Code of Conduct (based on Contributor Covenant 3.0) for copyleft-next goes into effect within a week; final comments *now* please

[Bradley M. Kühn]

I strongly agree with everything Richard said.

Richard Fontana wrote earlier this week:
> So in this case it was important to try to figure out a way for a
> CoC to enforceably apply to me and bkuhn at the outset and to not
> place enforcement of the CoC in our hands.

Yes, as I said elsewhere in the thread, it's a “Who Watches the
Watchers?” (“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”) problem.

I think the projects that have “purely performative” / “virtue
signaling” CoC's just have the key leadership of the project doing
the CoC enforcement itself.  We are not doing that precisely because
I've spent time finding a third-party committee so this CoC really
binds me and Richard as project leaders to something that the
community can feel is there for them if something goes wrong.

I've seen just two people on the list who don't feel a CoC is worth it,
but no one has said outright that it's a mistake.  I don't think we
can assume the silent majority.  I argue that, at the worst, this CoC
is giant noop for a project that's been dormant for so long with only
brief moments of activity.

To those who find this unnecessary, I say — let us run this noop
because it makes a lot of us (particularly those of us who have to
run the show around here) feel safer.  Feel free to 🤦 at us a few
times and then please move on.

For my part, the reason I felt a CoC was a bootstrapping necessity to
get this project going (and why I brought it up more than a year ago
for the first time … I ran out tuits then) is this:

I've been doing FOSS for 30 years.  I've seen a lot of CoC
violations, and before their were CoC's I saw a lot of bad behavior
in projects that no one knew what to do about.  I saw people bullied,
mistreated, and rage-quit in great pain.  Most importantly, I've
observed that the most emotionally heated issues in FOSS projects are
when someone brings up “licensing”.

And, here we have copyleft-next: a FOSS project is “Oops! ALL
LICENSES.”

I will take an even money bet within anyone that we have a heated
emotional argument about some issue and someone is going report a CoC
against someone else.  It's just how this is gonna go, and we're
fooling ourselves if we think we're all Vulcans and are going to
create the future of copyleft and it won't be a bit emotional.

IOW, people's feelings *will get hurt* mdahs no matter what we do.
This CoC makes us read when emotionally-charged comes, and helps keep
the discussion respectful discussion and not toxic.  To do that, we
need a dispassionate group of Community Moderators who aren't
thinking every day about the substance of copyleft-next to be ready
and able to help us out.

Finally, I also sense in the frustration of some of those asking “why
now?”. Frankly, it's a question I ask myself often: how much 🤬'ing
yak shaving do we have to do until we — Y'KNOW — start drafting a new
copyleft license?  The answer, as always is, more yak shaving than
anyone anticipated, and it's taking way longer than we thought.

Fortunately, things have changed recently.  Again, speaking only for
myself here, SFC (my employer) has kindly released some of my funded
staff time to work on this — representing only myself and not SFC's
interests.  That means I can get some of the logistics done, and
hopefully bang through all this yak shaving so we can do actual work.

Our community desperately needs a new copyleft that does novel things
in a software world that is changing rapidly.  When we slog through
these meta-things — that of course have nothing to do with
copyleft-next proper — we can with confidence and safety urgently
turn our attention to the non-meta-task of making copyleft-next 1.0.

But, before we do that, speaking for myself, I want guardrails in
place for us, in the hands of with people our (small but growing)
community trusts, ready to handle any acrimony that might come.

> are now widely considered table stakes when starting a free
> software project that at least aspires to having significant
> collaborativeness.

I can't resist¹ a correction here to make the poker analogy accurate:

“A Code of Conduct is the ‘minimum buy-in’ for starting a free
software project and establishes clear ‘table stakes’ in advance for
all who participate in and contribute to the project.”

¹ … because from 2001-2009, to make financial ends meet, I played
  poker professionally part-time to subsidize my FOSS work.  So
  incorrect poker analogies do get to me. 😆
--
     -- bkühn — On Fediverse (via Mastodon): https://fedi.copyleft.org/@bkuhn