Re: Fwd: Improving the FSF in support to the GPL, RMS and staff

[Jean Louis]

* Yuchen Pei <hi@ypei.me> [2021-04-05 16:44]:
> > I mean institutional CoC, related to specific roles and binded to by
> > laws. None of the above is that. Thanks for the examples.
> 
> Shouldn't such guidelines apply to everyone regardless of roles?

That is what public thinks. I see it practically, those few
organizations I have observed with the Code of Conduct felt very fine
to abuse its own Code of Conduct.

By the way -- one can behave in alignmend with somebody's Code of
Conduct -- as it is not binding, or one can behave disaligned to Code
of Conduct and get sanctioned -- nothing of those actions exclude the
law.

One may say something in a group, and be sanctioned by managers or
expelled, and may get in court for discrimination or public
defamation. Code of Conduct does not protect neither managers neither
those who misbehave of the law. We just don't have many incidents, but
offending somebody, harassing, discriminating, defaming may be
criminal in some jurisdictions, including in some US states.

> And why do we need a CoC bound by the laws?

Unless it is some religious organization I don't think that any Code
of Conduct exclude the law. In fact, Code of Conduct may be colliding
with the law by many means.

> How do we make sure the CoC is not harmful like the Linux one, or
> abused, misused, or selectively enforced using vague languages?

Why do that at all?

Almost every country have pretty good constitution, in some countries
it is very respected, in some it is not. Not even constitution can be
aligned with laws of the country. And now we expect to align Code of
Conduct with laws and constitution?! This does not work practically.

If somebody committed act that is suspicious of being offense, it is
up to managers to decide if to report or not to police. If somebody is
actually harmed, inform authorities anyway.

If somebody was called white supremacist, that may not be unlawful,
depending of the expression and intentions, it falls into free
speech. If somebody calls somebody pig, shit, or similar, that may be
offense, defamation, libel or similar, it may be unlawful in many
jurisdictions of the world.

There is no Code of Conduct that will either abolish the jurisdiction
of the abuser neither of the abused.

> How do we make sure the inclusive environment is truly inclusive and
> does not harm free speech, and the diversity is truly diverse
> including neurodiversity?

It is very simple. If organization does not have any policy on not to
be inclusive, do not assume the opposite.

Diversity is not a goal of many organizations, you are free to build
one. Important is that everybody's contribution is accepted. But it is
not important to count number of people by diversity classes for the
sake of diversity. It is not related to free software.

> Adding a new one also increases overhead but FSF is shrinking. It would
> better if instead FSF just enforces the current ones (libreplanet coc, gnu
> kind etc.).

How about we all enforce it here and skip the subject of Code of
Conduct and start speaking how to help the FSF campaigns?

Jean

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