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Richard Stallman Announces GNU Kind Communication Guidelines (gnu.org)
AmiMoJo writes: Richard Stallman has announced the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines, an effort "to start guiding people towards kinder communication." The Guidelines differ from a Code of Conduct in that it's trying to be proactive about kindness around free software development over being rules with possible actions when breaking them.
These new GNU communication guidelines can be found at GNU.org along with Stallman's commentary. From the guidelines: A code of conduct states rules, with punishments for anyone that violates them. It is the heavy-handed way of teaching people to behave differently, and since it only comes into action when people do something against the rules, it doesn't try to teach people to do better than what the rules require. To be sure, the appointed maintainer(s) of a GNU package can, if necessary, tell a contributor to go away; but we do not want to need to have recourse to that. The idea of the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines is to start guiding people towards kinder communication at a point well before one would even think of saying, "You are breaking the rules." The way we do this, rather than ordering people to be kind or else, is try to help people learn to make their communication more kind. I hope that kind communication guidelines will provide a kinder and less strict way of leading a project's discussions to be calmer, more welcoming to all participants of good will, and more effective.
These new GNU communication guidelines can be found at GNU.org along with Stallman's commentary. From the guidelines: A code of conduct states rules, with punishments for anyone that violates them. It is the heavy-handed way of teaching people to behave differently, and since it only comes into action when people do something against the rules, it doesn't try to teach people to do better than what the rules require. To be sure, the appointed maintainer(s) of a GNU package can, if necessary, tell a contributor to go away; but we do not want to need to have recourse to that. The idea of the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines is to start guiding people towards kinder communication at a point well before one would even think of saying, "You are breaking the rules." The way we do this, rather than ordering people to be kind or else, is try to help people learn to make their communication more kind. I hope that kind communication guidelines will provide a kinder and less strict way of leading a project's discussions to be calmer, more welcoming to all participants of good will, and more effective.
2. I disagree with making "diversity" a goal. If the developers in a
specific free software project do not include demographic D, I don't
think that the lack of them as a problem that requires action; there
is no need to scramble desperately to recruit some Ds. Rather, the
problem is that if we make demographic D feel unwelcome, we lose out
on possible contributors. And very likely also others that are not in
demographic D.
I will communicate with people how I feel they deserve to be communicated with.
Indeed, please do. And those communities will be just as free to shun you for being an arsehole.
eg Text and UI controls requiring young levels of eyesight and motor control because nobody making the UI is old or disabled
This is not an issue of lack of diversity of your developers, but lack of feedback from a representative group of your users.
Camera film being not very good at capturing black skin because it was calibrated by white people for white people, etc
Camera film today being bad at capturing black skin because calibrated "by white people for white people" in general? That smells like bullshit.
Do you have recently taken pictures in side-by-fashion on a modern film properly exposed and developed without touch-up work as proof of this?
Cameras and camera film are designed for capturing arbitrary images --- MANY MANY, perhaps most being pictures of inanimate objects/scenes from nature, so the ability for film to accurately take a very high depth of color across the spectrum is necessary...
Unless you have some really really oddball special film... cameras are are meant to capture a scene with high detail containing any color; not just people, let-alone people with a particular skin tone.
From the Guidelines:
By contrast, to suggest that others use nonfree software opposes the basic principles of GNU, so it is not allowed in GNU Project discussions.
This is the kind of religious/political zealotry that turns people off CoCs!
(Just kidding BTW. I personally avoid nonfree software to an extreme.)
Only your first sentence was at all accurate. Political correctness started out as a way to silence and suppress people with the wrong politics -- whether they disagreed with the Communist Party or some other totalitarian regime -- and continues to have the same essential character today. Identifying it is not a suppressive action.
White people have nothing to be ashamed about
Yeah, that's not the issue.
The issue is that the descendents of slaves still face a lot of problems stemming from that history, and honouring the people who were part of the problem with their name on a building doesn't help. In fact, it makes things slightly worse...
It's like those statues of Confederate generals. They were mostly mass produced cheaply long after the war, when the civil rights movement was gaining traction in fact. They were designed to remind the people demanding equal rights that they were not equal, that the communities they live in thought they were property and were willing to fight for that belief. The people putting them up didn't give a shit about the generals, they just wanted to make black people feel uncomfortable.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Australia's government stopped a hiring program that used only non-gender data in resumes; they stopped it because it hired even more men that were being hired before.
Amazon recently announced that it was dropping its hiring "AI". Why? Because it preferred to hire men.
Men built this world. This is not surprising.
* Those statues and building names make their triumph all the more wonderful; they should be taking happy selfies in front of them.
* White people are responsible for the successes of the civil rights movement. They were the ones in power; they are the ones who made a success of it.
Civil rights, tolerance, multiculturalism, respect for the individual, equality under the law.
Those are all White ideas.