CoC does not help in benchmarks

Randi Harper randi at freebsdgirl.com
Mon Jul 16 15:13:14 UTC 2018


On Mon, Jul 16, 2018 at 12:24 AM, Erich Dollansky <
freebsd.ed.lists at sumeritec.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Sun, 15 Jul 2018 17:31:04 -0600
> Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
>
> > On Sun, Jul 15, 2018 at 5:26 PM, Erich Dollansky <
> > freebsd.ed.lists at sumeritec.com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Does anybody need more:
> > >
> > >     Keep it civil.
> > >     Be tolerant.
> > >     Remember that you are in public and that your actions determine
> > > the public perception of the project. Do not make it personal. Do
> > > not take it personally.
> > >
> >
> > Such overly-simply CoCs have proven unworkable in the past. They were
> > OK in the 90's, but we live in a different internet world today.
> > These are good guidelines and great advice, but make it hard to take
> > action when necessary. I wish it were not so.
> >
> > Warner
>
> what kind of action can be done with the new CoC that could not have
> been done with the old CoC?
>
> Erich
>
>
You know, I really try to stay far, far away from these conversations,
despite being part of one of the events that made the CoC more of a
priority. But I'm not associated with the project anymore, and I don't have
a reputation that I'm concerned about, so I'm going to take this time to be
free with my words. I'm sure some idiot is going to come on here and find
something about this email insulting and try to say that I'm breaking CoC.
gg.

Listen up. You are a software developer. You are fully aware of the idea
that there are edge cases that come up with software that you didn't write
code to explicitly handle. You understand that regardless of your personal
experience in the field, there are going to be things that happen that are
either outside your control or just exceed your current level of
understanding given your experience. Recognizing that you don't know
everything, that you can't know everything, and that some people have more
experience or a different experience than you is part of what makes a good
software developer great. It's also what makes someone a pleasure to work
with. Play to your expertise. Utilize others for their expertise where you
are lacking. I think these are probably concepts that a lot of us can agree
upon.

When it comes to dealing with policy, it's really not that different. If
you cannot see the problem with the old CoC or see why a CoC is needed in
the first place, it's because you do not have understanding of the events
that led to this decision, and you don't have the experience to divine
further context. Maybe you just suck at people. You certainly wouldn't be
the first engineer to be lacking in that department. But you didn't come
here with an understanding of your own lack of expertise, you didn't come
looking for someone that could share their experience with you. You came
looking to complain with a snarky comment about performance. You could have
asked in a non-confrontational manner or bothered to google or read mailing
list archives to find out the history of why the CoC came about. No one
wants to get into it because it remains a giant fucking mess, and frankly,
some of the people involved (like me!) just want to see the conversation
about those events die because they continue to get harassed about it to
this very day.

You do not know everything behind why this CoC was created. None of us
likely do. That's fine. You and I are not in charge of the CoC. Thank
fucking god, because I wouldn't want to be part of core and having to deal
with this clusterfuck of babies crying about their rights to be buttheads
to each other and how having a set of rules makes FreeBSD perform slower
and how <insert edge case here because some idiot just feels like creating
an argument because he read on slashdot about how SJWs are taking over open
source>. I mean, seriously. Do you honestly think the same people
responsible for the CoC are all also working on performance improvements
100% of the time? That's right. There's only 12 developers currently
working on FreeBSD and we don't let them out of the basement except for as
a reward for good behaviour. Have you seen the photos of various
devsummits? Photoshop, baby. Since when did we measure the success of the
project by some random fucking benchmark?

I am not in any way a part of this project anymore, but I continue to read
these mailing lists because I'm some kind of masochist that really honestly
cares about seeing the project do well even after I left. There are many
people in FreeBSD that I will always consider family. It was my home for
many, many years. And it has been eye opening how many idiots - whose
names, by the way, i sure as fuck don't recognize from any of the
devsummits or conferences - come onto this mailing list with their concern
trolls because they seem to think that core or the CoC enforcement team
must be idiots and would fall for anything. They are running the fucking
project. They were elected. If you've got a good argument make it, but this
shit is disrespectful.

I'm not sure if it's true that FreeBSD lost a few developers, but now that
there's a CoC, more people will likely contribute because they will feel
safer there. Few people want to contribute to a project that cares more for
LoC than the humans behind the code. I really don't care if the project
lost some primadonnas that were mortally offended that they were asked to
act like decent human beings. Good riddance.

If you don't like how the project is being run, there are steps to fix this:

1.) Contribute code to FreeBSD.
2.) Become a FreeBSD committer.
3.) Run for core.
4.) Change the policy.

Elections are held every 2 years. See you in 2020.


More information about the freebsd-advocacy mailing list