On Sat, Nov 15, 2014 at 11:16 AM, Nathann Cohen <nathann.co...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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.
I think mmarco said it well "i cannot say if the proposed code of conduct would have been a good idea to prevent them or not." I personally also don't know. This whole discussion is difficult for me, since I tend to have thick skin and am the third most popular poster of all time to the sage-flame list [1] (guess who is their number one poster by far?) [1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!aboutgroup/sage-flame And to be honest when I look at something like the "hoodie code of conduct" [2] which says "If a participant engages in any behaviour violating this code of conduct, the core members of this community may take any action they deem appropriate, including warning the offender or expulsion from the community, exclusion from any interaction and loss of all rights in this community."... I immediately think to myself "screw that, I'm not going to put my blood, sweat and tears into something that can just be taken away from me like that." [2] http://hood.ie/code-of-conduct/index.html > >> 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. I wouldn't go quite as far as "Might as well be proprietary." I comfort myself by realizing that many excellent mathematics papers are written this way as well, and they are still very valuable to the community. Sometimes privacy is necessary in order to focus and think clearly. The final code is still 100% public after all. > 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. That is a fair point of view, and I'm really glad you're giving your perspective on the proposal, even keeping in mind the non-public situations I just pointed out. I really appreciate it. >> 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. That was a different situation. There was some friction, but overall the main problem was that I couldn't pay him very much (and what I did pay him was really complicated, due to him not being a US person -- I even got audited as a result, though everything was of course 100% legal). He was one of the only actual paid-specifically-to-work-on-Sage people ever. He's very talented and easily had other options. He was not an academic, so his work wasn't being subsidized by a university/government system (like you and me). >> 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 I am only asking you what you think of having a code of conduct under the hypothesis that those concern are real and the consequences will definitely be losing developers and public discussions. I think you did precisely that above, and still came to the conclusion that you believe such guidelines would still not be better for productivity and the project overall. I appreciate your remarks, William -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- 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.
