Re: Code of Conduct: picking up
Hi,
> but even so, remain respectful. Disagreement is no excuse for poor
> behaviour or personal attacks, and a community in which people feel
> threatened is not a healthy community.
What does
"poor behaviour"
mean?
What does
"person attacks"
mean?
Regarding this:
> Note that many of our Contributors are not native english speakers or
> may have different cultural backgrounds; see also our [diversity
> statement](http://www.debian.org/intro/diversity)
it is already questionable do refer to things like the above statements.
Combined with:
> Serious or persistent offenders will temporarily or permanently banned
> from communicating through Debian's systems. Complaints should be made
it means that the exegesis of what the above agglomeration of glyphs
in the Roman alphabet means is in the hands of those with the loudest
and powerful voices in Debian, which does not necessarily mean
that the intepretation agrees with other's opinion.
Why don't we try to be *honest*, something like
Debian is a practical oligarchy. If you don't happen to
sit in key positions, you should be careful what you
are saying since disrespectful behaviour versus the
oligarchs will be punished by bans without recurse.
Like in every jurisdiction, Debian is not about true or
false, good or bad, but what is declared as right or wrong
by the law makers.
Following the Code of Conduct I will probably be punished for making
jokes about the different gender, different religion, different
political opinion, and maybe even different OS. Where is the border,
where is the limit.
The whole point of what I wrote is that
Good behaviour *cannot* be defined. Period.
That is the reason we have a juridical system.
Laws decide on breaking or following the law, but not
on good or bad (behaviour). But laws try to be clear in *what*
is defined. All this code of conduct tries to look like a law
but contains only wishee-washee unclear statements that leaves
only wide open play ground for power plays.
The only standardization of "good behaviour" found in wide spread
use are religious based (8 folded path, 10 commandments, ...). Do
we want to go this way, becoming a religion?
A short "Gedankenexperiment": What if someone in the upper ranks of
Debian (committee, delegates, secretaries, etc) decides to pervert
Debian and starts being *very* active, positively, acquiring a lot
of followers, and at the same time a lot of powers by combining
some of the jobs or distributing them between friends. Then, (s)he
uses this to silence those opposing further steps on grounds of
bad behaviour. The educated around here might be reminded of a
certain unahppy figure in the 30ies and 40ies in Germany.
*************
Non-legal style documents that allow for punishment are dangerous.
*************
I don't know whether the code of conduct suffices for that, but
as with other things, it is a slippery slope, once started, more
and more behaviour patterns are categorized and classified.
I am against this as long as there is nobody who can give me
an evaluable criteria to judge good and bad behaviour.
Norbert
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PREINING, Norbert http://www.preining.info
JAIST, Japan TeX Live & Debian Developer
DSA: 0x09C5B094 fp: 14DF 2E6C 0307 BE6D AD76 A9C0 D2BF 4AA3 09C5 B094
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