[Development] Code of conduct.

[Sarah Smith]

On Friday, June 22, 2012 08:47:34 am ext Rohan McGovern wrote:
> Alexis Menard said:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > When I see recent behaviors, wording, comments on various mailing
> > lists, blog posts, or IRC against major contributors or regular
> > contributor I feel sad about it. I feel sad to hear bashing, complains
> > in a way they should not be said, i.e. impolite, arrogant, aggressive.
> > While I do understand people have strong opinion about feature A
> > against feature B, QML vs C++, whatever against whatever, it is not a
> > reason to not behave like educated person. I find it very demotivating
> > especially when we all need to act as strong community to make Qt an
> > even better framework.
> > 
> > We don't all like each others but that is fine. But we are not forced
> > to accept people polluting the environment, the professionalism on the
> > project especially when it starts hurting motivation of people
> > *actually* contributing to the project. These people are not welcomed.
> > 
> > Should we have a code of conduct just like KDE or Gnome to specify
> > what we expect from community members in term of behavior between 
each
> > other? If people don't agree with this code of conduct then they
> > should not participate to the project. It's not a law neither a
> > removing liberty to people to raise their concerns, it just a way to
> > make sure people will do it in a nice manner and if they don't they
> > can just leave.
> 
> When I read your mail, I tried to think which recent incidents you were
> referring to.  I could only think of cases where non-contributors have
> been disrespectful of contributors.  As far as I can tell, Qt Project
> contributors' interaction with each other is not a problem.
> 
> Having a code of conduct may anyway be a good thing, but I
> don't think it would have made a difference to the behavior from
> non-contributors I think you're referring to in your mail.
> No matter what you do, jerks will be jerks....

The fact that a measure does not completely eradicate the problem it's 
intended to address, does not entail necessarily that that measure is not 
worth implementing.  I hope that's obvious - if it were not true, then the 
only measures worth taking would be those with 100% success rate.

For example a measure might reduce the incidence of a problem, or make 
its effects less damaging.  In my view, just having a policy as Alexis 
suggests means that as a group, we stand for treating each other in a 
respectful way.  Taking such a stand has value in and of itself.