https://lwn.net/Articles/766699/

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it's interesting how everyone seems to be saying "there has been no problems with the new CoCs so far, so it's really just a feelgood thing, isn't it!"

seems familiar... not only from used car salesmen but also in larger contexts...

it's also not true, as some of the examples in this very thread illustrate.

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As harmless as giving Richelieu six innocent lines of text*.



*"Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre" - which may or may not have been really said by the cardinal himself.

If people think they can't contribute useful code because no code of chat speech ("conduct") is in place, chances are that those people aren't capable developers and should probably just go away. Does anyone here think that the CoC people will suddenly turn into highly skilled kernel hackers now?

I'm looking forward to their first non-prose contributions to Linux. With a large bag of popcorn.

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I was recently made aware of the whole libreboot fiasco of 2 years ago. This was at another site, where someone linked to it as supposedly incontrovertible evidence that RMS discriminates against transgender people - in order to somehow strengthen their argument to have a certain unrelated joke removed from the glibc manual. True to form, that person did not research very well and completely missed the original accuser's apology to RMS, Sullivan and GNU/FSF (and application to rejoin GNU). It will come as no surprise that this person is also an avid supporter of the CoC.

It just shows how this kind of FUD can spread via the WWW and perpetuate despite retractions, clarifications and/or apologies. It shows how all of this can misinformation be conflated together and turned into some imagined scenario where free software development is somehow dominated by bigoted people, when this is clearly not true.

There are of course two sides to the coin - the accuser clearly played the "card" (so it does happen) and if it had been in a different situation in a different organisation with such a CoC in place and more corporate control/influence, the outcome might have been very different irrespective of supposed guilt - i.e. lives and reputations ruined/stained by what turned out to be a raft of false accusations.

What it boils down to is that CoCs are essentially a corporate tool, which only serve to protect the reputation of the controlling organisation, under the guise of protecting individuals from any source of offence... the reality is that there will inevitably be a scapegoat and a whitewash to avoid unwelcome media attention and bad PR.

Some "activist" groups have bought into this and use it to force their agenda/ideology, but in fact CoCs are a form of oppression which those groups should shun by default, in that they stifle independent thought and freedom of expression for the many, in order to supposedly protect the delicate sensibilities of a few. This is no different to censoring the activists in order to protect those who won't tolerate their views from any perceived offence.

In this excessively litigative society, a CoC is just another piece of arse covering, so that a company can tick some boxes to protect itself against claims and show that it was "doing something". If you have to fire a trans person because they're useless at their job, being able to wave around a CoC which explicitly defends such groups and other "minorities" can only help in the ensuing employment tribunal.

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Oh do tell me where to find this joke! When I was teaching myself C a few years ago I read the glibc manual practically cover to cover but I never found any jokes in it.

Apparently, it's some sort of political snipe about it being illegal to disseminate information on abortion in the US. As a member of the larger part of the world that isn't the USA I can remember first reading it with a puzzled expression and having no clue what they were talking about.

It's just another example of the US centric focus everyone has become so accustomed to. Mind you, my country is just as bad (only on a smaller scale): one would think that nothing outside of London exists here!

Anyway, that's what all the fuss was about. Silly, isn't it.

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Not bad. You can find ruder things in kernel code.

meh, I'm of the opinion that it doesn't belong in the manual, but I don't really care one way or the other.


What I do find more concerning is that RMS took an authoritarian stance and overruled the glibc developers, telling them they had to leave it in. That seems completely at odds with the FSF's touted "4 essential freedoms" to me

I don't think RMS did himself any favours with this "Respect my Authoritah!" stance, especially given how completely inconsequential the change would have been.

Anyway, getting a little off the topic now, so I'll shut up.

But Stallman does have an authoritarian streak. This is pretty obvious. I love the idea of free software but when I first started using Linux, I was perplexed by the insistence of the FSF crowd that only libre software should be used and that, if your computer didn't work without some proprietary blob, you should just buy another computer. I didn't see (and I still don't see) how that differs morally from the Microsoft argument that if the latest Windows doesn't run on your computer, you should buy a new one. People want stuff to work.

What exactly is the difference, psychologically speaking, between a pedantic insistence on free software even when it doesn't work and a pedantic insistence on certain kinds of politically correct attitudes even when they get in the way of well-functioning software development teams?

Freedom is the difference and FSF is right about their attitude towards freedom in a political, social and corporate world where freedoms are constantly being taken away. Considering the importance of computers and such in our society I would expect alot more support for FSF stands on things.. But the lack of this seems to fit with the general norm of not caring about freedom, and the type of "I'm willing to be enslaved if I can just get my hands on easy-x, easy-y or something similar for "dummies".

As a matter of fact, the fight is more important than ever, and I am surprised that nobody has really been fighting for owning your own hardware and hardware freedoms, as oppose to todays norm where it's hardware slaves or hardware zombies. There is no point in freedom respecting software if this cannot be used on any hardware.

And this fight might be the final nail in the coffin for both Linux, GNU, BSD and others if we look at how mobile/tablet technology has developed. You pay enourmous amounts of money for hardware you never own, that in fact owns you, and in addition puts spam on your phone and does not let you run any freedom respecting software. Authoritarian companies that control your everyday life in a way far worse than Microsoft ever did on computers with their tyrannical monopoly back in the days. These new generations of software companies not only want to control your device, they want to control you and your thoughts as well.

Efforts are surely underway to make this the case for regular computers as well.

This is the software you get, live with it and be happy about it and glorify the company who delivers it.. Poorly designed communist like hardware products with poorly designed software and absolutely no choice at all for regular consumers. No product that is any different from the rest, and this is what you HAVE to accept. If there were any better products or better designs out there, it would be a major threat to the tech giants and the free flow of money from you into their pockets, and this is surely something which cannot be accepted. Not only do they control your product and the software on it, they also control all relevant companies that can make any hardware, just to make sure no newcomer can design anything different than what is available today and can keep sucking the money out of consumers at a fast pace.

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GNU and BSD are understandably "US centric", due to their origins (US Universities, UNIX, etc), so I suppose such references are inevitable.
Agreed, it's a typical example of some people getting their knickers in a twist over something very trivial, as ever due to the potential for offence.

I can agree with a lot of what Zeebra says. I don't myself own a mobile phone or a tablet, partly because I feel too old to ever learn to use one , but partly also because I hate the app/Facebook/always-online mentality that goes with them. Everyone you see on the street these days trails an umbilical cord connecting them to the Internet. They have happily traded their freedom and privacy for the most trivial kind of convenience.

A friend of mine, an intelligent and well educated woman, regularly uses her phone to tell her where she is and what distance she has jogged, oblivious of the fact that she is allowing FB and others to track her just as if she were a criminal wearing one of those leg irons (they have a name but I've forgotten what it is). When I pointed this out to her, she couldn't see that it was a problem.

People nowadays have little respect for their own or other people's political freedoms. I remember that when I was a child, people pooh-poohed Nineteen Eighty Four because they said people would never allow a system to be developed that let the government spy on them that way. They were wrong obviously. But I still think there is a difference between trading one's personal privacy for convenience and "free" services, and just wanting to be able to use a preferred operating system on one's computer without having to jump through hoops to satisfy some abstract idea of independence from proprietary software.

I hate today's political correctness culture because it offends the enlightenment tradition of free speech and free thought that I was raised in. I don't see the idea of free software, attractive as it is, to be as important as free speech or freedom from surveillance.

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Well, this is one of the main issues. I understand the pragmatic needs, but this kills the fight. And I certainly don't think people who do not understand the issues have the right to criticize GNU/RMS/FSF for their stands when they just do not understand the core of the issue and the importance of it.

And as I said, the fight really should go much further, which is why I cannot understand why more people do not even support basic software freedom. Sure, wireless do not work with a free driver, but if we just give up and install a blob out of convenience, then we will never even fight for freedom respecting wifi, and nobody will even care to choose freedom respecting wifi instead of freedom stealing equivalents. Simply for convenience, convenience that kills the fight before it has even started.

As things are currently with software, it is a good compromise. Some things are not ideal, but at least they can work and choice is possible. But the real fight now is to ensure that when people buy hardware that they actually own that hardware and have the right to do with it as they please. Whatever method the hardware manufacturers use to give their customers actual ownership of their hardware is a good compromise, while the ideal is open hardware platforms. Anyways, the compromise result should be that people can install their own software on the hardware and have control of their hardware to a degree that they can choose what operating system, interface and so fourth they want to have on their own device.

But the world is moving in the opposite direction, where 70 year old music where the artist is dead is not even given over to the public domain for the benefit of society and the people in it. In addition one can patent ridiculous and obvious things and prevent anyone from building anything basic due to breaking patents that should never have been granted in the first place. In addition to control over the outsourced hardware manufacturers, patents of this type make it impossible for any new companies to make mobile phones in today's market unless they belong to "the club". This situation is even much worse than the PC market was with Microsoft and "the club" of hardware manufacturers who controlled the PC market completely in the past (and to a large degree still).

This thread is probably drifting off-topic, given that it was originally about the conflict between modern political correctness and the male-dominated, strictly meritocratic culture of free software development. But while we are on the subject of freedom and hardware, there is a widespread suspicion that HP put secret firmware on their printers to stop them from working with low-cost refilled cartridges. A printer cannot explicitly refuse to work with such a cartridge (in the US courts, that has been ruled a restraint of trade) but a lot of people have noticed that HP printers work initially with non-oem cartridges but then mysteriously stop working. And if you complain, you are told, "It must have been a bad cartridge. What do you expect if you use cartridges that we don't recommend?"

HP have always been poster boys in the Linux community because they supply a completely open-source driver package. But what is the use of that if the hardware forces you into a closed supply chain? I will not use HP printers any more for that reason.