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Case study: GCCCase study: GCCPosted Jun 8, 2006 1:25 UTC (Thu) by pimlott (guest, #1535)Parent article: Behavioral standards in the free software community
I haven't followed this for a long time and never knew the details, but I believe that the GCC developers went through a period of conduct reform many years ago. During the time I read it (after the reform), discourse on the GCC mailing list struck me as more restrained, even diplomatic, than on any other I'd seen. I wonder if there are any lessons there, and whether the experience of GCC--a highly political project with a history of tensions--could guide standards of behavior for other projects (cue JoeBuck).
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Case study: GCC Posted Jun 8, 2006 6:05 UTC (Thu) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] The GCC project doesn't have any hard rules about politeness, it's just about social norms. People do occasionally get angry or rude, but you just don't see that much of it. When things get hot, people often contact each other off-list and smooth things out. Any development list has a norm; people read it for a while and they get a clue as to how people interact on that list, not just what's on topic, but the general tone.In its entire history since the EGCS fork, only one person was ever expelled from the gcc mailing lists. The jerk in question flooded the list with his rants and made several threats of violence, both on-list and off-list, against the release manager at the time, and the steering committee discussed whether we'd have to get the police involved, but fortunately the guy just went away after he was banned. With EGCS, we tried to set up a culture that was based on consensus. If you can work out a solution that everyone can live with, that beats a solution that wins by a 2/3 vote every time, because all of the serious objections have been answered. Of course, that isn't always possible; then if it's a technical issue, you want the best expert in that area that you have to decide, and if it's "political", you want to come as close to unanimous as you can.
Case study: Ubuntu Code of Conduct Posted Jun 9, 2006 0:10 UTC (Fri) by nealmcb (subscriber, #20740) [Link] Ubuntu is another good case study - there is a code of conduct, which people need to sign (PGP) before becoming a full member.
http://www.ubuntu.com/community/conduct
The outline is:
Be considerate
I've seen some good things said about it, and liked the idea myself.
It appears that Gentoo has one also, based on Ubuntu's
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