Richard Stallman Announces GNU Kind Communication Guidelines

[Weasel]

There's some things that Stallman does wrong, but in many cases he's right. He schooled "mah diversity" idiots pretty hard. Full support and respect.

[Weasel]

Michael BTW why don't we have some guidelines at Phoronix? People are allowed to be toxic and nobody stops them from doing so. They're hostile to people who think different, have social or so-called left intentions and use SJW as a bad word even though it should be considered a good thing. Why are they allowed to get along like that?

Long story short: The community is toxic at times. Especially when there's room for political point of views - but not limited to that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxicity

The community has relation to chemical substances? SJW is definitely a bad word since it represents people lacking something up there, using idiot words like "toxic".

[blackiwid]

a) Intentionally adressing someone with the wrong pronoun is just plain offensive. I'll assume the person who wrote this is male, and suggest the following thought experiment: Imagine you're the cliché nerd boy at school, and instead of being good at sports and popular with the girls, you're sitting in your basement reading websites dedicated to Linux hardware benchmarks. Your peers start to mock you because you're not conforming to their male ideal stereotype and start calling you the female version of your name and refer to you as "she". Would you be pissed at them?
Calling the pronouns stuff "ridiculous" is a really shitty thing to do as well. It's not like these people don't have enough problems already. It won't hurt you just to accept them as they are, and be as nice or ignorant as you'd be to any other person in their position. Even if you're one of the people who considers transsexuality an illness, mocking and bullying the sick is not going to help them or anybody else.

I agree that far that if somebody makes a effort to chance his gender from 1 of the 2 genders to the other genders I will happily respect that, and even accept that. So it really sucks if people call even operated transgender woman "sir", that is just being rude on intend, and you have to be a radical Taliban christian to not do so. And if I would know such a person I probably would try to cut ties with him.

BUT that said, there are only 2 genders, at least language wise, there are not 80, if you are lets say a gay person, that start to wear woman cloth and still speak like a woman I will call you a woman no problem.

Even a transgender woman is technically still no real woman even after a operation, I can respect her wish to be a woman, but I can't respect a person wish to be a unicorn and call him unicorn, I am sorry. It's not rude if I don't want to call you unicorn.

[lunarcloud]

I'd like to see you be such a brave reddit fedora atheist if it was Islam in Christianity's stead

1. The joke of it totally went over my head at first, lol, oh well. I mostly think the parody approach is unprofessional of them. Stallman's thing here is mostly spot on.
2. You're thinking of a trilby. Hope you're not a Red Hat user who thinks the short-brimmed hat is the same as your distro's logo.
3. Wasn't trying to be brave? In your hypothetical I'd think it instead and avoid the death threat machine that exists within that particular Abrahamic religion.

[dstaubsauger]

BUT that said, there are only 2 genders, at least language wise,

Well, that's why they are attempting to change language. English as well as other modern languages developed during a millennia-long process, and their current form reflects changes that society made along the way (e.g. "miss", "mademoiselle" etc going out of fashion somewhat recently). Current language "versions" do not reflect nonbinary people's subjective reality, and so they now try to fix that (because for the first time in probably a very long time in history, it's (somewhat) ok to publicly talk about being transgender/whatever). Practically speaking, i don't expect we'll settle on 80 different pronouns in the long term (including their correct reflective and possessive forms), because that would be kind of impractical, and therefore i don't "fear" it.

Also, more practically, two things to consider:

1. Just finding a pronoun weird is no reason not to interact with a person. When talking *to* them, "you" is the only pronoun you'll need for them.

2. Many are also ok with being referred to as "they", which you might find to be easier to get used to, linguistically.

3. It's surprisingly easy to avoid 3rd person pronouns to refer to people in most sentences, so if you're uncomfortable with someone's pronoun, just use there name or phrase the sentence differently.

4. It's really not that hard to just be nice to people by changing one word per sentence.

5. Trans/nonbinary people, like everybody else, are defined by more than their gender (even though that might usually be the first and most obvious thing you notice about them). And like with all other people you'll never know whether they are some random internet stranger, the next contributor to an open source software you like, or a total asshole. Offending someone by using the wrong pronoun or starting the discussion with the "pronoun" topic will probably piss them off and you'll never find out.

Sorry for the wall of text

[audir8]

...Still it does need to be asked why explicitly stating that you should be nice to one another needs to be done? where did social engineering go wrong to result in people not being polite to each other (sure give both barrels once they are being assholes)

It needs to be asked even more why saying "be nice" in so many words is seeing such push back. I think everyone would agree writing down some rules of the road once you're past more than 10+ people on a longterm project is a good thing.

I hope GNU Kind is widely used, and thanks RMS for the statistics on the gender gap in OSS, and these common sense guidelines.

[bridgman]

I'd like to propose a new, simpler CoC. I'l call it the IDGAF-COC. It looks something like this:

. This is a software project. I D G A F about your demographics. I won't ask you and I'd expect you to not tell me. It is irrelevant.
. What you do on your own time has nothing to do with the project unless you make it part of the project. I DGAF what you say on your personal Twitter so long as you're not speaking for the project.
. If you're being an asshole to someone else, I'm going to ban you from the project.
. If someone is being an asshole to you, let me know. If it's true, I'll attempt to mediate a solution. If a solution isn't immediately reached, the offender will be banned from the project. If it is determined that your complaint is an attempt to weaponize the COC, you will be banned from the project.

This is probably pretty close to what Linus first wrote for the original CoC (the Code of Conflict) then softened a bit for publication.

[Bsdisbetter]

I agree that far that if somebody makes a effort to chance his gender from 1 of the 2 genders to the other genders I will happily respect that, and even accept that. So it really sucks if people call even operated transgender woman "sir", that is just being rude on intend, and you have to be a radical Taliban christian to not do so. And if I would know such a person I probably would try to cut ties with him.

BUT that said, there are only 2 genders, at least language wise, there are not 80, if you are lets say a gay person, that start to wear woman cloth and still speak like a woman I will call you a woman no problem.

Even a transgender woman is technically still no real woman even after a operation, I can respect her wish to be a woman, but I can't respect a person wish to be a unicorn and call him unicorn, I am sorry. It's not rude if I don't want to call you unicorn.

Don't confuse sex with gender. Gender is a term coined by one of those -ology streams, akin to astrology and other bogus 'science'.

[Bsdisbetter]

This is probably pretty close to what Linus first wrote for the original CoC (the Code of Conflict) then softened a bit for publication.

Then it's a pity he didn't have the balls to stand his ground... ooh that's coc-defiant language there.... but I guess he assumes that eventually these PC fanatics will stop at nothing to destroy you (or your project) just to make a statement that they're right and you are wrong regardless of either reality or the facts.

[Bsdisbetter]

It needs to be asked even more why saying "be nice" in so many words is seeing such push back. I think everyone would agree writing down some rules of the road once you're past more than 10+ people on a longterm project is a good thing.

I hope GNU Kind is widely used, and thanks RMS for the statistics on the gender gap in OSS, and these common sense guidelines.

Probably because up until this point in human history software projects have progressed fine without such authoritarian rules designed to shut down discussion when you disagree. Did Linux (and Freebsd also) just suddenly become dysfunctional & now requires a long list of stupid rules to make it function again or did the pc brigade just add another notch to their belt in their 'struggle' for social realignment?

Perhaps people have no real world experience coming from a schooling system that treats everyone as winners, but, guess what, people aren't all winners, we don't always get our own way and you need to be able to resolve conflict other than referring to a set of rules to shut down disagreement. Nanny-state nonsense.