Behavioral standards in the free software community [LWN.net]

Behavioral standards in the free software community

Posted Jun 8, 2006 12:09 UTC (Thu) by ortalo (subscriber, #4654)
Parent article: Behavioral standards in the free software community

Why invent new rules while they seem to mimic laws existing in many countries (at least those respecting human rights)? Maybe we should just try to self-apply rules *already* imposed to us by laws related to diffamation, decency, child protection, discrimination, etc. (including those related to equality between women and men, or people from different races) instead of once again re-inventing the wheel.

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Behavioral standards in the free software community

Posted Jun 8, 2006 12:40 UTC (Thu) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]

Laws often state that everyone is equal before the eyes of the law; they rarely state that you have to treat everyone the same.

Laws often state that you aren't allowed to abuse another person; they rarely state that you have to be polite to people.

The law specifies a bare minimum of what is acceptable brehaviour from a person, which is as I think it should be. I would not like to live in a country where it was against the law to have an argument with someone, or that I had to treat me son the same way as I treat the man on the street.

Behavioral standards in the free software community vs law

Posted Jun 8, 2006 21:24 UTC (Thu) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

I don't know what countries you're thinking of, but I know in the US, laws don't come anywhere close to the rules being talked about here.

It is not a crime to defame someone. Defaming someone can make one legally liable for the damage it causes, but even then it has to have a clear negative impact on the person's business or profession; the insults on OSS mailing lists probably wouldn't qualify.

It is not a crime to reject someone's code because of his race or gender. There are about half a dozen ways you cannot discriminate based on race (employment, housing, etc.), but merging code isn't one of them.

It is sometimes a crime to do indecent things such as use offensive words, but since it's always based on community standards, I don't think it would apply to OSS mailing lists, especially if said list does not have a code of conduct.

If there are other jurisdictions in the world where common decency is codified into police law, that might be a good start as opposed to generating a code of conduct for an OSS project from scratch; someone already suggested approximately the same thing by mentioning the ACM's code.