The tools we create can be used for both good and evil. It's not my place to decide who can and can't use the tools I create and what they can use it for. Frankly, I simply don't care at all about any kind of politics, which is why I got into programming in the first place.
And if the author doesn't like that, than that's just too bad for them.
You don't need discussions; distributing code is a political action by itself. The project is inherently political. Limiting discussions is just a power play.
Sure, but that's why I mentioned politics -- the particulars matter and there is plenty of ground for reasonable people to disagree.
Judgement goes both ways. Maintainers are under no obligation to accept my code, but if enough maintainers stonewall enough of my code for reasons that I consider unreasonable enough then I'm under no obligation to write the code, either. That's where I've gotten to. It wasn't a short journey. Oh well.
You are being blinded by your political agenda. This source code is readily available and costs nothing, thus it is both open and free. Much of the machinery here is relevant to me, so I can learn about the nature of the system through the code and adapt design lessons to completely unrelated applications. Without this free and open code no such thing would be possible.
I understand that you have nothing but loathing and contempt for my approach to software development and you are welcome to promote your philosophy but you will find it impossible to bend simple language to your wishes as long as there are people who see things completely differently.
It's not even that a software project can't (or shouldn't) have political causes that it supports.
It's the arrogant attitude that "if you aren't for me, then you're against me". That their views are so righteous, that the only people who could possibly object are bad actors.
We are talking about a code generator. Dev tools ought to be neutral when it comes to politics and ethics otherwise you get a smart hammer that will refuse to nail Jesus to a cross. That's not how tools work.
you are not a coder unless other coders say you are
Not everybody needs the approval of an external entity. I couldn't care less what other coders think of me. What I ship speaks for itself. What I write speaks for itself. What studies scientists publish speak for themselves. The rest is politics.
While Foss should be to some degree apolitical, individual contributors should be allowed to express their political views. The politics and the software itself should be treated differently.
This is stupid. Keep your politics out of software, whatever they might be. If you're really so intent on combining the two, go make a separate project for doing so.
I want the politics of protest in software. I want us as a community to be better prepared for the responsibility of our profession—like engineers—and better stewards of our society, and to protect people from the dangers of sabotage while advocating for the people who rightly see sabotage as a viable option… possibly the only one.
We have extraordinary privilege and power as workers. We have the power to make the world better. The people who want to make it worse already see us and our domain as an attack vector. We cannot change that. We should rise to the occasion, not declare neutrality in its face.
My point had nothing to do with politics. This thread is about the need for a code of conduct.
The post I'm replying to said they agreed with Peterson, who apparently says that "We are not built on a hierarchy of patriarchy, but a hierarchy of competence". The implication is that a code of conduct is not necessary for open source software because it is a meritocracy.
I'm explicitly and directly refuting this position by using a recent example - out of millions of potential examples - from actual history.
An honest look at the world suggests that it is built neither on a hierarchy of competence nor a hierarchy of patriarchy, but rather, a hierarchy of privilege. It just so happens that white men - myself among them - are the most privileged.
A code of conduct is necessary and good for technical projects because it reduces the ability of one person's privilege and bigotry to be used to subvert another person's merit.
But it seems as if the politics being discussed here apply to the project and its contributors, it's not as if a Code of Conduct is being applied to you, the end user. Unless they add something political to the license itself, I don't see why it would matter.
Honestly how much does their political stance affect your work?
Using a programming language is 99.9% technical work. As long as they don't go out of their way e.g. to make rustc compile your project wrong if you have files with political content with opposing orientation on your computer, how does any of that matter?
I disagree. I work at Google, and I can't imagine getting in trouble for making an unambiguous improvement to someone's code.
There is, of course, some politics. It's just not at the level where people could openly be pissed off just because someone made them look bad by doing better. Politics happens over much more ambiguous things, like what length people from one team should go to to fix bugs affecting another team. These are areas where there are legitimate differences of opinion, so it's only natural that people's biases affect their work.
reply