OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 25, 2022 19:10 UTC (Mon) by pebolle (guest, #35204)
In reply to: OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct by jospoortvliet
Parent article: OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

> Well you move the goalposts a fair bit then, first talking about deb vs rpm, now bringing in Microsoft.

My concern is the pretty obvious issue that people working on Free Software have managed to split their rather small market share into ever smaller, incompatible rounding errors. Instead of confronting that issue some people choose to spend their time on creating third rate legalese.

No goalposts were moved stating that concern.

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 25, 2022 19:54 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (19 responses)

> My concern is the pretty obvious issue that people working on Free Software have managed to split their rather small market share into ever smaller, incompatible rounding errors. Instead of confronting that issue some people choose to spend their time on creating third rate legalese.

You appear to be under the impression that people working on drafting code of conduct can choose to spend their time to increase the marketshare of the distribution. Marketshare isn't necessarily a goal that everyone working on a community distribution is hoping to increase and it isn't obvious that have clear communication on what type of conduct is expected in a community distribution is antithetical to that goal. It also assumes a top down resource allocation strategy where individuals can be told to work on a single central goal. What is far more likely is all that volunteer resources aren't fungible in this way. These are very different skills and people can choose to spend their volunteer time however they want. You might as well as be complaining that people working on a distribution wallpaper aren't fixing your pet package manager bugs.

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 25, 2022 21:01 UTC (Mon) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (18 responses)

> You appear to be under the impression that people working on drafting code of conduct can choose to spend their time to increase the marketshare of the distribution.

Correct.

> Marketshare isn't necessarily a goal that everyone working on a community distribution is hoping to increase [...]

If you're into Free Software that's certainly a goal. And even for those that are not, what's the point of being some niche product? Purity?

> It also assumes a top down resource allocation strategy where individuals can be told to work on a single central goal.

No, it doesn't. It's merely pointing out that busywork is what it is: a waste of time.

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 25, 2022 21:57 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (13 responses)

> If you're into Free Software that's certainly a goal. And even for those that are not, what's the point of being some niche product? Purity?

No it is certainly not a goal for everyone. Anyone can develop free and open source software for a large variety of reasons besides marketshare. Maybe it is a hobby, maybe they are just scratching their own itch, who knows. Most free and open source projects I suspect have marketshare not in their mind at all.

> No, it doesn't. It's merely pointing out that busywork is what it is: a waste of time.

Yes it does because otherwise you have to agree you can't just tell volunteers what to do. What is busywork for you is interesting and engaging work for others. Calling what others considers to be important as busywork will get you ignored.

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 26, 2022 16:10 UTC (Tue) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (12 responses)

> Anyone can develop free and open source software for a large variety of reasons besides marketshare.

Whatever the motivations of individual developers are, the goals of the Free Software movement are crystal clear. And this is an issue where open source and free software actually can't be lumped together: "For the Open Source movement, non-free software is a suboptimal solution. For the Free Software movement, non-free software is a social problem and free software is the solution."

How does this not translate to a 100% marketshare if you're into free software?

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 26, 2022 18:25 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (7 responses)

The goal is to make the benefits of free software accessible to as many people as possible. 100% market share but with communities that dissuade large parts of the population from involvement is worse than a smaller market share but communities that are welcoming to everyone.

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 26, 2022 18:45 UTC (Tue) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (6 responses)

> 100% market share but with communities that dissuade large parts of the population from involvement is worse than a smaller market share but communities that are welcoming to everyone.

"Your project seeks to solve a social problem. Its strategy to do so might even work. However, your project doesn't have a Code of Conduct. This means large parts of the population are dissuaded from involvement. Therefore I rather not have your project try to solve that problem, however effective it may be."

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 26, 2022 18:48 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

"Your project seeks to solve a social problem. In the process, it creates another one, which may actually be worse."

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 26, 2022 19:09 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (4 responses)

Free software that dissuades large parts of the population from involvement doesn't solve the social problem that free software seeks to solve. Licenses are part of the solution, not the whole of it.

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 26, 2022 19:59 UTC (Tue) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (3 responses)

> the social problem that free software seeks to solve

The social problem that free software seeks to solve is non-free software. Whoever solves it - Amish housewives, Nordic fishermen, Thai monks, Afrikaner farmers, Detroit choir boys - is immaterial to that movement.

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 26, 2022 20:00 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (2 responses)

Do you think that the problem of proprietary software is solved by replacing it with software that nominally grants freedoms but makes it impossible for most people to usefully exercise those freedoms?

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 26, 2022 20:25 UTC (Tue) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (1 responses)

Mormon youth, inspired by their scriptures, find out a way to solve hunger world wide. Iranian girls, devout Muslims but thankful that computer science is within their bounds, start to improve free software at an impressive rate.

How do these Mormon youth and Iranian girls make it impossible for most people to feed starving people or exercise their freedom to use software?

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 26, 2022 20:30 UTC (Tue) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

They don't inherently. But if the community around the software produced by the Iranian girls ends up preventing (by accident or design) anyone other than Iranian girls from contributing to their software, the practical effect is that the benefits of that free software are available to fewer people than if the community was more broadly welcoming.

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 26, 2022 18:35 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (3 responses)

> How does this not translate to a 100% marketshare if you're into free software?

It's fine for you to subscribe all the way to this ideology and believe this follows but you must recognize that plenty of software gets produced by people who don't subscribe to this "movement" and this includes major contributors within several GNU projects, often funded by the same companies that produce a lot of proprietary software. So making the assumption that what they are working on, often voluntarily, is "busy work" because you don't see the connection between what they are working on and marketshare is obnoxious.

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 26, 2022 19:13 UTC (Tue) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (2 responses)

It's not at al obnoxious to doubt the usefulness of codes of conduct, especially when they're written down in third rate legalese.

If distributions do not strive any more to make free software or open source - pick your favourite - ubiquitous they should be clear about that. I suggest "Freetime Linux OS", "openHOBBY", "Uvebeenfooled" and "Debate, The Universal debating society".

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 26, 2022 19:42 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> It's not at al obnoxious to doubt the usefulness of codes of conduct, especially when they're written down in third rate legalese.

Declaring it "busy work" and "third rate legalese" goes far beyond raising doubts.

> If distributions do not strive any more to make free software or open source

They do make plenty of software without necessarily subscribing to your ideology on marketshare. They also do plenty of other related work including artwork, translations, documentation, communication, marketing, infrastructure management and so forth.

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 27, 2022 9:18 UTC (Wed) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link]

> If distributions do not strive any more to make free software or open source [...]

The number of people working on free/open source software is in the millions, maybe even hundreds of millions. The number of people ascribing to any kind of Free/Open Source software *movement* is tiny. Linux distributions generally don't ascribe to any particular movement. Each distribution has its own goals, just as any organisation has its own goals.

And even if you as a user use any particular distribution, that doesn't mean you ascribe or even like the goals of the distribution you are using. Debian is driven by its Social Contract. It promises to provide software according to its own guidelines. At no point does it say it is promoting any particular movement. OpenSUSE has it's own goals. There is no deception: people don't use a Linux to be part of some kind of movement. They do it because it helps them in some way.

What you are suggesting is about as absurd as suggesting that anyone drinking coffee is part of a Coffee Drinking Movement, or that anyone driving a car is part of a Car Driving Movement. People have their own reasons for doing things.

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 26, 2022 6:46 UTC (Tue) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (2 responses)

> If you're into Free Software that's certainly a goal. And even for those that are not, what's the point of being some niche product? Purity?

https://lwn.net/Articles/667610/ is a really fitting response to that, especially in this context.

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted Apr 26, 2022 15:50 UTC (Tue) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link] (1 responses)

Note that this quote is from someone that called proprietary-software "antisocial", "unethical" and "simply wrong" (and probably much more along those lines). He also wrote essays titled "Why Software Should Not Have Owners" and "Why Software Should Be Free" (and again much more along those lines).

"The goal of GNU was to give users freedom, not just to be popular." So the "bad decisions" he warns about in that quote are probably things like allowing proprietary extensions, reuse in proprietary programs etc. To get more popular is not enough reason for those sort of things: he only endorses them when they are in the strategic interest of free software.

But the utopia he advocates clearly involves a 100% marketshare of free software.

OpenSUSE adopts a new code of conduct

Posted May 5, 2022 21:54 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Yes, you agree with me; merely slapping the scripture of Stallman on a codebase doesn't make it social, ethical or right. Those things require conscience and an acceptance that the computer exists to serve the user and not vice-versa. Adopting a code of conduct is one sign that a project has that presence of mind.

People making a career out of throwing rocks and gatekeeping is a strong signal too, but not the one they think it is.

100% market share?

Posted Apr 26, 2022 21:40 UTC (Tue) by timon (subscriber, #152974) [Link]

> > Marketshare isn't necessarily a goal that everyone working on a community distribution is hoping to increase [...]

> If you're into Free Software that's certainly a goal. [...]

This reminds me of a piece of GNU philosophy that's relevant here:

> It is misleading to describe the users of free software, or the software users in general, as a “market.”
> [...]
> But the free software movement is a social movement, not a business, and the success it aims for is not a market success. We are trying to serve the public by giving it freedom—not competing to draw business away from a rival. To equate this campaign for freedom to a business's efforts for mere success is to deny the importance of freedom and legitimize proprietary software.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Market