[Development] QUIP 12: Code of Conduct

[Lars Knoll]

On 25 Oct 2018, at 09:51, Volker Krause via Development <development at qt-project.org<mailto:development at qt-project.org>> wrote:

On Thursday, 25 October 2018 09:11:42 CEST Simon Hausmann wrote:
Am 25.10.18 um 08:31 schrieb Shawn Rutledge:



On 24 Oct 2018, at 17:09, Jason H <jhihn at gmx.com<mailto:jhihn at gmx.com>> wrote:



In case it needs to be said-
I am AGAINST racism, sexism, bigotry, and all the other exclusionary
things. But I am also against people judging other people's code for
factors that have nothing to do with the code itself. I find that adding
a value judgement of conduct to code to be intolerant. We had the
ideal.
I am FOR inclusion. I want everyone to feel welcome here.
Everyone.>
I agree.  It seems to be about fixing something that isn’t broken, or as
in that story in the Bible where the people came to a consensus that
every other country around them had a king, so they should have a king
too.  Nothing good came out of it in any cases where we have seen this
kind of illogic applied.  “Most other big corporations have a deep
hierarchy of management, with too much power concentrated at the top, and
we want to be a big corporation, so we need to replicate that.”  “The
other lemmings are running away so maybe we’d better follow.”  It’s not
the open source way, which seemed to be working well enough already.



If you give power to a committee of 3 people, they will probably abuse it
eventually, misjudge, cause bitterness, create factions, and some
developers will end up walking away.  Seems predictable, doesn’t it?




You claim that this is about fixing something that isn't broken. Your
statement that a committee will predictably and eventually abuse their
powers and misjudge is, I feel, a

statement that is spreading fear, doubt and uncertainty, without any
evidence within the scope of this community.


On the other hand I am aware of at least one concrete case where the
behavior of a reviewer has caused a contributor (with a track record of
accepted patches, btw) to

turn away from the project and even resulted in an email of complaint
sent to the community manager. The lack of tools, written understanding
and common agreement

on what is good behavior resulted in that nothing happened at all and
the contributor in question has stayed away from the project since then.


I do think that this is the exception, but it is crucial that we have
the right tools and mechanisms in place when unlikely exceptions happen,
in order to deal with them

instead of ignoring them. After having seen this with my own eyes, I am
convinced of that.


Whether it is a code of conduct or kindness guidelines - anything like
that is something that I welcome as an improvement.


Simon

+1

We do have a Code of Conduct at KDE for about 10 years now, and this hasn't
led to abuse of power, suppression of free speech, racism against white people
or whatever other nonsense people seem to attribute to CoCs nowadays.

On the contrary, it gave us a solid foundation to act against the (very few,
fortunately) cases of abusive behavior to protect our contributors. As Simon I
have seen the damage such behavior can do, and therefore would also welcome
tools/rules to be in place to deal with such situations.

Regards,
Volker

I fully agree.

And btw, we have had a clear majority in favour of adding a CoC at the Contributor Summit, and explicitly agreed that a group of people will work on creating it. I’m happy we now have a first version, that we can use as a basis for further discussions.

Cheers,
Lars

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