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Beware the contributor covenant code of conduct
Derezo
Member #1,666
April 2001
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How is it so difficult to explain that you should not approach another human being with foul intent?

Opal gate is one measly foul mouthed developer among hundreds of thousands of Open Source developers. I need at least a minimum of 10 names before I will even consider this to be any sort of serious witch hunt. Two measly right wing articles and a bunch of pejorative name calling isn't going to convince me that the people who follow this code and are welcoming in this way are not better people than those who do less to accept others.

I'm sorry. Nothing in this thread is convincing that the other side is better. It sounds like you want an excuse to be a bad person. These organizations don't want you to contribute to their projects. Get over it.

"He who controls the stuffing controls the Universe"

torhu
Member #2,727
September 2002
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Derezo said:

How is it so difficult to explain that you should not approach another human being with foul intent?

You are one big fucking strawman, dude.

Erin Maus
Member #7,537
July 2006
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Derezo said:

These organizations don't want you to contribute to their projects.

I fear most of those complaining about codes of conduct, in this thread, don't even contribute to projects that would have codes of conduct (e.g., projects with many contributors), and thus are complaining just to complain...

---
ItsyRealm, a quirky 2D/3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a medieval world with horrors unimaginable.
they / she

Specter Phoenix
Member #1,425
July 2001
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Yes, I keep forgetting, we live in an age where you have to be connected to the thing you are complaining about in order to have an positive or negative opinion on it. Not like you can't see things happen around you and form an opinion due to it...like seeing a programmer permanently removed from a project for violating the code of conduct because a female contributor was "triggered" by a variable name in the code he wrote. Was the word really triggering? Don't know, when I heard about it they never revealed what the terrible word was. I'd have to look, but I think Randi Harper was on her Twitter account bragging about getting a guy removed from BSD over a false CoC claim. Of course Harper is a bully that likes to play the victim while actually bragging about people she bullied..real piece of work, that one.

Erin Maus
Member #7,537
July 2006
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I was making a jab at you lot bitching on the forums about non-existent issues, while never going on to do anything reasonable with the same time otherwise.

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ItsyRealm, a quirky 2D/3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a medieval world with horrors unimaginable.
they / she

Specter Phoenix
Member #1,425
July 2001
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So you are jabbing at yourself too? Seeing as you spend your time bitching about our bitching. Seems you are just as counter-productive as "us lot".

People on Twitter bragging about using CoCs to remove people they don't like from projects they are working on is a non-existent problem? Way to have those blinders on, round of applause!

Erin Maus
Member #7,537
July 2006
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There's a gross difference in the time you spend on this and the time I do.

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ItsyRealm, a quirky 2D/3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a medieval world with horrors unimaginable.
they / she

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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What I can't understand is why liberals care so much about CoC.

What's the benefit? What proof do we have of them actually producing quality products? If the world's greatest open source product, the Linux Kernel, was created before CoC (or feminists even knew what open source was), do we really need it?

You see, I can 100% relate to the experience of a good project being ruined by nesters. People who want control because their ego demands power, control, and/or acknowledgement of achievement. A war of people who want to debate what color to make the bicycle shed.

So there appear to be two sides here:

- People who are worried that a legal document forged by feminism could be used to destroy good projects, or at least smear them. [Case in damn point. Someone's twitter has no bearing on their professional capabilities. The definition of a professional requires someone who can keep their personal and work lives separate anyway--so no code of conduct is required other than "be professional" which is already an implied requirement.] Their emotions stem from a rational, experienced fear, of manipulation of projects by politics.

- There are people, who for the life of me, I cannot understand. They think the Code of Conduct should be enforced and are extremely emotional... but why? What's the emotion coming from? Do they think without a CoC people are going to be excluded? People are going to be shamed? And, let's assume those things DO happen, what's the horrific end result? Someone is either discouraged and doesn't contribute. Or, someone says "Screw you" and forks the repo anyway and makes their own contributions.

Other than silly, childish, petty edge case of "they don't like me and said something MEAN TO ME!" what is the freaking downside, and why can't feminists here (or anywhere else) actually qualify the downside and the actual, tangible benefits of a CoC? And why can't they admit that adding a legally binding document to an OPEN-SOURCE community is a dangerous attack on the freedom of ideas that has produced some of the greatest software ever designed.

It's entirely possible for an open-source project to be run by aggressive personalities, and yet be the greatest software ever because in their war of ideas the only ones that stand the flames are the good ones. That's not the ONLY way to collaborate on a project. But feminism and CoC are literally saying that there is only one way to collaborate and that feminists should decide it. That's insane on the face of it and that exact mindset is why our schools in the USA are such trash. Large, far away, political organizations deciding what can and can't be said, HOW things can and can't be taught, by adding rules for the sake of rules, only for them all to be abused (Zero Tolerance anyone?) and the end result is a complete trash of an education system.

So it makes perfect sense for anarchists and "hacker culture" to be weary of outside forces deciding when and how they can act, collaborate, and create.

We can talk about making every one "Feel good" all we want. But in the real world, the people who actually produce are going to be the ones who lead. And they're not going to care about our silly changing-with-the-wind mentalities about the best way to collaborate.

And even if you don't care about end productivity, it's an insane thing to want to control other people's projects. If they're productive, it's none of your damn business how they achieve that productivity. So Aaron, to use your own logic against you, you have no right to complain about people who don't like CoC because they're happy and productive without your meddling and they've been productive decades longer than any project with a feminist-decided CoC has.

Finally, to quote the Opalgate, where-in feminists literally attempted to attack a valid, productive project over complete pettiness:

Quote:

This beyond insanity at this point. You people want to live in a world where everyone shares your opinion and if anyone expresses a differing opinion you want to hunt them down and stop them from contributing to FOSS projects, projects you're not even involved with; and you're so zealous in your bigotry you cannot see that you are the aggressor in this situation. You cannot see that a world where people cannot express opinions you find distasteful is not a utopian paradise but a prison that will trap us all. Someone's beliefs have nothing to do with code. These are fundamental differences between our worldviews. If you cannot accept that worldview work a different project that applies your principles there a lot of them starting up I hear.

I think if the CoC was designed by conservatives in 1995, and "offensive" included any mention of being gay or trans (something that was "obviously illegal and wrong" to our culture in 1995.), it'd be pretty darn clear to liberals how broken the CoC is.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

torhu
Member #2,727
September 2002
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Here's one guy's take on how this comes about:

video

Basically, he blames daycare and bad parenting. And marxists professors who then take advantage of the emotionally unsettled kids later on, turning them into social justice crusaders. Or something.

Derezo
Member #1,666
April 2001
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It's entirely possible for an open-source project to be run by aggressive personalities, and yet be the greatest software ever

It's perfectly fine for them not to adopt the CoC as well.

One reason to adopt this type of code, as you said there was no benefit, is to protect your brand. Imagine if there were a group of aggressive, socially loud developers who started to associate your project with some sort of negative publicity related to something that would be a violation in this code. Other companies may choose not to adopt your project based on the bad publicity or the affiliation of it and it may conflict with their own policies.

I really don't think it's a big deal, myself. I would sure hope that a contributor who has contributed a great deal to a project would have a fair shake in the judgement process of the project that he's on. That type of atmosphere is not directly related to this code though..

"He who controls the stuffing controls the Universe"

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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Derezo said:

It's perfectly fine for them not to adopt the CoC as well.

I 100% get your point. The problem is that when the majority of all monopolistic tech firms endorse this kind of thinking, then minority developers have no choice but to follow them unless they want to pay the price (which is sometimes prohibitively expensive).

- Github has a CoC. They WILL take down things they see as offensive. (Google it for plenty of examples.)

That means the BIGGEST website that is known throughout all levels of the tech community and has tons of social networking, and job / resume building applications cannot be used if you go outside of their CoC.

The majority of developers cannot afford to run a cloud-backed-up server to host their little javascript applets.

- Facebook takes down conservative viewpoints.

Imagine how terrible YouTube would be if they (and Google) acted the same way? Where they banned you from using Google Groups, Google Docs, and so on if you merely use their product, not for clearly illegal things like actual harassment, child porn, and so on, but merely to voice to non-majority opinions?

Well, then you'd have Twitter.

AND, it gets even worse. Because Reddit last year went through this whole SJW onslaught and everyone kept saying over and over, "If you don't like it, leave." Well, guess what happened? People DID leave and made a site called Voat, and what happened to Voat? Feminists DDoS'd it into the ground for months in order to keep people from leaving and enjoying their own independent community. They also sent the ISP letters that the site was a "known pedophilia ring."

Apparently, you can either get with the majority, or enjoy being DDoS, SWAT'ed, and accused of being a child molester.

And lastly, if SJW thinking is such a good thing, why are these companies that are enacting SJW idealogies such crappy places to work?

https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/21/reddit-is-still-in-turmoil/

Apparently Reddit, the angel of morality which even banned negotiating for pay raises ("Because it hurts teh womyns!"), is full of toxic people, full of sexism, full of sexual harassment complaints against BOTH men and women. It's also full of fear of being suddenly fired.

Some liberal utopia! Turns out you can't legislate respect for your fellow human beings. You have to actually lead, reward merit, and hire professional people. People who produce, not people who want to control. You know... a meritocracy.

Here's a company that only hired women. (100% "diversity"!) It did not go well.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1168182/Catfights-handbags-tears-toilets-When-producer-launched-women-TV-company-thought-shed-kissed-goodbye-conflict-.html

Lastly, I know that CoC seems progressive. But let's think about a topic that is MORE progressive than current progressives and therefor will seem like "being gay" did in the 90's. Polygamy should be legal. That's not my preference, I'm not personally arguing for it, but if the ONLY metric is "between consenting adults" then why should it be restricted to two adults? Why isn't Polygamy in the CoC and supported among the roof-tops among progressives? Because they're not actually critical thinkers. They learned their ideology. That's all they know, it's how the world "should be", and moving further progressive seems insane.

I bet you money, Github and et al would ban pro-polygamy projects, discussions, and groups. Because it's not about morality. It's about following an ideology. A set of liberal defined rules and rights and wrongs. Not "all right and wrong", just the ones they care about.

Super super lastly, check out this insane idea of the NCoC. (No Code Of Conduct.) Based solely on the idea that people are expected to behave like adults, and contributions matter only based on merit.

https://github.com/domgetter/NCoC

Could you imagine a world where Academic Papers were rejected solely because the authors had opinions the liberal majority didn't like? How many papers throughout history would be burned Fahrenheit-451-style? Should we throw away Edison's, Newton's, and other scientists' accomplishments because they don't agree with the current political zeitgeist?

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Erin Maus
Member #7,537
July 2006
avatar

If you believe Facebook or GitHub is in the wrong when they take down a project or page they feel is against their code of conduct, the only options you have, assuming they don't listen, are some variations of not using the service.

You wouldn't tolerate me coming into your property and being rude or voicing my far-left views, regardless of whether your property is your home or a business or something else. You barring me from your property, however, is perfectly acceptable.

In this case, GitHub's website is essentially their property. The same goes for universities, etc.

Freedom of speech is only a mechanism to protect you from government overreach. By no means can you voice your views wherever and however, regardless of what they are. There is no obligation for anyone to listen to you, and similarly, there is no obligation for a private entity (people or organizations) to support you.

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ItsyRealm, a quirky 2D/3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a medieval world with horrors unimaginable.
they / she

Derezo
Member #1,666
April 2001
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Some liberal utopia! Turns out you can't legislate respect for your fellow human beings.

I think you're missing the part where these are private companies making organizational decisions that are designed to exclude people who poison the well. To be honest, it looks like It's Super Effective!

Reddit and Github are privately owned companies. They're not the worst of them by any stretch of the imagination.

Quote:

Imagine how terrible YouTube would be if they (and Google) acted the same way?

I would hope I could invest in the turmoil! Alphabet falls under a bit of a different umbrella and is a much bigger cog in the machine -- because it is a public company, not a private one. If they truly did make a bad move I would hope to profit from it.

Public companies Twitter and Facebook have different reasons for enacting their censorship as well.

I don't really agree with a lot of things Facebook does and they do far more extreme things than what people are complaining about in this thread. They censor on a much further level than this and that is a whole other discussion. I do still use it, but I use it within limits and understand it's failures enough to avoid them as much as I can. I also realize that I am in no way forced to do so (I don't actually use Twitter and care little about celebrities, famous people, or generally other people's opinions ;)).

Quote:

Reddit, the angel of morality which even banned negotiating for pay raises

Our job market is one of the best job markets to be in right now. There is such high demand and the pay is increasing. If they pay their employees poorly and treat them poorly, they're going to go elsewhere and there is a hell of a lot of elsewhere to go.

"He who controls the stuffing controls the Universe"

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Derezo said:

One reason to adopt this type of code, as you said there was no benefit, is to protect your brand. Imagine if there were a group of aggressive, socially loud developers who started to associate your project with some sort of negative publicity related to something that would be a violation in this code. Other companies may choose not to adopt your project based on the bad publicity or the affiliation of it and it may conflict with their own policies.

Instead of bending over and trying to appease this vocal minority of extremists we should be raising our voices and pushing back against their attempts to police thought. Every time somebody loses their job for matters outside of the business we should be calmly hushing the mob and reminding them that the actions of an employee in his spare time do not represent the company. There's absolutely no reason to hold the company accountable for that, and I think that if more companies just stood against it they'd quickly find that ... business goes on as usual.

For an open source project it makes even less sense to bend over to this abuse of society. The project probably isn't being funded by anyone. The developers are doing this for fun and their own personal gains. If a company doesn't want to use software because it's partially developed by a person with unpopular ideas then that's their loss. Redeveloping that software or finding a replacement will probably cost way more than $0. It doesn't hurt the project in the least unless they're offering paid support contracts or something (e.g., the Mercurial project is open source, but Selenium was created as a consulting firm to provide support and to contract feature development).

Even still, you're opening the flood gates by giving these kinds of ideas any merit. It would blow over in a week or so if you just ignored it, but if you bow down to it not only are you on the PC shit-list already (because presumably your team is mostly male and there's no coming back for you), but you're also going to anger the free thinking hacker community. You'll lose credibility with the people that arguably should matter to you.

What's more is that you're asserting that a project needs a CoC in place in order to "fire" a contributor for bad behavior. You don't need anything. The BDFL or the leadership team or the owning company or whoever owns the project controls the project. They can get rid of anybody they want for any reason whatsoever. Especially if the contributor isn't a paid employee. You can fire them for being black. You can fire them for eating chicken on Tuesday. You can fire them for bleeding from their vagina. You can fire them for voicing shitty ideas. I don't think you should do any of these things, but you can.

Specter Phoenix
Member #1,425
July 2001
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@bamccaig
But remember? These are non-existent issues! I love when I see people say that line, as I've dealt with them for two years now and the scenario has been the exact same.

Blinder: Those are non-existent issues!
Me: Here is links to where the non-existent issue happened.
Blinder: Those are just remote cases.
Me: Yes, but remote cases of abuse encourages others to abuse the system to their favor.
Blinder: Still a non issue.

Look at gaming. Gamers were worried feminists attacking games would result in companies not porting games to the US. Critics, like MovieBob, said feminists weren't trying to take games. Yet several Japanese games have pulled US releases due to the "controversy over female representation". Critics still said it was a non-issue. Then when PlayAsia released those games to the US, the non-issue critics attacked them for making it available to US gamers. Even after they attacked PlayAsia, they still claimed they weren't trying to take games and that it was a non-issue.

Amazing how 'non-issues' can escalate to being an issue by those claiming it isn't an issue. :-/

Hmmm....must be another non-issue.

Erin Maus
Member #7,537
July 2006
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It's not new for games produced in Japan and released in the United States to have been modified for the Western audiences when it comes to content...

This goes back to the NES at least.

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ItsyRealm, a quirky 2D/3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a medieval world with horrors unimaginable.
they / she

Derezo
Member #1,666
April 2001
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bamccaig said:

It would blow over in a week or so if you just ignored it, but if you bow down to it not only are you on the PC -list already (because presumably your team is mostly male and there's no coming back for you), but you're also going to anger the free thinking hacker community. You'll lose credibility with the people that arguably should matter to you.

I am ignoring it. :D

"He who controls the stuffing controls the Universe"

Specter Phoenix
Member #1,425
July 2001
avatar

It's not new for games produced in Japan and released in the United States to have been modified for the Western audiences when it comes to content...

This goes back to the NES at least.

Interesting you changed the topic from "Japanese developers announcing they weren't releasing in the US due to the feminists attacks on female representation and not wanting to deal with that mob" to "localization".

Erin Maus
Member #7,537
July 2006
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If localization includes reducing sexual content, violence, etc, then yes, I suppose I did.

---
ItsyRealm, a quirky 2D/3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a medieval world with horrors unimaginable.
they / she

Specter Phoenix
Member #1,425
July 2001
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So you are one of THOSE people that want walking simulators and games like these and a games based off this.

Remove sexual content, violence, etc. and you might as well just go to an aunt or grandparents house and listen to them piss and moan about their life because it will be about as boring as the games made for that criteria.

Erin Maus
Member #7,537
July 2006
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Where did I say games must be censored?

I just pointed out game censorship to appeal to 'Western sensibilities' is a decades old phenomena. By no means did I indicate games should not have sexual content or violence.

Developers censoring their games (at their own behest, or that of their publisher) to maximize profit is no different than movies being edited to hit a target rating in order to maximize profit.

Frankly I don't care whether or not incredibly violent games, or games with gratuitous sexual content, exist and whether or not others play them. It's like mushrooms: I find them incredibly repulsive, but that just means I won't eat them and I don't care if someone else does.

For the record, I enjoy games like Bloodborne/Demon's Souls (albeit I found Dark Souls a bit unsatisfying in comparison), Eternal Darkness, Uncharted, etc. How are these games like "watching grass simulator" or Barbie games :)?

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ItsyRealm, a quirky 2D/3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a medieval world with horrors unimaginable.
they / she

torhu
Member #2,727
September 2002
avatar

One way of explaining why this document sucks is that it's a case of the old solution looking for a problem.

Anyway, I just came across this video of a girl that used to be an SJW. She talks a bit about the whole madness works, and why it's bad for the people that take part in it:

video

Specter Phoenix
Member #1,425
July 2001
avatar

I'm not talking censorship, though there are feminist groups that are calling for older games be 'fixed' to remove gore, tone down violence, and cover up cases of sexualized women. Hell Anita Sarkeesian and her business partner had a fit over the E3 Fallout 4 and Doom trailers because the room erupted in applause. They think all those games should be boo'ed and gone completely.

No, I mean "THOSE people" that don't want new games to have violence, sexual content, gore, etc. at all. They want games like Home Alone, Freshman Year, Witness, etc. One anti-game feminist actually told me he would have liked Resident Evil franchise more if they removed the zombies, remove the guns and fights, and just made it nothing but the puzzles to unravel the story line. I'm talking about the ones that want games to not have any of that as part of the design process.

Feminists have blamed all mass shootings on video games. They blame them for "toxic masculinity". They even have their own "researchers" that publish papers claiming games do cause men to be violent, sexist, or whatever the buzzword of the month is. Yet they ignore that men have been violent back before even electricity was utilized in homes. They ignore that while game popularity continues to increase, crime is decreasing. They act like all games are designed for 10 year old and younger when talking about games that clearly are marked 17+ or 18+ depending on region.

This all blew up when game sites published opinion pieces attacking its reader base and then acting like it was some sort of misunderstanding when gamers got pissed.

CoC just adds icing to the top of the Feminist cake as it gives them easier leverage to make false claims in order to get people they don't like or disagree with off a project.

Yes, I know you want to keep saying this is a non-existent issue even though men have been removed from projects by women claiming CoC violations that didn't exist. Just like people still claim women falsely accusing men of rape is a non-existent issue while ignoring the UVA fiasco or the lacrosse player fiasco.

OR

video

Erin Maus
Member #7,537
July 2006
avatar

You have incredibly poor reading comprehension skills and create whimsical ideas of what I believe to pin me in the feminist boogeyman trope of yours for some bizarre reason. Why?

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ItsyRealm, a quirky 2D/3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a medieval world with horrors unimaginable.
they / she

Derezo
Member #1,666
April 2001
avatar

Yes, I know you want to keep saying this is a non-existent issue even though men have been removed from projects by women claiming CoC violations that didn't exist.

I don't think the argument is that these problems are non-existant, but rather that it's worth these minor costs to make an effort in that direction for the projects that would adopt it. It's not happening on a wide scale, these are isolated incidents (and not necessarily unjustified from what I've read).

"He who controls the stuffing controls the Universe"



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