Tough to be the SC in this one

Posted Dec 31, 2024 1:12 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46)
In reply to: Tough to be the SC in this one by gnu_lorien
Parent article: Tim Peters returns to the Python community

> This is a tricky consideration to make. The history of decision making that goes like "We will not punish this person not because they're innocent, but because of how bad it would be for the person that is punished" is fraught with abuse.

...and "let's publicly slander and punish this person with no justification beyond 'because we said so'" isn't fraught with abuse?

When there is a wide disparity in the relative power of the parties, restraints are supposed to be placed on the party with more power to prevent the other from being steamrolled.

> Hearing this defense is a huge red flag to me

You've clearly never been on the receiving end of this attitude. For your sake, I hope you never are.

> Whatever other consequences there may be to other people seeing the accusations against Tim Peters and decided to extrapolate that into other punishments, all the SC did here was suspend him from utilizing private resources for three months

No, they also publicly accused him of violating _something_ in the PSF's Code of Conduct, which enumerates at least 28 different things that are cause for discipline, including several that are outright criminal in most jurisdictions. Additionally, they appear to have not followed their own documented enforcement procedures, notably the section titled "follow up with the reported person" which is supposed to contain "A description of the person's behavior in neutral language".

(I note that their enforcement process document doesn't actually require any sort of pre-judgement outreach to the reported person, Which... is a *huge* red flag.)

So, is it "better to punish a hundred innocent people than let one go unpunished" or "better to let a hundred guilty go unpunished than punish a single innocent person"?