LWN: Comments on "How to do Samba: Nicely"

How to do Samba: Nicely

JoeBuck — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 16:42:16 +0000

The "negative version of the Golden Rule" was from Confucius, five centuries before the Biblical version. It's been translated as "Do not impose on others what you do not wish for yourself."

How to do Samba: Nicely

neilbrown — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 23:23:19 +0000

> OF COURSE I want to be treated like a male. But half of my friends and acquaintances would hate it!

You are taking a very literal interpretation. I'm not suggesting it is wrong to be literal, but it is not the only reasonable interpretation.

How you want to be treated is a function of various aspects of who you are, in general (male, British, etc) in context (poor, rich, homeless) and at present (tired, grumpy, hungry).

There are multiple levels at which you can interpret the maxim, depending on how deeply you look into both yourself and the other person, and what level of abstraction you consider when you try to form an identity between the two.

You get to choose how abstract you go, but the maxim applies recursively: How abstractly would you like someone else to analyse your condition when determining the best way to compare their desires with yours - then use a similar level of abstraction yourself.

How to do Samba: Nicely

Wol — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 14:45:20 +0000

> So the rule does still restrict your behaviour if you're an autosadist; it just becomes useless and permits you to hurt others if you're a regular masochist. Presumably the medieval monks weren't heavily into BDSM else they'd have realised that people have different (sometimes complementary) tastes, and the rightness of an asymmetric action depends on all the participants being okay with it, and none can judge its rightness solely by considering their own desires. Surely someone has come up with a more robust rule in the past 2500 years that can be used instead of this.

Well, it doesn't work well for half the population, and is extremely sexist, anyway.

OF COURSE I want to be treated like a male. But half of my friends and acquaintances would hate it! And then they treat me like a female and I hate that!

It's very hard to come up with a decent rule along those lines, but something along the lines of "encourage and build others up". But all this requires some basic knowledge of human psychology, and far too many people take the attitude "I don't WANT to know ..." :-(

Cheers,
Wol

How to do Samba: Nicely

excors — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 11:52:40 +0000

>> And the ones that are relevant to interactions within the community are mostly vague and subjective. E.g "Do not do to another what you would not have done to yourself."
>
> I never liked that one as a rule. I would never treat people as badly as I treat myself.

Hmm, I suspect you may be misinterpreting that one - its archaic and ambiguous language is another problem. I believe it's meant to be a negative form of the Golden Rule, more clearly expressed like "Never do to anyone else anything that you would not want someone to do to you". (As in, "would not have done" should be interpreted as "do not wish to be done", rather than meaning something you did not (or will not) potentially do. I assume there are fancy grammatical terms for these things but I don't know them.)

So the rule does still restrict your behaviour if you're an autosadist; it just becomes useless and permits you to hurt others if you're a regular masochist. Presumably the medieval monks weren't heavily into BDSM else they'd have realised that people have different (sometimes complementary) tastes, and the rightness of an asymmetric action depends on all the participants being okay with it, and none can judge its rightness solely by considering their own desires. Surely someone has come up with a more robust rule in the past 2500 years that can be used instead of this.

(Anyway, per https://www.mail-archive.com/sqlite-users@mailinglists.sq... it looks like SQLite has now renamed its Code of Conduct to a Code of Ethics and changed the preamble again (compare http://web.archive.org/web/20180322103128/https://sqlite.... vs http://web.archive.org/web/20181024180502/https://sqlite.... vs https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html), and the CoC was changed to the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines which look okay. Now the problem is that the CoE arguably violates the CoC, because it still makes the developer group appear actively non-inclusive towards non-Christians.)

How to do Samba: Nicely

nilsmeyer — Thu, 25 Oct 2018 06:41:50 +0000

> And the ones that are relevant to interactions within the community are mostly vague and subjective. E.g "Do not do to another what you would not have done to yourself."

I never liked that one as a rule. I would never treat people as badly as I treat myself.

> And as far as I can tell, there's nothing that clearly forbids e.g. homophobic behaviour, as long as you love them and pray for them while calling their lives sinful. That's not comforting to people who are thinking about joining the community and want some assurance they'll be accepted.

I wonder how ones sexual orientation would ever come up in the context of open source development, unless someone deliberately seeks conflict, which I would think is covered in another rule.

A CoC has to be understood more like a constitution than a penal code, it has to have some wiggle room to be effective (although I object to the word "unwelcome" in the Contributor Covenant).

I agree with you that this seems somewhat facetious, at least I had a good laugh. It mirrors that a lot of people don't really want to deal with it, especially since adopting a CoC seems to often trigger a slew of nasty responses (not here on LWN of course, but a few other places).

How to do Samba: Nicely

jra — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 22:39:41 +0000

There has been the occasional issue, and very occasionally people have been banned for bad behavior.

This document came from the (very smart, IMHO) observation that the 'standard' Code of Conduct were a laundry list of things not to do, with very little guidance on what to do instead.

So being the helpful community we aspire to be, we wrote one to help people.

How to do Samba: Nicely

jra — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 22:35:14 +0000

You can always ask on the samba lists themselves for help with that.

How to do Samba: Nicely

excors — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 21:01:14 +0000

Well, there's two separate parts to it. Section 1.2 is for any member of the community, and that part seems useless - most of the relevant rules are so vague that it's little more than "don't annoy the project leader else he might tell you off or eventually ban you". That's the status quo in any community with a leader and no CoC.

Section 2 is only for core developers, and that's the stupid part. It's a copy of rules for monks in a medieval monastery, and might be helpful in that context, and maybe someone aspires to live their own life like that, but it's clearly not appropriate as a software project's CoC.

CoCs are useful because they try to protect people from the needlessly harmful conduct of others, to help large diverse groups work together productively. SQLite's rules mostly aren't about interactions between people, they're about individual behaviour ("Devote yourself frequently to prayer", "Be not a great eater") and thought policing ("Be in dread of hell"), so there's no need for them to be in a CoC. It does say "we make no enforcement of the introspective aspects", but they're still included in the list of rules and they significantly distract from the potentially relevant ones.

Many are redundant with basic laws ("Do not murder"), so there's no need for them either. Some are not understandable to a modern reader (I don't know what "Be a stranger to the world's ways" means, and after finding some books and essays that discuss it I get the impression nobody else knows either). Some aren't applicable in the modern world ("Make peace with your adversary before the sun sets" - the latency of email discussion makes it hard to resolve any conflict in a single day. And you might not even know what timezone your adversary lives in, so which sunset should you use?)

And the ones that are relevant to interactions within the community are mostly vague and subjective. E.g "Do not do to another what you would not have done to yourself." - several people in LWN comments have said they like it when Linus swears abusively at them, because that's the only way they can tell he's being serious, so that rule lets them swear at other people too. And as far as I can tell, there's nothing that clearly forbids e.g. homophobic behaviour, as long as you love them and pray for them while calling their lives sinful. That's not comforting to people who are thinking about joining the community and want some assurance they'll be accepted.

If they replaced the whole list of 72 rules with one saying "Be nice", that would be about as helpful. Plus it wouldn't be as off-putting to anyone who's not a Christian fundamentalist.

I assumed it was facetious just because it seems plausible they thought something like "I don't like all these new CoCs that are full of inappropriate left-wing political ideas; I'd rather not have one at all but I have to so let's make one that's full of inappropriate right-wing religious ideas to show them how fundamentally flawed the whole concept of CoCs is". Not that that's a good argument, but it seems better than the alternative that they think this is actually a good CoC, and I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt.

How to do Samba: Nicely

JamesErik — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 17:26:17 +0000

The SQLite CoC author appears entirely genuine in his belief that the CoC is useful for his own life and also for the small community of contributors in which he operates. Furthermore, he has pointed out that no contributor objected to it. Claims of useless, facetious, and stupid ring hollow.

In regard to breaches, the last sentence of CoC section 1.2 speaks to it.

In summary, the SQLite contributors have freely and mutually agreed to try to live up to this honorable standard and to try to hold each other accountable to it within their small group. We should applaud them even if we might quibble with certain details of their text.

How to do Samba: Nicely

Wol — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 14:34:59 +0000

I would have thought "Strictly Come Dancing" would have had plenty of clues, too :-)

Cheers,
Wol

How to do Samba: Nicely

imMute — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 13:00:29 +0000

Clickbait title, but only because I was expecting an article to tell me how my 8 year old samba config was broke and what I should change to make it work better.

How to do Samba: Nicely

excors — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 09:51:04 +0000

It's unfortunate if those companies require a CoC but are happy to have one that's as useless and facetious as SQLite's CoC. (I mean, I assume it's meant to be facetious because otherwise it's just incredibly stupid.)

SQLite didn't even bother copying the bits from the Rule of Saint Benedict about how to deal with breaches of the code, "knowing that it is written, 'The fool is not corrected with words,' and again, 'Beat your son with the rod and you will deliver his soul from death.'". Perhaps tricky to implement in an online community, but it would make the CoC more effective.

How to do Samba: Nicely

cagrazia — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 07:05:20 +0000

> One final reason for publishing the current CoC is as a preemptive move, to prevent some future customer from imposing on us one of those modern CoCs that I so dislike.

[from SQLite CoC]:
> 1. First of all, love the Lord God with your whole heart, your whole soul, and your whole strength.

The beautifulness of these medieval CoCs :)

How to do Samba: Nicely

am — Tue, 23 Oct 2018 02:25:33 +0000

Looks like it's not a reaction to specific incidents but rather a general trend of needing to have contributor guidelines.

From SQLite's Richard Hipp:

Thirdly, having a written CoC is increasingly a business requirement. (I published the currrent CoC after two separate business requested copies of our company CoC. They did not say this was a precondition for doing business with them, but there was that implication.)

Another interesting bit (the whole thing is worth a read, though):

One final reason for publishing the current CoC is as a preemptive move, to prevent some future customer from imposing on us one of those modern CoCs that I so dislike.

And then, of course, there's the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines announcement, also from today.

How to do Samba: Nicely

firstyear — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 22:55:56 +0000

It's important to remember that these rules, and by extension a code of conduct is about establishing what is acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. An example is that within our countries, law exists that says "stealing is prohibited, and has these consequences". We don't rely on peoples differing ideals of what is or is not acceptable, we write down laws that state how we act as members of the society.

A code of conduct is no different. It establishes the behaviours a community aspires to exemplify, rather than a representation of "breaking down" social order or a way to "punish" people - the same way we accept laws and legal frameworks within our countries. It should not take an "incident" to encourage people to say "we want to be better in the way we as a community behave".

How to do Samba: Nicely

Paf — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 21:55:10 +0000

Well, if there hasn’t, then this won’t matter. If there has, perhaps it will help.

It seems unlikely to do any harm.

But reading it, this looks like more of a “how to”, establishing the area where social rules and development practice meet. For example, they don’t like reverting patches, they like to add a fix instead - even if it removes code, I think. That’s covered in there. So basically it’s telling people “don’t ask for a reversion, post a new patch”.

This seems great and hugely helpful in learning the often unwritten rules of a development community. It also contains some very gentle elements along the lines of a code of conduct.

How to do Samba: Nicely

johannbg — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 20:52:28 +0000

Apparently so otherwize this would not have been needed in the first place...

How to do Samba: Nicely

fuhchee — Mon, 22 Oct 2018 19:49:56 +0000

Has there been a dearth of effective and professional behaviour on the samba lists?