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My code of conduct

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Linux
Legal

There are many “code of conduct” documents. Often they differ a lot. I have my own and it is probably the shortest one:

Do not be an asshole. Respect the others.

Simple. I do not care which gender people have when I speak with them (ok, may stare at your boobs or butt once) nor their sexual preferences. Colour of the skin does not matter as most of my friends I first met online without knowing anything about them. Political stuff? As long as we can be friends and do not discuss it I am fine. Etc etc.

It works on conferences. And in projects where I am/was involved.

Someone may say that part of it was shaped by working for corporation (is Red Hat corpo?) due to all those no harassment regulations and trainings. I prefer to think that it is more of how I was raised by parents, family and society.

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Sharp did it again

  • Sharp did it again

    I have written about a certain Sarah Sharp (now Sage Sharp) and their attacks on Linus. As everyone knows by now, the Linux Kernel Team has decided to adopt a Code of Conduct – and without failure and according to the expectations of many – within the shortest time the CoC was used not in the intended way to create a positive atmosphere, but to attack fellow developers, in this case Ted Tso.

    [...]

    I have contacted the Linux Foundation to cut any ties with SShape, because the posting alone is against the very idea of the CoC: it is ad personam, it is derogatory, and it is public harassment. I even consider it on the border line of legality to call someone out in this way.

    This is what one gets from a combination of radical feminists paired with a CoC of this style.

Linux is Under Attack, Disguised Using 'Conduct' Pretext

  • After Linus Torvalds, SJWs are now coming for Ted Ts'o

    More than a week after Linux creator Linus Torvalds said he would be taking a break from leading kernel development, it is still unclear as to what actually led to his decision. But one thing is crystal clear: the social justice warriors, who played a role in what happened, are now targeting another kernel developer, Ted Ts'o, who works for Google.

    Was it the article in The New Yorker, as its author claimed, that led to Torvalds stepping down? Or was it pressure from kernel maintainers who were annoyed that Torvalds had bungled his schedules and planned a family vacation at the time when the maintainers summit was supposed to be held?

    It is clear from the article in The New Yorker that the whole aim of what was essentially a hit job, and far from the usual standards that this august publication maintains, was to try and draw a connection between Torvalds' habit of abusive emails and the #MeToo movement. Cohen even managed to work the word in: "Many women who contribute to Linux point to another open-source project, Python, as a guide for Linux as its faces its #MeToo moment."

  • Linux devs threaten to pull contributions

    Open source legend Eric Raymond says threat is real as culture wars rear their ugly head.

    Open source legend Eric S Raymond has weighed in on governance of the Linux Kernel after developers threatened to withdraw their code from the OS.

    The nub of the issue is a new code of conduct the project adopted last week in the wake of founder Linus Torvalds standing down as overseer as the project. Torvalds and current kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartmann proposed the new Code of Conduct (CoC) after Torvalds admitted some of his behavior has damaged the kernel development community. He’s therefore stepped aside from his role as kernel maintainer for a time to seek assistance on how to better understand co-workers’ emotions.

Linux community acts after years of complaints

  • Linux community acts after years of complaints

    SUSE employee and Network World contributor Bryan Lunduke said Sharp’s loss is “a bummer” but argued that her departure does not necessarily reflect badly on the kernel community.

    “[N]ot everyone likes a politically correct work environment,” he said. “Not everyone will enjoy working in every environment, but my perception is that most working on the kernel enjoy doing so.”

    Lunduke admitted, however, that Sharp’s departure is not going to help the image of Linux developers.

    “It’s definitely not the greatest publicity in the world,” he said.

10 days later SJVN still brings this up

Linux kernel's 'seat warmer' drops 4.19-rc5

  • Linux kernel's 'seat warmer' drops 4.19-rc5 with – wow – little drama

    Speculation and debate still surround Linus Torvald's decision to step back from Linux kernel development for a while, but the next kernel release candidate landed with far less sturm und drang.

    Greg Kroah-Hartman, anointed by Torvalds to keep things rolling while the Linux supremo takes a break and gets some help, dropped Linux 4.19-rc5 on Sunday evening.

    Describing his role as "keeping the seat warm for a few weeks", Kroah-Hartman wrote: "As almost everyone knows, it's been an 'interesting' week from a social point-of-view. But from the technical side, -rc5 looks totally normal.

    "The diffstat is a bit higher than previous -rc5's, but the number of trees pulled is lower, so overall, pretty much all is on track."

Linux programmers opposed to new Code of Conduct threaten...

  • Linux programmers opposed to new Code of Conduct threaten to pull code from project

    Linux’s move from its Code of Conflicts to a new Code of Conduct has not been received well by many of its developers. Some have threatened to pull out their blocks of code important to the project to revolt against the change.

    This could have serious consequences because Linux is one of the most important pieces of open source software in the world. If threats are put into action, large parts of the internet would be left vulnerable to exploits. Applications that use Linux would be like an incomplete Jenga stack that could collapse any minute.

Linus Torvalds, the UNIX Wars and history repeating itself

  • Linus Torvalds, the UNIX Wars and history repeating itself

    If Linus can make this change, and we see one less cyberattack because of it, then this is a positive change. If we see more people developing for Linux, this is a positive change. If we see more bugs reported in and fixed, this is also positive.

    More importantly, if Linus can make this change, so can others. We need to make this change so that we can focus our effort on addressing issues and building a better community, not starting Unix Wars II.

Jonathan Corbet's take (now outside the paywall)

  • Code, conflict, and conduct

    A couple of surprising things happened in the kernel community on September 16: Linus Torvalds announced that he was taking a break from kernel development to focus on improving his own behavior, and the longstanding "code of conflict" was replaced with a code of conduct based on the Contributor Covenant. Those two things did not quite come packaged as a set, but they are clearly not unrelated. It is a time of change for the kernel project; there will be challenges to overcome but, in the end, less may change than many expect or fear.

I’m very disappointed in Linus Torvalds

The Woman Bringing Civility to Open Source Projects

  • The Woman Bringing Civility to Open Source Projects

    Codes of conduct are designed to make open source projects more inviting to everyone, and the idea is catching on. Today, more than 40,000 projects have adopted the Contributor Covenant, including Google's artificial intelligence platform TensorFlow and the increasingly popular programming framework Vue. Even Linux is finally on board: Earlier this month the project adopted the Contributor Covenant, and Torvalds apologized for his past behavior.

    André Arko, lead maintainter of the popular Ruby tool Bundler, says the Contributor Covenant has changed the project for the better. Before the project adopted the Covenant, the team struggled to find enough contributors to maintain the project. That changed quickly. "We've had dramatically more participation," he adds. That’s meant more participation from women, minorities, and other underrepresented groups, but also more contributions from white men as well.

The Culture War Comes to Linux

  • The Culture War Comes to Linux

    A small group of programmers are calling for the rescission of code contributed to Linux, the most popular open source operating system in the world, following changes made to the group’s code of conduct. These programmers, many of whom don’t contribute to the Linux kernel, see the new Code of Conduct as an attack on meritocracy—the belief that people should mainly be judged by their abilities rather than their beliefs—which is one of the core pillars of open source software development. Other developers describe these attacks on the Code of Conduct as thinly veiled misogyny.

    It’s a familiar aspect of the culture war that many online and IRL communities are already dealing with, but it has been simmering in the Linux community for years. The controversy came to the surface less than two weeks after Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, announced he would temporarily be stepping away from the project to work on “understanding emotions.” Torvalds was heavily involved with day to day decisions about Linux development, so his departure effectively left the community as a body without a head. In Torvalds’ absence, certain developers seem committed to tearing the limbs from this body for what they perceive as an attack on the core values of Linux development.

The BBC's turn to bring up Torvalds again.

  • Linus Torvalds: 'I'll never be cuddly but I can be more polite' [Ed: Famously Linux-hostile BBC (lots of ex-Microsoft UK managers at BBC) the latest to perpetuate smears against Torvalds and Linux]

    He has always had a reputation as someone who provides blunt feedback to engineers, with expletive-laden emails, once describing an Intel fix as "complete and utter garbage".

The Parable of the Code Review

  • The Parable of the Code Review

    Last week’s events, with Linus Torvalds pledging to stop behaving like an asshole, instituting a code of conduct in Linux kernel development, and all but running off to join a monastery, have made a lot of waves. The last bastion of meritocracy has fallen! Linus, the man with five middle fingers on each hand, was going to save free software from ruin by tellin’ it like it is to all those writers of bad patches. Now he has gone over to the Dark Side, etc., etc.

    There is one thing that struck me when reading the arguments last week, that I never realized before (as I guess I tend to avoid reading this type of material): the folks who argue against, are convinced that the inevitable end result of respectful behaviour is a weakening of technical skill in free software. I’ve read from many sources last week the “meritocracy or bust” argument that meritocracy means three things: the acceptance of patches on no other grounds than technical excellence, the promotion of no other than technically excellent people to maintainer positions within projects, and finally the freedom to disrespect people who are not technically excellent. As I understand these people’s arguments, the meritocracy system works, so removing any of these three pillars is therefore bound to produce worse results than meritocracy.

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