Re: CoC [Final v2]

On 1/25/2016 8:39 AM, Brian Dunavant wrote:
> Of interesting note, the Ruby community is currently considering
> switching to a CoC inspired directly from this draft of a Postgres
> CoC.   The extremely long conversation can be viewed at:
>
> https://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/12004


again, people there are bringing up the 'feel safe' thing.    Noone can
help how people feel, feelings are highly subjective.   Some people feel
threatened by a fur coat on a random passerby, or by a woman not covered
head to toe in a burka.   I know people who don't feel safe unless they
are carrying a loaded gun, yet random strangers carrying guns make ME
feel very unsafe.

I'm just a postgresql user who occasionally contributes to this and
other mail lists, so my 'vote' on this has very little weight, but I
want to again state, in my personal opinion, IF PGDG adopts a CoC, it
should be as simple, terse, and generic as possible.   As soon as you
start enumerating possible social injustices you are on a very slippery
slope.   Next thing you know, you'll need courts, lawyers, hearings,
legislature, and are reinventing 'government', and you end up with more
overhead than actual code contributors.

meanderings, only indirectly related to this...

On the centos email list, some people were bashing gnome3 (probably for
good reasons).  I looked up the gnome project (mostly, read the
wikipedia entries relating to it, also a few recent blogs by core
developers).  Gnome started as a 2-man volunteer project, grew, had a
mission to develop a complete desktop environment unencumbered by close
source licensing issues that KDE's QT had(past tense), and by Gnome 2
had largely succeeded in these goals.    Now Gnome has a 'Project' (with
hierarchical management) and a 'Foundation' (with hierarchical
management) , and the last 'Foundation' chair was more interested in
organizing Outreachy, a 'outreach group for women in free software'
promotional group (a fine thing but completely unrelated to gnome), and
the gnome core developers are quitting right and left for lack of a firm
direction or mission, and lack of resources.   Everyone, including many
of those developers, are unhappy with gnome 3, but have no idea how to
fix it.

Over my long and checkered career in computer software, I've worked for
several startups where the founder was a brilliant technical person with
no business sense...  when the business got too big for them, they
allowed money people to install 'business people' as CEOs and stuff,
these business people had no clue how software development operated and
tried to treat it like whatever industry they'd come from (one CEO was a
former PepsiCo VP!   He top-loaded the place with MBA yes-men and
Marketing).   The founder withdrew into his own bubble off working on
pet projects, and the company floundered around for a few more years,
then crashed and burned.


--
john r pierce, recycling bits in santa cruz