Yo ! > Understand, there are also consequences to not having some sort of > successful code of conduct. These include:
Hmmm.... It is a bit incorrect to pretend that none of it would ever happen if we had a code of conduct. A code is just a tool to say that those who wrote the code are a priori right. > 2. Miss out on Sage development discussions that would be on public > lists, but will instead be moved to private mailing lists that can > more easily enforce a "code of conduct". Yeah, I also hate that. Sometimes you see ticket where many important design decisions are made and absolutely no comment on the trac ticket except "Looks good -> positive review" because all discussions happened offline. Might as well be proprietary. > These are two very significant real outcomes that are happening that > you may not be aware of. That doesn't make them any less real. The > sort of people that will quit working on a project because they do not > feel comfortable in discussions are in most cases *precisely* the > people who will not publicly explain why they are leaving. Also, the > development discussions that happen privately are private, so you > don't know they are happening, unless you're specifically told about > them. Hmmm... It is a bit hard to answer somebody who says that "everybody agrees with me but as they tell me in private you cannot know it". This being said, I do not think that a code of conduct would change anything to that. We just cannot order everybody to be happy, smile at all times and live in harmony. > Because of my unique position in this project, I've been regularly > made aware of the above happening since the beginning of the project. Hmmmm... Since the beginning ? Actually, I never knew why Michael Abshoff left. The only mail I ever got from him was when he created my trac account and he seemed like a nice guy. > In my experience many professional mathematicians are unusually > considerate sensitive people, who choose mathematics as a career > partly because they greatly appreciate the extent to which discourse > about mathematics and among mathematicians is very civil and about the > mathematics itself, rather than politics and personal attacks. Depends where you look. The amount of anarchists in the math world is alarmingly high. Those are not exactly the guys who are shy about political ideas, or anything in general. Just met a guy on a plane who told me how everybody in Universities kept wasting public money. I may even have convinced him to use Sage instead of Mathematica :-) > Such > people have little patience for being involved in a community that is > not exceptionally civil. Really, it depends where you look. Take some random names of people on this mailing list, see how they react ! All guys who post on this thread actually give the proof that they are not afraid to participate to political discussions. And we all do so in a very civil way. In how many places do you think that we can so easily talk so freely about such issues ? In Universities everything is done behind doors, here it is public ! > Many of these people can contribute > enormously to Sage, implementing code that only they can implement, > which takes thousands of hours of careful thought, benchmarking, > design, and coding. They are extremely valuable to our project and > community. Well. You will understand that I find it hard to have any specific opinion about people who you tell me only shared their concerns with you in private. Hard also to evaluate the thousands of work that we may have potentially lost :-P Nathann -- 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.
