Baby-sitting bad behaviors

Posted Sep 19, 2018 19:48 UTC (Wed) by mchehab (subscriber, #41156)
In reply to: Code, conflict, and conduct by kay
Parent article: Code, conflict, and conduct

> IMHO there is no big practical difference between old and new version of COC.

There is: the old CoC inputs penalties to the violators of the CoC. With the new one, maintainers become responsible for baby-sitting other behaviors:

Maintainers who do not ... enforce the Code of Conduct in good faith may face temporary or permanent repercussions as determined by other members of the project’s leadership.

It gets worse:

applies both within project spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community.

So, if a random Kernel developer gets drunk and do something "not welcoming" on a random community event, even if thousands of miles away from current maintainers' location, a random maintainer can be punished, if it doesn't enforce the CoC.

I don't know a single maintainer that signed-up for baby-sitting grown ups.

> Compared to other COC, e.g. , https://lwn.net/Articles/765332/, its simple and straightforward.

Nice document! Didn't read it until today.

I actually liked a lot more that PostgreSQL one, as it inputs penalties to the ones that violate the CoC, not the ones that don't have any relationship to a random abuser, except by eventually taking patches from him/her, when they're technically correct.

Another good thing is that it states two instances to judge misconducts: a comitte and a Core Team. It also defines an appeal process, where parts can defend themselves if they find the decision to be unfair.

Also, I have some doubts if the way we currently handle electronic emails on tags like Suggested-by would be possible without violating the CoC, as it defines electronic information as private information:

private information, such as a physical or electronic address

and say that publishing them is unacceptable:

Examples of unacceptable behavior by participants include:

...

Publishing others’ private information ... without explicit permission

Baby-sitting bad behaviors

Posted Sep 20, 2018 2:52 UTC (Thu) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (1 responses)

You're missing the "in good faith" part. Its simply saying that if you try to abuse these rules, you can face consequences.

...For example, trying to get someone punished because they weren't enforcing the CoC, simply because you wanted to prove that the CoC, as you (mis)interpreted it, was terrible, would be a violation of the CoC. That would not be "enforc[ing] in good faith". (Just in case that was your cunning plan.)

Baby-sitting bad behaviors

Posted Sep 20, 2018 5:07 UTC (Thu) by Rudd-O (guest, #61155) [Link]

"In good faith" means whatever your inquisitors want it to mean, when you're the protagonist of the Kafka novel.

Baby-sitting bad behaviors

Posted Oct 15, 2018 0:13 UTC (Mon) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link]

>I don't know a single maintainer that signed-up for baby-sitting grown ups.

I would think that is exactly the job of a maintainer: it's just a matter of what domains of behavior you need to baby sit - their code? Their behavior on a mailing list unrelated to code? Their behavior outside of the kernel community altogether?

The line must be drawn somewhere, but, at some point, you are indeed baby sitting adults. Hopefully only in a very limited domain, though.

I suppose you could be a maintainer that doesn't take responsibility "baby sit" for the patches submitted by other people, but you will either have terrible code or no contributors outside of yourself.