Now this is an area in which the man definitely knows whereof he speaks. Listen to him.
I’m about to do something I think I’ve never done before, which is assert every bit of whatever authority I have as the person who discovered and wrote down the rules of open source.
After ten years of drama and idiocy, lots of people other than me are now willing to say in public that “Codes of Conduct” have been a disaster – a kind of infectious social insanity producing lots of drama and politics and backbiting, and negative useful work.
Here is my advice about codes of conduct:
- Refuse to have one. If your project has one, delete it. The only actual function they have is as a tool in the hands of shit-stirrers.
- If you’re stuck with having one for bureaucratic reasons, replace it with the following sentence or some close equivalent: “If you are more annoying to work with than your contributions justify, you’ll be ejected.”
- Attempts to be more specific and elaborate don’t work. They only provide control surfaces for shit-stirrers to manipulate.
Yes, we should try to be kind to each other. But we should be ruthless and merciless towards people who try to turn “Be kind!” into a weapon. Indulging them never ends well.
Granted, I said much the same in SJWs Always Lie back in 2015, but then, I do not have the authority in the open source world that ESR does. If you want to keep your organization functional, always apply these three rules:
- No codes of conduct
- No human resources department or employees
- No tolerance for thought police