On Sat, Sep 15, 2018 at 4:47 AM James Keener <jim@jimkeener.com> wrote:
The preceding's pretty simple. An attacker goes after an individual, presumably without provocation and/or asymetrically. The attacked person is on this mailing list. IMHO this attacker must choose between continuing his attacks, and belonging to the Postgres community.
What's tougher is the person who attacks groups of people.
The preceding's pretty simple. An "attacker" voices their political opinions or other unorthodoxy or unpopular stance, but in no way directs it at the
postgres user base or on a postgres list. The "attacked" person is on this mailing list. IMHO this "attacker" must choose between continuing to voice their opinion, and belonging to the Postgres community.
The protection there is a culturally diverse code of conduct committee who can then understand the relationship between politics and culture. And just to note, you can't solve problems of abuse by adopting mechanistically applied rules.
Also a lot of the major commercial players have large teams in areas where there is a legal right to not face discrimination on the basis of political opinion. So I don't see merely expressing an unpopular political opinion as something the code of conduct committee could ever find actionable, nor do I think political donations or membership in political or religious organizations etc would be easy to make actionable.
But I understand the sense of insecurity. Had I not spent time working in Asia and Europe, my concerns would be far more along these lines. As it is, I don't think the code of conduct committee will allow themselves to be used to cause continental splits in the community or to internationalize the politics of the US.
I think the bigger issue is that our community *will* take flak and possibly be harmed if there is an expectation set that picking fights in this way over political opinions is accepted. Because while I don't see the current community taking action on the basis of political views, I do see a problem more generally with how these fights get picked and would prefer to see some softening of language to protect the community in that case. But again, I am probably being paranoid.
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Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
Efficito: Hosted Accounting and ERP. Robust and Flexible. No vendor lock-in.