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Is there an explanation anywhere, for the uninitiated, why leftists like codes of conduct so much? What does introducing a code of conduct accomplish?
It excludes the outgroup, or at least forces them to adopt your norms.
But all the CoCs I've seen seem pretty banal. How does it exclude people? A right-wing person can just focus on the actual development and not get involved in the political disputes and they should be perfectly fine.
Are you actually kidding? The default template for all tech codes of conduct specifically states:
I refuse to believe you have not seen this. It's the most common one out there. Look me in the eye and tell me you're not trying to gaslight people.
OK, this is my fault. Hanlon's razor and all that.
The phrase "all the CoCs I've seen" implies I've seen a decent number of them. In fact, at the time of writing that comment, I had only really seen two: the one that was removed from PolyMC (linked in the top comment) and the Wikipedia/Wikimedia "Universal Code of Conduct". Those two just happened to be fairly reasonable (in my view). The W3C CoC you linked below is egregious, and I can see how that sort of CoC could become a culture war battleground.
That, along with the comment by @thrownaway24e89172, answers my original question. My understanding now is that CoCs do not necessarily need to be designed to enforce wokeism, but actually existing CoCs often are. And I suppose a CoC that amounts to "be nice to each other" is kind of pointless, so people who are trying to get a CoC adopted usually have an ulterior motive. The PolyMC CoC still seems innocuous, though.
I’ve been in a group that tried to do things like banning “slurs” like “crazy” (even when used innocuously, as in “how crazy is that”) because it’s “harmful to neurodivergent and folx with mental illnesses” or something of that nature, explicitly in their CoC. (I wonder if it’s still up there?)
That said, this was also a group that had a serious discussion on their slack (or discord? Idk) about whether they should ban food photos because it’s exclusionary to people with eating disorders. I have to assume not all places are this nuts.
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Github's two default choices are the Contributor Covenant and the Citizen Code of Conduct, and neither of those documents contains that passage. It's true that a quick Google search for
"will not act" "reverse racism"turns up quite a few hits, but I think you need more evidence for your inflammatory claims.GitHub made it their code of conduct all the way back in 2015. The fucking W3 consortium uses an even worse version of it that bans "dog whistles and microaggressions"! Is the main internet standards organization that literally controls HTML not big enough to count?
He's claiming he's never seen such codes, which I think is an incredibly unreasonable claim to make and requires some kind of evidence, because he's insinuating that everyone else is imagining it and low-key sneering at them for it.
I did provide evidence such codes are widespread among major organizations. He should have to provide some evidence they're not if he wants to make that claim.
Is that good enough for you? Is anything good enough to counter zero-evidence claims of "I haven't seen this, so you're making it up and probably crazy"? Because gaslighting people about this seems to have worked without fail since 2015.
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A quick Google search for
"code of conduct"reverseturns up a few:GNOME Foundation:
GeekFeminism's Recommended Community Anti-harassment/Policy:
IIRC, the GeekFeminism policy recommendation in particular came out right when these started showing up in a lot of open source projects and is probably responsible for a lot of the culture war surrounding this due to being widely cited.
EDIT: The links at the end of the GNOME Foundation's code of conduct include more examples, eg this template has an example section on reversisms.
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Note: the guy who kicked the other developers out was rather inactive as far as actual development of the project goes, so that does make this a bit of a pointless move. In open source, power is awarded to those who do. Merely holding the keys does not make you the supreme ruler. If you kick out the majority developers of a project, they will fork the project and leave you holding an empty bag. What this kid tried to do is take over a project he's not a majority, or even substantial, contributor to. That is a faux pas and a no-go in open source, and the project should rightfully be "deplatformed" (*) because of it.
Not because of his political opinions.
(*) But, please, call a duck a duck. A hostile take-over is bad enough, why does the media have to distort and lie and frame this as "malware"??
Isn't that what NeoVim did? Some group of devs were unsatisfied with the BDFL, they the project, and now it's basically the main fork. I don't think that at the time it was forked they were majority (tho I'm not sure).
Some people do think it was somehow bad to fork it. Pretty insane.
WDYM by 'deplatformed'?
NeoVim didn't kick out everybody's commit access and steal the name and website of the original 'vim' project when they decided to fork.
Brought to awareness that the thing is no longer what it used to be and that everybody should switch over to whatever new repo they were forced to use as a result of the original one being taken over.
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That contributor graph is also in an odd situation because as a fork, PolyMC is pulling in all the commits from MultiMC which is why the MultiMC lead is top contributor on it. Actually scanning through the commits and merges it is mostly the crew that moved over to Prism doing the work. It did lead to looking at some of the code changes and it really is just the kind of mundane drudgery you see in package maintainer repositories. Not exactly technically difficult work but very much the sort of thing you need a dedicated person to handle day after day, week after week. The PolyMC lead probably will not be able to maintain that cadence, even if it's literally just merging commits from MultiMC and PrismMC.
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To be fair, Flatpak and AppImage are abominations to those of us who are Linux sysadmins at heart.
Why is that, btw? My biggest issue with Linux is that package manager cliques get to decide what programs I can run, which doesn't seem much better than the apple app store.
I want to be able to just Download_The_.EXE.jpg in cases where you can't trust maintainers to be supportive.
Flatpak doesn't really change that. You could always go directly to the developer to download the package from them instead of getting it from your distro's package repos. You could do that manually, or set up your system to point to a repo maintained by the developer and it would work very smoothly.
That said I also don't have anything against flatpak either, so I'm curious as to the rationale behind what @kakistocrat said myself.
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AppImages and Flatpaks can contain whatever libraries the packager wants. So, e.g. when there's a vulnerability in some library, they are not updated automatically to the new patched version when you run
apt update && apt upgradeThat is a very bizarre objection to package managers? I'm not aware of any package manage where you can't just add another repo for it to check against. For instance, I have added several repos to my computer so I can get certain software not included in the distro's repos by default. It's as easy as adding a line to a text file.
You can always do that.. just download the .deb or .rpm or whatever format your distro uses and run
dpkg -i mypackage.debGranted you'll have to manually resolve dependencies but it's not actually hard to do.
Guess I should clarify then: I'm a retarded techno-illiterate who's too used to being able to click a single button to install a program on windows. >_>
I didn't even realize that was an option before flatpaks. I'd just been getting everything from my distro's default repo.
Download a .deb or .rpm and click it in your file manager should even work in most cases! (although it won't auto-update) (although neither will the .exe installer unless the app itself bundles an updater)
Yes! I used the deb to put veracrypt on a live USB the other day. Really need to package my own iso at some point, or just cave and use medicat, but there's honestly much less use for live CDs these days.
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To be fair, Lenny's been on this matter for a while, and while the "he'll install malware" paranoia is... paranoia, he's not acting impressively here and hasn't been for a while. I don't expect social cons to be willing or able to do a serious debate at length, but kicking people out from maintainership is very much of "take
myyour ball and go home" school of social action.Because a launcher is effectively auto-downloading and unsandboxed JAR code, there's a lot of bad things an untrusted actor could do, and fucking around with git access is not an unreasonable thing to consider untrustworthy. The 'OVE' thing is stupid, but PolyMC was used heavily enough and by enough of a userbase that isn't checking exacts of changelogs that there's been a long history of treating overly dramatic behaviors as undermining trust. See the various snafus over DragonAPI's nag screen or the first and second Wars of the Brass for non-political variants. Tinker's Construct also had a thing where the programmer was actually compromised and everyone went full Madagascar until they could figure it out.
((Unfortunately, this sorta behavior is really common. One of the points of Quilt was specifically to avoid this sorta thing because it's happened at length before, and age doesn't filter well for maturity... and I don't think they've so much solved the governance problem as made their problems hard to criticize.))
That said, yes, there's little reason for conservatives (or even libertarians) to see even the most mildly-phrased 'pro-social' CoC as an evenhanded emphasis on treating people honestly and kindly, and the popular ones are pretty overtly and explicitly not that, and the ability to ambivalent between the two ends is part of the point. And using the flatpak and other package manager/signing systems like this is... not good in a lot of not-good ways: at minimum blurring the lines between ownership disputes a la leftpad, at worst an exporting of the Build Your Own App Store call. I'm not absolutely sure the logo is aggressively meant as a filtering thing -- for historical (bees) reasons, in Minecraft dev world the anti-socon red flag is a blue-and-pink-and-white one -- but even if it wasn't, I don't think any of the people who did it will complain if it's perceived as such.
I'm also skeptical that Lenny could or was interested in trying to make those debates seriously.
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From my experience, I would estimate people who do forks for woke reasons run out of steam very quickly, because maintaining a fork of any project that does something substantial is a lot of boring and thankless work, and "to spite somebody" is usually not a good source of motivation for that. I've seen several such occurrences and it never survived long.
I also don't think "hostile fork" is a right expression. Forking a project that you don't like something about - whether it's code or maintainership - is an absolutely normal thing to do in open source. That's literally what the whole thing was designed for. If you fork and do better job - great.
The thing that makes me really frown upon it is fake CVEs for the purpose of hurling abuse towards somebody they hate. The whole security notification system (CVEs, etc.) run basically by a lot of people voluntarily cooperating, often when it's not even their paid job. Breaking this system would have enormous costs and huge real-life consequences. Corrupting such systems for political purposes is about as bad as making a fake bomb threats. Maybe even worse as there are actual threats around. Of course, it's only Minecraft but who knows if this mindset spreads where it could reach...
I'd be inclined to agree, but in this case it seems that all the maintainers Lenny ousted are now working on Prism. Only time will tell but I'd wager a guess that they are simply going back to business as usual, only without Lenny (or any other people they deem a "right-wing bigot").
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My understanding is that Lenny owned the PolyMC organization on GitHub and was thus able to oust all other maintainers that way. And he owned it because he started the fork. People have been passing around the commit graph chart on the PolyMC "Insights" page and saying "look, he didn't even do jack shit for the project!" but that's misleading because (a) every contributor's graph will look like that because PolyMC only forked from MultiMC in December of last year, and (b) GitHub is weird about crediting people on the graph if a commit was authored by person A but committed by person B, plus there are several merge commits that were made by multiple people who may or may not get credit for it on the graph, etc.
So for those not in the know, this "OVE" is basically trying to mimic what is called a CVE report, and fake it enough such that maintainers get scared and take action to deplatform the package, despite it not even being a real CVE report. I'd go as far to say that calling it merely a "fake CVE" is being too charitable. That's how much this abuses a process that is (nominally) politically neutral and objective.
The package managers aren't the only thing PolyMC has been kicked out of. The user agent string it uses to fetch mod updates is now banned by CurseForge, so users have to change the string around. The API key they use so people can sign in to their Minecraft accounts has been mysteriously and silently deleted (allegedly, because a previous ousted maintainer owned it). Every single Minecraft-related Discord server has sent announcements fearmongering about the project, as well as respected figures in the community like KingBDogz, a Mojang developer, repeating the message that people should stop using it immediately "because he is promoting bigotry". Basically, everyone has done everything they can to screw over the project, all over allegations that it was "hijacked" by a "right-winger" for "malicious purposes". I get the sinking feeling that if the situation was reversed and it was instead a left-winger taking over to own all those Nazi chuds, people would instead be cheering them on (and any objections that the takeover now means they could install malicious files onto people's computers would just be dismissed as right-wing talking points). Just goes to show you who's truly in power.
It gets even better. Just parsing the naming convention, you get "OVE", October 17th 2022, report 0001. CVE stands for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. I'd presume the O is related to Open as in Open Source but replacing the word Common with it doesn't make much semantic sense to me. In CVE terms that'd be the first report for the entire year but even then, the formatting is wrong since CVEs don't embed full dates just the year. Let's just take a look at the website that maintains the list of OVEs. It is literally some randos blog with nothing else related to vulnerabilities political or otherwise. Quite the social engineering effort.
Apparently OVEs aren't just something that the blogger cooked up out of thin air; some security group called "Openwall" maintains a service that generates these unique OVE IDs (you can generate your own here and verify that the site won't reuse IDs, even after a refresh). Of course, that doesn't change things too much; these OVEs are poorly-known enough that some of the blogger's friends only found out via this incident, and one wonders if the blogger would have used an OVE if the ID format and name didn't bear such a resemblance to the better-known, scary CVEs. But it's not quite as bad as the blogger making stuff up from whole cloth.
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Every few weeks I shutter at the thought that my own passion project will be beset by this one day. I don't blame either party here, when the enemy takes what you love, that really hurts. Neither party here seems to be inherently motivated by coding the thing. Unless I've not read it carefully enough?
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You're definitely not. Time was that the extent of political argument in the open source community was about the issues salient to open source itself (licensing, copyright, etc) and nothing else. Beyond that it was about making software that did its job well, not about advancing a political agenda.
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Well, you wouldn't be the first to notice--remember the post on the old subreddit about "copyright reform as a failed hamartiology" (or whatever the title was)? I think things just kinda broke against those calling for freedom, and now all that's left is to just get on board the Culture War; a sort of cyber-Gallipoli where the hopeful attackers were forced to leave, having sustained heavy casualties and now being sent to the other, more salient fronts.
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Honestly, I'd fully endorse right wingers not being welcome in a community that seemingly exists to waste people's time with video games in the most useless ways possible. Maybe they could get off discords run by shut-ins and do something real.
But the worrying thing is the way petty conflicts like this work as training wheels for leftist takeovers of organizations that actually matter.
It breeds mindless no-life zealots and trains them to follow party procedures for crushing opposition, rewarding them with a taste of power when they're allowed to summon the might of corporations to hurt people they hate; the pack has already been banned by Microsoft. And a lack of victories means there's no effective training for humans to oppose them, even In Minecraft.
Edit: I offer my deepest apologies to the gamer community for the offense and hurt this poorly considered post caused. It was a heated non-gaming moment that does not represent who I am. As such, I promise to Do The Work and fund a scholarship for children to compete for the prestigious "100% achievement no-keyboard" Minecraft Speedrun category. Their bravery and commitment to this valuable skill is an inspiration to us all.
This was a needlessly antagonistic post, and added nothing of value to the discussion. User banned for 1 day.
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It would be great if this trend was limited to only "time wasting" software and not an ever growing list of open source projects.
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Trad macho posturing bullshit like this is always so laughable being posted on a community that is an even less productive use of time than some Minecraft open source project. Say, MeinNameistBernd, shouldn’t you be teaching Sunday School, bodybuilding or reciting Greek poetry right now?
This antagonism gets you banned for a week. Please think of it as my personal contribution to the productive use of your time.
Can't say I agree with the discrepancy in time between the two posters ban lengths. It gives the impression that being antagonistic first is less against the rules than being antagonistic toward someone being antagonistic. Also, your flippant antagonism toward the person you're banning should get you banned as well if we were all playing on the same field.
Not to defend the mod decisions too much, but I'd imagine that they would've banned the replier for a longer length if the replier had more of a history of antagonizing people in this way than the original poster. Though, I'm not a mod and don't have access to the notes they have on each user, so I can't say for sure that's why they banned Westerly for longer than MeinNameistBerd.
It's possible, they usually specify if that's the case. I don't care that they were banned or even the lengths they chose I just think the discrepancy is too disproportionate all else being equal. To be honest this just seems like playful banter being interpreted as much harsher than either user meant it to be but maybe I'm wrong. nara's little poke with a stick to the user after the ban reminded me of what Hlynka would do with bans and why they bothered me so much (though I think they're both excellent contributors in general).
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I'm putting in the new window I bought today, actually. Really dumb time of year to do it, but I liked the first one so much more than the old French doors that the project... Kinda grew again. Just DIYing a heat pump turned into a stupidly big house renovation.
How have you been?
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Also this (context)
Frankly, it seems like there needs to be an explicit other side, which "doesn't tolerate the intolerance". Not right-wing (through inevitably it'd be dominant), just a side which doesn't ever interact/cooperate with the people who engage in these kinds of tactics. I really doubt batshit insane censors are the actual majority.
Like, open source projects with explicit anti-CoC.
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How's the joke go again? The fights are so vicious because the stakes are so small, or something to that effect?
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You link to a video of Richard Stallman here, which is fitting since a couple years ago he was more-or-less cancelled for having made comments about one of his former coworkers in a private email chain that fell short of condemning and demonizing him. I think at this point the open-source community more-or-less fell into some form of gentrification where now any difference is no longer seen as worthy or at least tolerable for the bigger goal of giving every user freedom over their own devices (which, sadly, has only gotten worse in recent years), but now a liability that "discredits the movement" and is just plain unpleasant, no matter how valuable they may be to the movement (I mean, he's literally Richard Stallman for god's sake).
He was sorta un-cancelled. Link.
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OSS movement is now as full of cancel-happy CJWs as many other formerly respected and productive institutions. Nobody cares what you did or what you achieved if you said something that triggers the twitterati. They got Linus himself to bend the knee, what chance anybody else have got?
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To be fair one of the biggest security issues of this/last year affecting a huge number of systems was first found in Minecraft.
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The lower the stakes, the greater the rage.
There's the infamous Hanford Parish Council Meeting (with the standing orders): https://youtube.com/watch?v=zy3Kml-F7J0
In the Starsector modding community there are endless squabbles over people using other's sprites, someone installed crashcode to make it so their mod wouldn't run with someone else's (mod in question was New Galactic Order which was vaguely Imperial-Germany/Nazi themed). Those on the /vst/ general bitch about the people on the discord and the forums bitching too much, about overpowered factions in a singleplayer game.
Indeed. No skin in the game effectively translates into no reason moderate one's behavior. Nobody actually expects to actually get punched in the nose or shot over something so trivial and thus they feel comfortable and safe letting their id take the wheel. Of course the cruel irony is that it is exactly this attitude that leads to people being assaulted or killed over "trivialities" in the first-place.
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