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Behavioral standards in the free software community
Behavioral standards in the free software community
Posted Jun 16, 2006 22:34 UTC (Fri) by knshaum (guest, #38431)Parent article: Behavioral standards in the free software community
You offer Keith Packard's expulsion from XFree86 as an example of how codes of conduct can be harmful, and certainly it was in this case... to XFree86. But notice that the OSS community as a whole, and arguably Keith himself, *benefited* from his expulsion. X development was moribund and is now re-energized, and the community that refused to listen is no longer being listened to itself. The enforcement of the code of conduct turned out to be beneficial, just not in the way intended by those doing the enforcing.
The OSS community already has a mechanism for dealing with bad project management: forking. This places a hard limit on the amount of damage that ill-conceived or badly-enforced codes of conduct, and other bad practices, can do.
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