Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [PATCH v2 0/3] code of conduct fixes

From: ebiederm@xmission.com (Eric W. Biederman)
To: James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>
Cc: ksummit-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org,
	linux-kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
Subject: Re: [Ksummit-discuss] [PATCH v2 0/3] code of conduct fixes
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 2018 18:23:24 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <87efcxtmhf.fsf@xmission.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <1539202053.12644.8.camel@HansenPartnership.com> (James Bottomley's message of "Wed, 10 Oct 2018 13:07:33 -0700")

James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com> writes:

> Resend to show accumulated tags and also to add a third patch listing
> the TAB as the reporting point as a few people seem to want.  If it
> gets the same level of support, I'll send it in with the other two.

There is also:

> Our Responsibilities
> ====================
> 
> Maintainers are responsible for clarifying the standards of acceptable behavior
> and are expected to take appropriate and fair corrective action in response to
> any instances of unacceptable behavior.
> 
> Maintainers have the right and responsibility to remove, edit, or reject
> comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions that are
> not aligned to this Code of Conduct, or to ban temporarily or permanently any
> contributor for other behaviors that they deem inappropriate, threatening,
> offensive, or harmful.

Which is very problematic.
a) In append only logs like git we can not edit history.
   Making it a mainters responsibility to edit the history, to do the
   impossible is a problem.

b) There are no responsibilities of for people who are not Maintainers.
   That is another problem.

c) The entire tone of the reponsibilities section is out of line with a
   community where there are no enforcement powers only the power to
   accept or not accept a patch.  Only the power to persuade not to
   enforce.

Overall in the discussions I have heard people talking about persuading,
educating, and not feeding trolls.   Nowhere have I heard people talking
about policing the community which I understand that responsiblity
section to be talking about.

Increasingly I am getting the feeling that this document does not the
linux development community.  Perhaps a revert and trying to come up
with better language from scratch would be better.

I don't know how to rephrase that reponsibility section but if we don't
go with the revert something looks like it need sot be done there.

Eric