[Info-vax] Key LLVM developer resigns

[Craig A. Berry]

On 5/7/18 4:46 AM, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2018-05-05, Craig A. Berry <craigberry at nospam.mac.com> wrote:
>> On 5/5/18 8:44 AM, MG wrote:
>>>
>>> Why would they?  LLVM has demonstrated that they don't
>>> put development of LLVM first
>>
>> Software doesn't develop itself; it needs people. As far as I can see,
>> the LLVM project have taken reasonable steps to make the project a nice
>> place to work for the people involved, including some efforts to
>> actively recruit new people from underrepresented groups. That's
>> actually a very good plan to "put development of LLVM first" long-term.
>>
>> The code of conduct to which the quitter objects is here:
>>
>> <https://releases.llvm.org/5.0.0/docs/CodeOfConduct.html>
>>
> 
> If that's all there was to it, I wouldn't be nervous because what
> is on that page (as at 7-Mar-2018) is a reasonably written set of
> guidelines if they are administered by grown up people who use
> normal judgements about what is right and what is wrong.
> 
> Unfortunately, reading around, there appears to be some serious
> concern that this might just be the entry point for some rather
> unexpected behaviour and there are indeed a good number of examples
> if you go looking.
> 
> For example, here is the GitHub Code of Conduct:
> 
> https://blog.github.com/2015-07-20-adopting-the-open-code-of-conduct/
> 
> and the CoC mentioned is available here:
> 
> http://todogroup.org/opencodeofconduct/
> 
> which includes a rather charming section that begins with:
> 
> |Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people's safety
> |over privileged people's comfort.
> 
> After Googling the terms in that section to try and understand what
> on earth it is saying, what that appears to be saying is that if you
> are part of the mainstream culture then you don't have any rights to
> complain about attacks against what you say, even when the attacks
> are unjustified.

No, that's not what it says at all. It says that if you practice or
defend any of the behaviors discouraged by the policy and someone
objects, your complaint about that objection will not be acted on. In
other words, you can't just say "it's all relative" and claim that
reporting a violation of the policy is just another attack on par with
the forms of abuse and discrimination that are discouraged by the
policy. Also, it has nothing to do with whether you are "part of the
mainstream culture"; those provisions are clearly about behavior, not
identity.

I don't know whether anyone has actually adopted this particular policy
as its intended purpose is to be a template that would need to be
tailored to each community.

> There is also a movement to remove Master/Slave from the technical
> terminology because it is considered to be racist/oppressive/etc:
> 
> https://www.drupal.org/project/drupal/issues/2275877
> https://github.com/rust-lang-deprecated/rust-buildbot/issues/2
> 
> Oh, and it appears you can't use "hugs" as an innocent expression of
> sympathy any more because it has now become oppressive to do so:
> 
> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/02/21/freebsd_code_of_conduct_controversy/

I do find some of these policies have gone a bit far in trying to
legislate in exhaustive detail every aspect of decency and common sense,
and I prefer the simpler ones that mostly limit themselves to positive
principles. LLVM apparently follows the Django project in its simple and
sensible policy.