This is not a question of left vs right. It's a question of authoritarian vs libertarian. And this is very relevant to the community. It's also not a question of democracy vs central authority. It's a question of vs παρρησία vs goodspeak. And this is very relevant to the community also.
Pharo is "owned" by the people who do the bulk of the work on it, and they are kind enough to share it with us. That there is such a thing as a *Pharo* community is the result of their work. That there is such a thing as a Pharo *community* depends on the ability of that community to communicate freely. This cuts BOTH ways. If people are scared off by incivility, that's bad. If people are driven away by incivility, that's bad. But when you stop seeing rudeness as rudeness, which may be amended, and start seeing it as crimethink, you drive people away, and that is bad too. Let's consider a recent thread. I took the position that << and putOn: were confusing, unreliable, and unnecessary. The unreliability issue has been addressed in Pharo 8; had I not been able to speak I would never have learned that. Some people apparently think that it improves readability, where I find that << impairs my ability to understand. The fact that BOTH sides were able to speak freely means that we now know (a) that there is no consensus for removing them from the system and (b) if you want other people to read your code you might want to think twice before using them, and we are all better off. But if criticising someone's opinion were construed as harassment, the thread would have been shut down before I displayed my code with a generalisation that is worth having if << is worth having at all. I probably should have mentioned the Erlang code of conduct http://erlang.org/download/erlang_org_code_of_conduct.txt It is pretty a-political, has graduated response, and potential for forgiveness. A code of conduct for *events* is another matter, which is why I bring Erlang up. http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2015-March/083849.html is eye-opening. (It's mainly about Ruby community issues.) On Mon, 23 Sep 2019 at 11:51, Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas <offray.l...@mutabit.com> wrote: > > My point was that this community, as a the big majority of FLOSS ones, is not > a democracy and *not* having a democracy has shown its benefits in human > endeavors like science, technology, hackerspaces and so on. > > I'll keep the rest of the conversation with you on the source code repository > and the PR. See you there. > > > On 22/09/19 6:40 p. m., Steve Quezadas wrote: > > This isn't science, this is a community. We don't need a CoC, there haven't > been any problems on this list regarding nazis or whatever. This is just a > group of people trying to enforce their political ideologies on everyone > else. Let's just remove the CoC altogether and just replace it with one line: > "this maillist is about Pharo, anything else is offtopic". > > If you want to debate on the merits of Islam vs Christianity/ right vs left / > thugs vs racists , you are free to hold your opinion on some other sub, but > it's offtopic here. > > On Sun, Sep 22, 2019 at 4:23 PM Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas > <offray.l...@mutabit.com> wrote: >> >> There is no data to support such supposed majority. But even so, free, >> libre, open source communities are not democracies. Imagine the quality of >> code or argumentation based on perceived majorities? If science would be a >> democracy, the earth would be "still" flat. >> >> On 22/09/19 6:04 p. m., Steve Quezadas wrote: >> >> I would say that the majority don't seem to be in favor of it. This should >> be a democracy. >> >> On Sun, Sep 22, 2019 at 1:53 PM Offray Vladimir Luna Cárdenas >> <offray.l...@mutabit.com> wrote: >>> >>> >>> On 22/09/19 3:38 p. m., Steve Quezadas wrote: >>> > > The discussion so far shows that CoC is not a distraction to many >>> > >>> > Actually, the discussion shows that the CoC is "a distraction to many". >>> >>> Actually it shows that some people consider it a distraction, others >>> don't. I think that every body here is able to form its own opinion on >>> that and invest time and effort accordingly. >>> >>> Cheers, >>> >>> Offray >>> >>> >>>
