Red Hat fails to take WeMakeFedora.org [LWN.net]

Red Hat fails to take WeMakeFedora.org

Posted Mar 15, 2022 16:23 UTC (Tue) by atnot (guest, #124910)
Parent article: Red Hat fails to take WeMakeFedora.org

> Matthew Miller censored my blog from Planet Fedora again at the same time that an online mob attacked Dr Stallman

> The free software community has been overrun by kangaroo courts proclaiming Codes of Conduct in recent times.

Yeah I'm pretty confident this individual is not a good faith actor.

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Red Hat fails to take WeMakeFedora.org

Posted Mar 15, 2022 22:37 UTC (Tue) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408) [Link] (6 responses)

Although this person is certainly a troll when taking everything else into account, the views that you single out are those a lot of people hold in good faith. It would be wrong to believe that the treatment of RMS or the movement towards including more CoCs is not highly controversial. Labeling someone as acting in bad faith based on them holding a different side in a hotly debated topic doesn't seem right.

Red Hat fails to take WeMakeFedora.org

Posted Mar 15, 2022 23:06 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> It would be wrong to believe that the treatment of RMS or the movement towards including more CoCs is not highly controversial

In this case, what is being highlighted by OP isn't so much the topics themselves but the highly loaded language used to describe them.

Red Hat fails to take WeMakeFedora.org

Posted Mar 17, 2022 12:48 UTC (Thu) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link] (4 responses)

>Labeling someone as acting in bad faith based on them holding a different side in a hotly debated topic doesn't seem right.
Codes of Conduct and whether RMS's actions would fall outside reasonable codes of good conduct aren't hotly debated (or are only hotly debated by time-wasters arguing they deserve an exception). Codes of Conduct put a marker between helpful and unhelpful behaviour when you're trying to get people together to share work. 'People together' is more important than your unique skills or RMS' special contributions -- bugs won't be shallow without many eyes, to adapt an old saying.

The Code of Conduct is axiomatic to you being a good faith actor. It's a lesson learned after many years of trolls functioning as denial-of-service agents taking time from making great software to protect and police the behaviour of contributors. If you can't fit in and work within the collaborators' agreed terms of engagement, you're free to fork the project -- but good luck finding people to work with!

K3n.

P.S. It remains possible that a Code of Conduct perpetrates ongoing injustice against marginalised people, we all live in imperfect communities. Having a baseline Code of Conduct is a starting point to improve the community's expected standards of behaviour to become more inclusive and less oppressive.

Red Hat fails to take WeMakeFedora.org

Posted Mar 17, 2022 21:40 UTC (Thu) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408) [Link]

It's objectively false that it is not hotly debated (or at least highly controversial), and to claim that anyone "on the other side" is simply a time-waster is intellectually dishonest. I'm not here to argue about RMS or codes of conduct and I'm not going to let you pull me into one. I was just pointing out that it _is_ a controversial topic.

Red Hat fails to take WeMakeFedora.org

Posted Mar 18, 2022 5:31 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (2 responses)

CoCs were not initially very controversial, but subsequent alleged abuse of them has become so.

The line is somewhere between, "people's perception of your violating the CoC is hurting your credibility", and "my perception that you violated the CoC justifies me in banning you." That is a pretty wide gap, and different people have different ideas about where to draw it, but anyplace where it needs to be far from the first one is a place I would rather not remain involved.

Cf. "Eternal September"

Red Hat fails to take WeMakeFedora.org

Posted Mar 19, 2022 18:12 UTC (Sat) by misc (guest, #73730) [Link] (1 responses)

They are controversial because some folks who seems to have a lot to lose are making noise to make them controversial.

If we look at the incident in Pycon 2013, the problem wasn't the CoC reporter, the people who were reported nor the organisers. All was managed correctly on the CoC side. The organisers said "you shouldn't do that", people agreed, and that's it. However, because the reporter posted something on twitter (a picture), it became viral and attracted a online group that jumped on her. Virality wasn't intended, and the reaction was disproportionate. It snowballed and resulted in, if I am not wrong, everybody fired and receiving death threats, etc, etc. Tweets do not become viral by magic, mob do not assemble by themselves, someone has to push for that. This was pre gamergate (who started in 2014), and yet, no one ever seems to go look deeper on that side of the issue.

The controversy is mostly linked to that type of mob. I do not say CoC wouldn't be controversial by itself, but the discussions around them are a order of magnitude more controversial due to some forces that are under discussed most of the time. That's like with systemd. You would think a init system change wouldn't result in someone sending a threat on the answering machine of his main developer, and yet, it happened.

You can see that for almost every high visibility cases. There is lots of time where CoC violations are handled without trouble, but we almost never discuss them because they are not high visibility. If you look at the stats provided by projects, such as Fedora ( https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/fedora-code-of-co... ), you can see the majority of tickets are not resulting in anyone being banned. And that 1 lone ban is likely Daniel Pocock, whose story have been already told.

Red Hat fails to take WeMakeFedora.org

Posted Mar 20, 2022 0:57 UTC (Sun) by cypherpunks2 (guest, #152408) [Link]

Very few people truly believe that a project should have no rules that govern conduct, but the debate is not about having to follow rules in the first place. It's about scope and enforcement, and the problems that can occur when rules are poorly thought out, hastily implemented, abused, or overused.

The issue isn't the CoCs exist, but how they're sometimes implemented. I don't doubt that there are people who want to make it controversial in bad faith, but you shouldn't make the assumption that anyone who is concerned about a CoCs implementation is the same type of person who would mob someone on Twitter and threaten them. In general, there are very few examples of harassing or aggressive behavior that were not grounds for expulsion before codes of conduct became popular, and as another commenter pointed out, small-to-medium projects may function fine without CoCs (or extremely minimalist ones), whereas larger projects may benefit from having stricter rules.