So what exactly is causing you issues with this? Local TV stations have been doing this for years for severe weather situations.
The issue isn't the broadcast, it's that we're not in sufficient control of our personal computers such that we get to choose if/how the broadcast is presented to the user. Classic televisions weren't programmable so they just had to show whatever was being broadcast, but our 21st century handheld PCs should be above that.
No one is forcing your personal computer to display this message (and if they were, open source obviously would be the solution, yadda yadda yadda). This is actually an FCC regulation, and it's been the same since the 1960s with the Emergency Broadcast System.
It is illegal for an FCC-licensed broadcast station to continue broadcasting normal programming during a Presidential EAS Alert -- they have to either carry the signal from the local LP1/LP2 station, go dark, or display a message to tune to the appropriate station. If the President needs to tell the nation that the Russians just attacked us, that needs to get out there.
The parallel decision to handle this the same way for Alerts going over WEA rather than EAS is not a particularly large leap. There are plenty of other things your cell phone is forced to do, by law... Including allow you to dial 911 even if the phone is locked, has no SIM card, and has no service provider. "Accept cell tower based Nationwide Emergency Alerts" is not particularly out of place in that light.
This is true. Physics has no opinion on the matter. Many physicists however are definitely sexist against women. Not all but enough to be a real problem.
You might have missed the new hotness in intersectionality: the redefinition of -isms and -ists to refer to outcomes, not intent.
If an insufficient number of XYZ are not present, then "the system" (not specific people) is XYZ-ist and must be corrected. And if you are not XYZ, then you are a receiving a benefit of an XYZ-ist system and are thus XYZ-ist yourself. (Note: Denying your inherent XYZ-ist nature shall be taken as strong additional evidence that you are XYZ-ist.)
His being a dumb ass got him fired. Why do idiots like this feel entitled to bring up their backwards politics at non-political events?
If I'm working a job and presenting for my company and I go off on a rant about something political guess what will happen to me?
If you guess I probably will get fired you win. I'm tired of all these over privileged cry babies feeling like they have a right to throw out their politics on company time.
It's worth pointing out that the opposite would almost certainly not be the case though. If he had done a presentation on "Gender Diversity in Physics" that reached the opposite conclusions, the complaints wouldn't be made. And if you haven't noticed, the trend by the SJW crowd is to insert politics at ALL events, because "there is no such thing as a non-political event", and "being able to ignore politics is a white male privilege" and if you disagree, you're a bigot.
I'd be all for keeping these events non-political. Too bad one side has already decided that bridge must be crossed.
Funny, placing code quality above irrelevant incidental features like genitals is exactly the point of anti-bigotry initiatives like the new code of conduct. It's patently obvious that detractors either prefer the maintenance of their social position over code quality or simply believe that women and others protected by the code of conduct are incapable of writing quality code. It's transparent and moronic.
Read as a whole, that's entirely the opposite of what the front page of the CC says... It spends one sentence saying "technical contributions" (read: "code quality") should not be an excuse for "bad behavior" (which is arguable), but most of the rest of the paragraphs talking about "irrelevant incidental features like genitals" and how the owners of such are the hardest hit.
Much of the objection to the new CoC as opposed to the previous one is that the previous one was pretty clearly intended to address behavior, and not the subject. If someone is being too much of an ass, the problem is that he's being an ass, not that he was an ass to person XYZ in particular. This is primarily a "watch out for these special people" document and not a "don't be an ass" document.
Surely no one believes that only nazis and fascists have a problem with this right?
I think progressives really do believe that. I've seen too many "free speech is hate speech" posters at free speech protests to think it'a all a sham. And how are protests against free speech even a thing at colleges?
The FSF/OSS/hacker communities have spent 20-30 years debating the relative merits of "free as in speech" or "free as in beer" as philosophies in the technology space. Hopefully one thing we can all agree on is that those arguing "free speech is hate speech" do not deserve a seat at that table.
"die-hard conservatives even confessed they'd voted for HRC"
LOL. No they didn't.
You seem to be confusing conservatives and right-leaning populists. Plenty of conservatives didn't actually vote for Trump, choosing either to leave it blank, vote third party, vote for Evan, or -- alas -- vote for Hillary.
The 2016 election was a hot mess between two horrible candidates, and plenty of folks on both sides of the aisle decided to vote against whoever they happened to believe was worst. Not always on traditional party/ideology lines.
What planet do you live on that Office for hte Mac was "widely considered to be a better product" clearly not someone who has had to support Office for the Mac professionally on 100s of Macs. This statement made me audibly guffaw and laugh
Probably depends on how far back you've been doing that. Compared to the horror that was Word 6, Office 98 for Mac was freaking amazeballs and many contemporaneous reviews pointed out that it had more core features than Office 97 (except for some Windows-specific OLE stuff and PC-only apps) and supported various Mac technologies on a first-class basis rather than through slow emulation layers.
On top of that, in a time when Installers (especially Windows-port Installers) were ungodly wizard affairs, a true self-contained folder-drag install process was a God-send... so much so that its simplicity helped push the benefits of what Mac users now refer to as bundles. This wasn't common on the Mac at the time if your application wasn't already a single-file, so for a "suite" package it was pretty remarkable.
I used to use Macs in the 9.xx days. Cooperative multitasking, where one program could completely hang the system unless it calls WaitNextEvent() resulted in a relatively unstable OS build, especially if you used a lot of programs.
I don't know... Thinking back on things, I'd actually say that I tended to have *more* applications (though not background services) running at a time then than I do now, but that's partly because the promise of the Browser-As-Platform is way more a possibility now than then.
I had been a Mac user since System 6 though, and I think Mac OS 8.6 was actually pretty damn stable for me. Cooperative multitasking can't fight against application bugs, but the generally slower rate of change for apps meant that those with bugs were more liable to be identified. Of course, flaky extensions could still ruin your day, but that was really always the case, and we all knew that things like Kalidescope could cause problems.
On the whole, I suspect apps' requirement for WNE loops (or, heaven forbid, GNE) forced some to always consider the need to relinquish control on a shared system. Nowadays it feels like apps ignore that complete and demand the kernel figure it out -- safer, no doubt, but I'm not sure it's completely *better*.
In any event, I left Mac world just as the OS X made it from Rhapsody to release, and after ages in Windows/Linux re-introduced myself to it in 2011. A different world. Not better; just meeting different needs.
Somebody at Google said "hey, we could abuse our power for good!" and management came back saying "it's still abuse, so we're not doing it", and that was the end of it.
Compare it to: Somebody at Google said "hey, men and women are different and if we consider that then we could help increase actual diversity here for good!" and management came back saying "you're fired", and that was the end of it.
It's bad enough that Google even has this power, but between it and Facebook, there's clear pressure from the bottom up (thanks to the prevalence of thought in the Bay Area) to end up doing this. It's naive to think effort to effect these types of things end here.
Also, the NY is definitely highlighting this. Misogyny is the implication:
Linus Torvalds's decision to step aside came after we asked him a series of questions about his conduct for a story on complaints about his abusive behavior discouraging women from working as Linux-kernel programmers
I don't think Torvalds was misogynistic, nor do I think anyone is claiming he was. I think they were just claiming he was too abrasive for a professional working environment. The word "misogyny" or anything derived from it doesn't appear anywhere in the New Yorker article.
Just wait. It'll come.
For whatever reason, the New Yorker articles quotes a couple of women, but there have been plenty of guys who've gotten fed up with Linus's abrasiveness and moved on.
I think the "for whatever reason" is a bit loaded there... The "whatever reason" is pretty clear in the larger cultural environment.
It's probably worth noting that there's already pressure forming to have Ted Ts'o removed from the TAB on "meta" grounds (Can't make a report while this person is on the Board), and explicitly called out as "someone who didn't sign off on the patch", from a person shouted out to by the reporter of the NY article on the announcement.
Hospital which is a not-for-profit cannot refuse to treat patients based on their ability to pay for services.
That's not true. While a non-profit hospital must, like any hospital, accept emergency patients, they may transfer them as soon as they are stable, and there's no obligation to treat anyone otherwise.
Strictly speaking, that's not true universally true either. At a Federal level, this law is tied to receiving Medicare funding. Virtually all hospitals do, and thus virtually all hospitals are subject to the mandate, but Federal Law cannot directly require this without an interstate commerce tie (or at least, that hasn't been challenged that way in court). One could make a case for it, but a stronger (and in my mind more equitable and moral) suggestion would be for States to require this directly -- and have them apply it to all hospitals as a matter of public policy.
I'm an EMT-B, FWIW... although I don't work as one. I've definitely seen the effects of overstuffed ERs though.
Being anti-social and lacking empathy doesn't make you a better coder, it makes you an asshole. You can be both; a good coder and a good person. Being deficient in a healthy human emotion shouldn't be a badge of honor.
I work in medicine, and while many fail at empathy, at least there is a focus on it.
Linus is many things, but he is not a "tech-bro" in the modern valley sense. This seems orthogonal to the original discussion, as startup/Silicon Valley/Web 3.0 Culture is toxic for far more reasons than simply the kernel maintainer chewing you out if you try to commit really bad design flaws into it.
While I am not asserting that this CoC is good, I am asserting that we shouldn't criticize it solely based on political views of its author.
I would absolutely agree with you if it were unrelated to the issue at hand -- I don't care what their views are on tax policy, federalism, national security, etc. Unfortunately, this "political view" is linked to from the CoC itself in that it's on the front page of the link that the code itself provides. Although that front page doesn't explicitly link to the manifesto, the entire third paragraph discusses meritocracy and its demerits. I think it's only nature to analyze that paragraph in the larger avowed scope of the anti-meritocracy movement.
I am not a developer. I am a self taught system administrator.
...
These two pieces of news this week have re-invigorated me into a desire to get more involved in the things I love(d). Now regardless of the motivation of Linus or the communities ideas here, at least one person will be coming back to the fold. Hopefully that is what the mission is here and the ruthlessness and "RTFM n00b" stuff is in the past now.
Self-taught administrator here too. The thing is, OSS projects are voluntary. It, and the hacker ethic beforehand, relied on individual contributions, individual contributors, and individuals pulling their own weight. That does indeed mean that RTFM is important -- a willingness to put in the effort (by RTFMing) before demanding effort from others (answer my question) is part and parcel of the mutual respect that's necessary for a community of any type.
Were people ruthless? Sometimes. Did people sometimes go overboard? Almost certainly. (Hello, Theo and DJB, and everyone else from the late '90s and early 2000s!) But correcting that does *NOT* require the philosophical change that this code, and the Post-Meritocracy Manifesto behind it, represent.
To be clear though the Code of Conduct doesn't say any of that, or even hint at it. And the text from the Contributor Covenant that you quoted isn't actually from the Covenant itself, it's from the preamble on the web page that introduces it.
So I think your "context" here is just fear-mongering. Can you point to anything you find problematic in the actual Code of Conduct?
I don't see how the explicit preamble on the main page is to be dissociated from the code itself. That's like saying that the FSF's philosophy is distinct from the GPL. By its nature, a debate about which copyright license to use (say, GPL vs BSD vs MIT) touches on the philosophical underpinnings of the licenses themselves, not solely on the text, nor solely on the utilitarian effect of the license on project use.
To answer your question, though, yes. The previous code referred to humans individually and did not prioritize, label, or categorize the use of various "classes" of persons. The new conduct policy is vague as to conduct, guarantees corrective action without indicating guidelines on what that is, describes a "professional environment", which (despite individuals being employed at times) implies a regulatory framework on the project as a whole, explicitly brings in public behavior outside the context of the project as subject to the jurisdiction of this, and implies there are additional rules to come.
Off-hand, I'd say the Code of Conduct from near the end of the movie Pleasantville was less oppressive.
Notably that while they were making room for all that moderately flowery language about inclusion, they removed the parts where they warn that there may be criticism, because criticism is an important facet. Since a frank warning that *appropriate* criticism was deemed too scary, I suppose they omitted it.
This is an excellent point. A presumed reason for it being called a "Code of Conflict" was an acknowledgement that there would be conflict, and that management of that conflict was crucial for any human endeavor. Conflict is natural, and our justice system itself is based on an adversarial interaction (lawyers for the prosecution and defense debate in front of a jury according to given rules). In that context, going from "conflict" to "conduct" itself is a notable change.
I really, really, really wish these had been handled non-concurrently. It's virtually impossible not to analyze or comment on the two events together, which leads to some unsettling connotations for some.
While I think Linus taking a breather to maybe not be as much of a dick while still demanding high quality code is an admirable moment of self-reflection, the roots of this Code of Conduct are quite unsettling.
A Code of Conduct for Open Source Projects Open Source has always been a foundation of the Internet, and with the advent of social open source networks this is more true than ever. But free, libre, and open source projects suffer from a startling lack of diversity, with dramatically low representation by women, people of color, and other marginalized populations.
Part of this problem lies with the very structure of some projects: the use of insensitive language, thoughtless use of pronouns, assumptions of gender, and even sexualized or culturally insensitive names.
Marginalized people also suffer some of the unintended consequences of dogmatic insistence on meritocratic principles of governance. Studies have shown that organizational cultures that value meritocracy often result in greater inequality.
From the PMM:
Meritocracy is a founding principle of the open source movement, and the ideal of meritocracy is perpetuated throughout our field in the way people are recruited, hired, retained, promoted, and valued.
But meritocracy has consistently shown itself to mainly benefit those with privilege, to the exclusion of underrepresented people in technology. The idea of merit is in fact never clearly defined; rather, it seems to be a form of recognition, an acknowledgement that “this person is valuable insofar as they are like me.”
(If you are not familiar with criticisms of meritocracy, please refer to the resources on this page.)
It is time that we as an industry abandon the notion that merit is something that can be measured, can be pursued on equal terms by every individual, and can ever be distributed fairly.
These are explicitly political documents... and they should be addressed as such. I don't think anyone has a problem with "don't be a jerk, and don't make it personal" in an open source project. Arguably, Linus has stepped over the line on occasion. The adoption of this document goes far beyond rectifying a mere lack of teeth in telling people to "Be excellent to each other"
So, even if all the ingredients could be obtained for a genuinely 0$ price point, mom will STILL pay to have a cake made for her, for her little girl's 6th birthday party, because mom is busy doing other things and can better use the hour of her time that would be spent making the cake and (trying to) frosting it herself. Instead, she could be arranging for the party, or checking invites. Same is true in software installation settings.
The problem is that the world is migrating to cakes-as-a-service... or, perhaps more appropriately, to beer-as-a-service. And free-as-in-beer-as-a-service is not sustainable. TANSTAAFL.
Nowadays, people on the Eastern seaboard don't need to go to Atlantic City to get the full "Vegas-style" casino experience on the east coast, which adds up to problems.
The full Vegas-style casino experience includes being able to walk out of one casino and right into another without putting down your alcoholic beverage. Tribal casinos aren't trying to provide that. They are just taking advantage of gambling addicts, not people who are trying to get the Vegas Experience. There are still only three places in the states where you can choose from a whole series of casinos without having to drive.
While that's fair, those who just want the Class III gaming without getting a city-wide (or strip-wide/block-wide) vibe are still now better served (or at least tolerably served) locally.
I tend to agree with this. Reading the article, I thought back to an aborted Doom2 WAD I was trying to build back in my first year or two of College, which would have been rather Downtown (Map 13)-like. This was before Columbine, but even after I don't think it would have caused an outcry like a modern AR game or a modern graphics game would.
New Jersey Supreme Court ruled casinos could not bar skilled blackjack players known as card count so the same thing may happen with this over them.
Aren't New Jersey casinos failing at a far greater rate then their Las Vegas counterparts?
Yes, but that's mainly due to the ability for Native American tribes to engage in full Class III gaming, which started to bloom in the '90s after States began making pacts following the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988. Nowadays, people on the Eastern seaboard don't need to go to Atlantic City to get the full "Vegas-style" casino experience on the east coast, which adds up to problems.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue isn't the broadcast, it's that we're not in sufficient control of our personal computers such that we get to choose if/how the broadcast is presented to the user. Classic televisions weren't programmable so they just had to show whatever was being broadcast, but our 21st century handheld PCs should be above that.
No one is forcing your personal computer to display this message (and if they were, open source obviously would be the solution, yadda yadda yadda). This is actually an FCC regulation, and it's been the same since the 1960s with the Emergency Broadcast System.
It is illegal for an FCC-licensed broadcast station to continue broadcasting normal programming during a Presidential EAS Alert -- they have to either carry the signal from the local LP1/LP2 station, go dark, or display a message to tune to the appropriate station. If the President needs to tell the nation that the Russians just attacked us, that needs to get out there.
The parallel decision to handle this the same way for Alerts going over WEA rather than EAS is not a particularly large leap. There are plenty of other things your cell phone is forced to do, by law... Including allow you to dial 911 even if the phone is locked, has no SIM card, and has no service provider. "Accept cell tower based Nationwide Emergency Alerts" is not particularly out of place in that light.
physics is not sexist against women
This is true. Physics has no opinion on the matter. Many physicists however are definitely sexist against women. Not all but enough to be a real problem.
You might have missed the new hotness in intersectionality: the redefinition of -isms and -ists to refer to outcomes, not intent.
If an insufficient number of XYZ are not present, then "the system" (not specific people) is XYZ-ist and must be corrected. And if you are not XYZ, then you are a receiving a benefit of an XYZ-ist system and are thus XYZ-ist yourself. (Note: Denying your inherent XYZ-ist nature shall be taken as strong additional evidence that you are XYZ-ist.)
QED.
His being a dumb ass got him fired. Why do idiots like this feel entitled to bring up their backwards politics at non-political events?
If I'm working a job and presenting for my company and I go off on a rant about something political guess what will happen to me?
If you guess I probably will get fired you win. I'm tired of all these over privileged cry babies feeling like they have a right to throw out their politics on company time.
It's worth pointing out that the opposite would almost certainly not be the case though. If he had done a presentation on "Gender Diversity in Physics" that reached the opposite conclusions, the complaints wouldn't be made. And if you haven't noticed, the trend by the SJW crowd is to insert politics at ALL events, because "there is no such thing as a non-political event", and "being able to ignore politics is a white male privilege" and if you disagree, you're a bigot.
I'd be all for keeping these events non-political. Too bad one side has already decided that bridge must be crossed.
Funny, placing code quality above irrelevant incidental features like genitals is exactly the point of anti-bigotry initiatives like the new code of conduct. It's patently obvious that detractors either prefer the maintenance of their social position over code quality or simply believe that women and others protected by the code of conduct are incapable of writing quality code. It's transparent and moronic.
Read as a whole, that's entirely the opposite of what the front page of the CC says... It spends one sentence saying "technical contributions" (read: "code quality") should not be an excuse for "bad behavior" (which is arguable), but most of the rest of the paragraphs talking about "irrelevant incidental features like genitals" and how the owners of such are the hardest hit.
Much of the objection to the new CoC as opposed to the previous one is that the previous one was pretty clearly intended to address behavior, and not the subject. If someone is being too much of an ass, the problem is that he's being an ass, not that he was an ass to person XYZ in particular. This is primarily a "watch out for these special people" document and not a "don't be an ass" document.
Surely no one believes that only nazis and fascists have a problem with this right?
I think progressives really do believe that. I've seen too many "free speech is hate speech" posters at free speech protests to think it'a all a sham. And how are protests against free speech even a thing at colleges?
The FSF/OSS/hacker communities have spent 20-30 years debating the relative merits of "free as in speech" or "free as in beer" as philosophies in the technology space. Hopefully one thing we can all agree on is that those arguing "free speech is hate speech" do not deserve a seat at that table.
"die-hard conservatives even confessed they'd voted for HRC"
LOL. No they didn't.
You seem to be confusing conservatives and right-leaning populists. Plenty of conservatives didn't actually vote for Trump, choosing either to leave it blank, vote third party, vote for Evan, or -- alas -- vote for Hillary.
The 2016 election was a hot mess between two horrible candidates, and plenty of folks on both sides of the aisle decided to vote against whoever they happened to believe was worst. Not always on traditional party/ideology lines.
What planet do you live on that Office for hte Mac was "widely considered to be a better product" clearly not someone who has had to support Office for the Mac professionally on 100s of Macs. This statement made me audibly guffaw and laugh
Probably depends on how far back you've been doing that. Compared to the horror that was Word 6, Office 98 for Mac was freaking amazeballs and many contemporaneous reviews pointed out that it had more core features than Office 97 (except for some Windows-specific OLE stuff and PC-only apps) and supported various Mac technologies on a first-class basis rather than through slow emulation layers.
On top of that, in a time when Installers (especially Windows-port Installers) were ungodly wizard affairs, a true self-contained folder-drag install process was a God-send... so much so that its simplicity helped push the benefits of what Mac users now refer to as bundles. This wasn't common on the Mac at the time if your application wasn't already a single-file, so for a "suite" package it was pretty remarkable.
I used to use Macs in the 9.xx days. Cooperative multitasking, where one program could completely hang the system unless it calls WaitNextEvent() resulted in a relatively unstable OS build, especially if you used a lot of programs.
I don't know... Thinking back on things, I'd actually say that I tended to have *more* applications (though not background services) running at a time then than I do now, but that's partly because the promise of the Browser-As-Platform is way more a possibility now than then.
I had been a Mac user since System 6 though, and I think Mac OS 8.6 was actually pretty damn stable for me. Cooperative multitasking can't fight against application bugs, but the generally slower rate of change for apps meant that those with bugs were more liable to be identified. Of course, flaky extensions could still ruin your day, but that was really always the case, and we all knew that things like Kalidescope could cause problems.
On the whole, I suspect apps' requirement for WNE loops (or, heaven forbid, GNE) forced some to always consider the need to relinquish control on a shared system. Nowadays it feels like apps ignore that complete and demand the kernel figure it out -- safer, no doubt, but I'm not sure it's completely *better*.
In any event, I left Mac world just as the OS X made it from Rhapsody to release, and after ages in Windows/Linux re-introduced myself to it in 2011. A different world. Not better; just meeting different needs.
Somebody at Google said "hey, we could abuse our power for good!" and management came back saying "it's still abuse, so we're not doing it", and that was the end of it.
Compare it to: Somebody at Google said "hey, men and women are different and if we consider that then we could help increase actual diversity here for good!" and management came back saying "you're fired", and that was the end of it.
It's bad enough that Google even has this power, but between it and Facebook, there's clear pressure from the bottom up (thanks to the prevalence of thought in the Bay Area) to end up doing this. It's naive to think effort to effect these types of things end here.
Also, the NY is definitely highlighting this. Misogyny is the implication:
Linus Torvalds's decision to step aside came after we asked him a series of questions about his conduct for a story on complaints about his abusive behavior discouraging women from working as Linux-kernel programmers
https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/1042793559601164290
I don't think Torvalds was misogynistic, nor do I think anyone is claiming he was. I think they were just claiming he was too abrasive for a professional working environment. The word "misogyny" or anything derived from it doesn't appear anywhere in the New Yorker article.
Just wait. It'll come.
For whatever reason, the New Yorker articles quotes a couple of women, but there have been plenty of guys who've gotten fed up with Linus's abrasiveness and moved on.
I think the "for whatever reason" is a bit loaded there... The "whatever reason" is pretty clear in the larger cultural environment.
It's probably worth noting that there's already pressure forming to have Ted Ts'o removed from the TAB on "meta" grounds (Can't make a report while this person is on the Board), and explicitly called out as "someone who didn't sign off on the patch", from a person shouted out to by the reporter of the NY article on the announcement.
Conversely our culture is bipolar with it, and right now the rubber band is stretched all the way towards the PC side...
Mod parent up... This is an interesting point.
Our culture is indeed quite bipolar with this.
Hospital which is a not-for-profit cannot refuse to treat patients based on their ability to pay for services.
That's not true. While a non-profit hospital must, like any hospital, accept emergency patients, they may transfer them as soon as they are stable, and there's no obligation to treat anyone otherwise.
Strictly speaking, that's not true universally true either. At a Federal level, this law is tied to receiving Medicare funding. Virtually all hospitals do, and thus virtually all hospitals are subject to the mandate, but Federal Law cannot directly require this without an interstate commerce tie (or at least, that hasn't been challenged that way in court). One could make a case for it, but a stronger (and in my mind more equitable and moral) suggestion would be for States to require this directly -- and have them apply it to all hospitals as a matter of public policy.
I'm an EMT-B, FWIW... although I don't work as one. I've definitely seen the effects of overstuffed ERs though.
Being anti-social and lacking empathy doesn't make you a better coder, it makes you an asshole. You can be both; a good coder and a good person. Being deficient in a healthy human emotion shouldn't be a badge of honor.
I work in medicine, and while many fail at empathy, at least there is a focus on it.
Linus is many things, but he is not a "tech-bro" in the modern valley sense. This seems orthogonal to the original discussion, as startup/Silicon Valley/Web 3.0 Culture is toxic for far more reasons than simply the kernel maintainer chewing you out if you try to commit really bad design flaws into it.
While I am not asserting that this CoC is good, I am asserting that we shouldn't criticize it solely based on political views of its author.
I would absolutely agree with you if it were unrelated to the issue at hand -- I don't care what their views are on tax policy, federalism, national security, etc. Unfortunately, this "political view" is linked to from the CoC itself in that it's on the front page of the link that the code itself provides. Although that front page doesn't explicitly link to the manifesto, the entire third paragraph discusses meritocracy and its demerits. I think it's only nature to analyze that paragraph in the larger avowed scope of the anti-meritocracy movement.
I am not a developer. I am a self taught system administrator.
These two pieces of news this week have re-invigorated me into a desire to get more involved in the things I love(d). Now regardless of the motivation of Linus or the communities ideas here, at least one person will be coming back to the fold. Hopefully that is what the mission is here and the ruthlessness and "RTFM n00b" stuff is in the past now.
Self-taught administrator here too. The thing is, OSS projects are voluntary. It, and the hacker ethic beforehand, relied on individual contributions, individual contributors, and individuals pulling their own weight. That does indeed mean that RTFM is important -- a willingness to put in the effort (by RTFMing) before demanding effort from others (answer my question) is part and parcel of the mutual respect that's necessary for a community of any type.
This is WHY hacker communities for so long have led to standardized texts like How To Ask Questions The Smart Way.
Were people ruthless? Sometimes. Did people sometimes go overboard? Almost certainly. (Hello, Theo and DJB, and everyone else from the late '90s and early 2000s!) But correcting that does *NOT* require the philosophical change that this code, and the Post-Meritocracy Manifesto behind it, represent.
To be clear though the Code of Conduct doesn't say any of that, or even hint at it. And the text from the Contributor Covenant that you quoted isn't actually from the Covenant itself, it's from the preamble on the web page that introduces it.
So I think your "context" here is just fear-mongering. Can you point to anything you find problematic in the actual Code of Conduct?
I don't see how the explicit preamble on the main page is to be dissociated from the code itself. That's like saying that the FSF's philosophy is distinct from the GPL. By its nature, a debate about which copyright license to use (say, GPL vs BSD vs MIT) touches on the philosophical underpinnings of the licenses themselves, not solely on the text, nor solely on the utilitarian effect of the license on project use.
To answer your question, though, yes. The previous code referred to humans individually and did not prioritize, label, or categorize the use of various "classes" of persons. The new conduct policy is vague as to conduct, guarantees corrective action without indicating guidelines on what that is, describes a "professional environment", which (despite individuals being employed at times) implies a regulatory framework on the project as a whole, explicitly brings in public behavior outside the context of the project as subject to the jurisdiction of this, and implies there are additional rules to come.
Off-hand, I'd say the Code of Conduct from near the end of the movie Pleasantville was less oppressive.
Notably that while they were making room for all that moderately flowery language about inclusion, they removed the parts where they warn that there may be criticism, because criticism is an important facet. Since a frank warning that *appropriate* criticism was deemed too scary, I suppose they omitted it.
This is an excellent point. A presumed reason for it being called a "Code of Conflict" was an acknowledgement that there would be conflict, and that management of that conflict was crucial for any human endeavor. Conflict is natural, and our justice system itself is based on an adversarial interaction (lawyers for the prosecution and defense debate in front of a jury according to given rules). In that context, going from "conflict" to "conduct" itself is a notable change.
Err, you left out the bottom part: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/8a104f8b5867#diff-310ab816e1e15913bbe69e164b689ac9R77
Attribution
===========
This Code of Conduct is adapted from the Contributor Covenant, version 1.4,
available at https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/1/4/code-of-conduct.html
I really, really, really wish these had been handled non-concurrently. It's virtually impossible not to analyze or comment on the two events together, which leads to some unsettling connotations for some.
While I think Linus taking a breather to maybe not be as much of a dick while still demanding high quality code is an admirable moment of self-reflection, the roots of this Code of Conduct are quite unsettling.
One really can't discuss the wording of the CoC without discussing the Contributor Covenant and the larger philosophical goals of the Post-Meritocracy manifesto.
From the CC:
From the PMM:
These are explicitly political documents... and they should be addressed as such. I don't think anyone has a problem with "don't be a jerk, and don't make it personal" in an open source project. Arguably, Linus has stepped over the line on occasion. The adoption of this document goes far beyond rectifying a mere lack of teeth in telling people to "Be excellent to each other"
So, even if all the ingredients could be obtained for a genuinely 0$ price point, mom will STILL pay to have a cake made for her, for her little girl's 6th birthday party, because mom is busy doing other things and can better use the hour of her time that would be spent making the cake and (trying to) frosting it herself. Instead, she could be arranging for the party, or checking invites. Same is true in software installation settings.
The problem is that the world is migrating to cakes-as-a-service... or, perhaps more appropriately, to beer-as-a-service. And free-as-in-beer-as-a-service is not sustainable. TANSTAAFL.
It can only be attributable to human error.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062622/quotes/qt0396920
Nowadays, people on the Eastern seaboard don't need to go to Atlantic City to get the full "Vegas-style" casino experience on the east coast, which adds up to problems.
The full Vegas-style casino experience includes being able to walk out of one casino and right into another without putting down your alcoholic beverage. Tribal casinos aren't trying to provide that. They are just taking advantage of gambling addicts, not people who are trying to get the Vegas Experience. There are still only three places in the states where you can choose from a whole series of casinos without having to drive.
While that's fair, those who just want the Class III gaming without getting a city-wide (or strip-wide/block-wide) vibe are still now better served (or at least tolerably served) locally.
I tend to agree with this. Reading the article, I thought back to an aborted Doom2 WAD I was trying to build back in my first year or two of College, which would have been rather Downtown (Map 13)-like. This was before Columbine, but even after I don't think it would have caused an outcry like a modern AR game or a modern graphics game would.
New Jersey Supreme Court ruled casinos could not bar skilled blackjack players known as card count so the same thing may happen with this over them.
Aren't New Jersey casinos failing at a far greater rate then their Las Vegas counterparts?
Yes, but that's mainly due to the ability for Native American tribes to engage in full Class III gaming, which started to bloom in the '90s after States began making pacts following the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act in 1988. Nowadays, people on the Eastern seaboard don't need to go to Atlantic City to get the full "Vegas-style" casino experience on the east coast, which adds up to problems.