alvinrod]

Shibboleths are things that are useful for identifying distinct groups of people. A good example is the bar scene in the Tarantino film Inglorious Bastards. One of the characters is an Englishman pretending to be a German Officer and he does an okay job, especially given the tense situation and everyone is fooled. However, the hand gesture he makes when ordering drinks is improper and immediately betrays him as a spy.

The word itself comes from an old Hebrew word that has an unrelated meaning to the present use, which springs from a Biblical story, where the word "Shibboleth" was used as a modern shibboleth because it was pronounced differently between two warring groups and could be used to tell if a person was a foe attempting to pass themselves off as a friend. There are plenty of other examples of this being employed throughout history. For example, if you're traveling in warn torn parts of the Middle East, you may want to memorize a few passages from the Quran as that's a common shibboleth used by militants to determine if someone is actually a Muslim since it's often impossible to know based on appearance alone.

The SJWs Are Already Attacking The Project

[L_R_Shaw]

https://twitter.com/brionv/sta...

SJWs cannot abide mockery because it is a threat to their own self anointed moral authority.

Re:The SJWs Are Already Attacking The Project

[pegdhcp]

I think what SJWs do not realise is that they are religious bigots, even while not adhering any religion. They believe not just in their righteousness but also evil in anybody even with a slightly different set of ideals.

CoCs are religious documents

[rl117]

SJWs are religious. Marxism is their religion, and intersectionality their tenets of faith. They believe in righteousness, sin, and punishment of unbelievers and transgressors (anyone who criticises any aspect of SJW beliefs, including their own). It goes without saying that the beliefs and their behaviour are thoroughly toxic nonsense, which is what makes them so dangerous. So given the choice between an SJW CoC and this set of fairly sensible (albeit religious) rules about living life as a good thoughtful and compassionate person, I think I'd rather be judged by the Benedictines than blue-haired SJW harridans and their enablers. At least the Benedictines allow for the forgiveness of sins and loving their enemies. SJWs don't believe in that sort of compassion, preferring to act like a pack of hyenas around anyone who shows weakness, failing Rule 64 (Hate no one) and a good number of the other rules as well!

BRILLIANT

[TimMD909]

Good job for SQLite! I like 19 (Console the sorrowing) the most. I also want to start a new project called "Sorrowing: The Console". It'd be like bash, but all the messages would be drenched in existential dread.

Re:BRILLIANT

[ItsJustAPseudonym]

You mean PowerShell?

Re:Why even adopt it

[Anonymous Coward]

that's the point of the sarcastic SQLite CoC.

CoC's could also prevent projects from working together, like Software Licenses also do.

Project ABC adopts the Monastic/10 commandments style CoC.
Project XYZ adopts a SJW/LGB/LGBT/LGBTQ/LGBTTQQIAAP friendly CoC.

Now these two projects cannot work together.

Now like with sports, software developers arbitrarily become split along party lines.

WTF does a CoC have to do with software?

Re:But is it a bad code?

[L_R_Shaw]

> Seems like it might be a good choice for a CoC.

The other and more sinister reason is the massive attempt by SJWs to ram the toxic 'contributors covenant' by the vile Coraline Ada Ehmke and others is the creation of SJW thought police organization for all open source projects who are dumb enough to adopt it.

Essentially SJWs getting paid to sit at home combing through open source projects searching for cases of wrongthink and working behind the scenes in ideological star chambers to kick their ideological enemies.

Projects creating their own sane CoCs or even just mocking the push to adopt these toxic SJW CoCs infuriates them. They are trying to get every single open source project to adopt a single universal SJW CoC and place every project under ideological thought police.

Think this is all hyperbole, just look at the sickening attack by Coraline Ada Ehmke against Ruby's creator when he refused to bend the knee:

https://twitter.com/coralinead...

Wrong

[SuperKendall]

That is what happens to your fingers naturally after a lifetime of reaching for the Meta key in combination with other keystrokes.

He literally cannot put the fingers together anymore.

Emacs master.

Code_of_COMMANDMENTS

[HeckRuler]

Why not use something a little more updated:

I am the sysadmin, thy savior, which have brought thee out of th elands of paper, out of the house of bondage

1. Thou shalt have no other sysadmin before me
2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any Gaben image
3. Thou shalt not email thy sysadmin in vain
4. Remember it's the weekend, keep it holy, don't call
5. Honour thy manager and thy HR
6. Thou shalt not kill -9
7. Thou shalt not commit adultery on company computers
8. Thou shalt not torrent
9. Thou shalt not bear false witness on thine tickets
10. Thou shalt not covet they neighbors hardware, nor his software, nor anything else.

Ye shall erect these memos which I command thee upon mount cubicle

Re: Why even adopt it

[schure]

I think this is a very fine joke and people should be proud of whoever created it.

Re:But is it a bad code?

[goose-incarnated]

Sqlite is one of the most widely distributed and used libraries in all of software. It has larger penetration than Linux, is more ubiquitous than zlib.

I think they have the karma to burn on this.

See you in Kangaroo Court

[mileshigh]

Chastity is the only honest way to go. However, you'll notice that requirement seriously interferes with recruitment in the modern world.

All similar codes I've seen pretend to be something else by forbidding unwanted sexual advances. "Unwanted" sounds oh-so reasonable, but the problem is: how do you know if an advance is unwanted if you don't try your luck? Communication between people is fragile at best. If you advance is accepted, then it was desired. Otherwise, you're a posteriori guilty of an unwanted advance and are a creep because You Should Have Known Better.

Ergo, the only sane solution is to say that all advances are unwanted in that community, which is called chastity.

Either the community is a place where one of the side-benefits is the possibility of romance/sex and where related behavior is sanctioned, or sex and romance are 100% off the menu.

Re: Why even adopt it

[arglebargle_xiv]

So is the SQLite CoC thing a joke or not?

This is actually Poe's Law in real life: "Without a clear indication of the author's intent, it is difficult or impossible to tell the difference between an expression of sincere extremism and a parody of extremism". The crap around CoC's has become so crazy that it's indistinguishable from parody.

Actually its a decent list for conduct

[drnb]

Actually if you drop out the parts related to the practice of religion its a pretty good code of conduct for software development.

2 Love your neighbor as yourself. [ex test before commit]
3 You are not to kill, [ex crash your customers]
4 not to commit adultery; [ex don't f with your users]
5 you are not to steal [ex respect the software license]
6 nor to covet; [ex don't add a feature just because its in the commercial app you are cloning]
7 you are not to bear false witness. [ex admit it came from source forge]
8 You must honor everyone, [ex conform to the coding standard]
9 and never do to another what you do not want done to yourself. [ex replace tabs/spaces]
11 discipline your body; [ex proper ergonomics[
12 do not pamper yourself, [ex sorry, you only get one 4K monitor]
13 but love fasting. [ex sorry, only a midrange GPU]
14 You must relieve the lot of the poor, [ex contribute to open source]
15 clothe the naked, [ex comment your code]
16 visit the sick, [ex fix your bugs rather than just make them scrum tasks]
17 and bury the dead. [ex remove the dead code]
18 Go to help the troubled [ex when someone is stuck on a bug be their second set of eyes]
19 and console the sorrowing. [ex let the fanboy's PC dual boot]
20 Your way of acting should be different from the world’s way; [ex cross platform is not all the MS windows variations]
22 You are not to act in anger [ex sorry, you can't tell customers to RTFM]
23 or nurse a grudge. [ex desktop Linux, get over it]
24 Rid your heart of all deceit. [ex stop telling people they will like emacs after a little while]
25 Never give a hollow greeting of peace [ex "why yes my core code will be cross platforms"]
26 or turn away when someone needs your love. [ex Target the Android platform too]
27 Bind yourself to no oath lest it prove false, [ex "I swear I tested all my changes"]
28 but speak the truth with heart and tongue. [ex run the regression test]
29 Do not repay one bad turn with another. [ex recommend perl because someone recommended it to you]
30 Do not injure anyone, but bear injuries patiently. [ex re-run all tests after the merge but before the commit]
31 Love your enemies. [ex Target the Windows platform too]
32 If people curse you, do not curse them back but bless them instead. [ex No flamewars on the dev thread]
33 Endure persecution for the sake of justice. [ex drink the company coffee rather than leave for starbucks when getting behind on things]
34 You must not be proud, [ex fix bugs outside your niche in the codebase]
35 nor be given to wine. [ex just dual boot or run a real emulator]
36 Refrain from too much eating [ex use CPU and RAM responsibly]
37 or sleeping, [ex don't make your code slow so you can use the currently hyped programming language]
38 and from laziness. [ex don't try to apply your favorite programming language to everything]
39 Do not grumble [ex Don't bitch in comments]
40 or speak ill of others. [ex Your preferred operating system is not always the best choice]
43 Be certain that the evil you commit is always your own and yours to acknowledge. [ex commit changes only under your login]
44 Live in fear of judgment day [ex launch day
45 and have a great horror of hell. [ex developer will have to do customer support immediately after launch]

Re: Why even adopt it

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is it a joke? Why do other open source communities condone murder by not explicitly disallowing it in their CoCs?

Someone wants to work on ReiserFS?