Hi William, Am Donnerstag, 13. November 2014 20:00:58 UTC+1 schrieb William: > > [ ] No, I greatly value the freedom to spout offensive profanity, and > will fork Sage in frustration if there is such a code.
I think you misunderstand the motivation for not wanting any published code of conduct. I do *not* want to have an official code of conduct, because I *do* want to have civilised manners in our community. To my understanding, what Volker suggests is as follows: Some people formulate and establish a law for the community. The same people claim that an offence to the law occurs. The same people investigate on it. The same people judge on it. And the same people eventually enforce the law. Needless to say that these people have no training whatsoever that would qualify them for any of these tasks, and moreover they have a personal interest. You may observe that the situation at schools is quite similar. Note that in civilised countries there must(!) be a clear distinction between legislative, judiciary, and executive, a special training is required in each of these branches, and their actions must not be driven by personal interest. Having such a separation would, from my perspective, be the only acceptable way of having an official code of conduct. But I suppose most developers wouldn't like to quit writing code and studying law instead. (We really do > want to know if there are any developers who would quit working on > Sage if we have this Code of Conduct; I would not *immediately* quit working on Sage if we had any official code of conduct. However, I do think that establishing an official enforceable code of conduct is presumptuous, and I would expect that it can be instrumented to do harm. And by Murphy's law it *will* eventually be instrumented to do harm. And then I *would* quit. I just want > people to think -- having a code of conduct isn't _obviously_ the > right thing to do.) > I think that an official code of conduct is rather obviously *not* the right thing to have. A code of conduct has a high likelihood of doing nothing more than "stating the obvious", and this might actually encourage some people (including myself) to start misbehaving, just in order to break the chains. It would all do more harm than good. As I stated in a previous post: A couple of years ago I was attacked, some person even posted a patch on trac that would have added a personally insulting comment into the Sage code. The reaction of the community, and especially of you, William, has been excellent: You encouraged me, on and off list, and nobody has fed the troll. When he did not get an exciting reaction, he tried to rampage a bit more, but his stampede ended in a vacuum, and thus he eventually disappeared. In other words, I can confirm that it does work when an authority (based on merits, I mean) sets a good example. So, I encourage all of us: If an offence happens, then please please take care of the person who is offended, but greatly ignore the offender. If ignoring the offender has no effect, then we are likely in a situation where "real" law applies. But then it's the department of public prosecution. Best regards, Simon -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
