Proposal for ML conduct

[Paul W. Frields]

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 10:17:17AM -0400, Lyos Gemini Norezel wrote:
> Paul W. Frields wrote:
> 
>     On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 09:23:23AM -0400, Lyos Gemini Norezel wrote:
> 
>     Let me see if I can clarify a bit here.  Your rights in the USA are
>     meant to be guarantees against the *government* stopping you from
>     speaking.  Not private entities.
> 
> True.
> 
>     Imagine the Fedora Project as more like a bar.  Sometimes conversation
>     at the bar does get a little boisterous.  But if a patron really gets
>     obnoxious, the bar may ask her to cool it, and if she doesn't, throw
>     her out.  Neither of those remedies is encroaching on the patron's
>     rights.  The bar is not abridging the patron's right to free speech by
>     refusing to allow her to exercise it on their premises.  The same
>     situation goes for Fedora.
> 
> Ah... but there is a major difference between a bar and a community
> of people that's meant to be "Free and Open".

I don't think membership in a free and open project has to require a
license to be rude.  We as a community don't allow everything to be in
our free and open project.  For example, we don't allow bits in that
don't meet our licensing requirements.  One could think of that as
requiring code that behaves excellently to its recipients, I suppose.

> Without vitriol and obnoxious people, some of the best ideas would
> be lost forever.

I suppose there is some marginal loss we might suffer as a result of
requiring people to be excellent to each other.  I suppose we're also
missing out on some arguably good applications (for some value of
"good") by requiring that everything we carry in Fedora meet our
licensing requirements.  Speaking only for myself, I think the loss is
acceptable, and judging by the reaction thus far, my suspicion is the
majority of our contributor community does too.

> How many times has the obnoxious person pointed out "Hey
> asshole... use Google!  "?  Without such vitriol... many lists would
> be drowning under the flood of people asking the same damn questions
> over and over.

There is nothing in the situation you describe that requires that
level of useless vitriol.  Rewrite the same advice in a helpful and
friendly way, and it achieves the same effect without lowering the
tone of the discussion.

-- 
Paul W. Frields                                http://paul.frields.org/
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