On Sat, Nov 15, 2014 at 9:37 AM, Nathann Cohen <nathann.co...@gmail.com> wrote: > -1 to a code of conduct, and +1 to considering that sage-devel is just yet > another human community with no specfic rules needed. > > I was reading a law book on contracts recently, and it just feels wrong to > have yet another example of a contract which is *not* designed with all > sides equal. If you want to contribute to Sage then you must agree with > every single detail of Sage's laws ? That's unfair. > > Plus as John Perry said this will probably just be used to close > discussions. > > Plus it feels weird to have another "rule" without a clearly defined > sanction. The only such example I know in the french law is the rule that > "All state employees (e.g. researcher/professors) MUST report any > corruption/offense they get to learn during their work". What if they do not > ? Well, there is no explicit sanction, so in practice the rule is useless. > And God knows that it would be useful to enforce it ! > > Plus, well. Sage may boast of hundreds of contributors but in the end how > many do you think that we are here ? Some persons join all threads, some > others just a few. What is the point of inventing a legal system when the > conversations we have here involve 5 persons, max 10 ?...
Understand, there are also consequences to not having some sort of successful code of conduct. These include: 1. Continuing to lose talented Sage developers specifically because they do not feel comfortable with the tone of the lists, and 2. Miss out on Sage development discussions that would be on public lists, but will instead be moved to private mailing lists that can more easily enforce a "code of conduct". These are two very significant real outcomes that are happening that you may not be aware of. That doesn't make them any less real. The sort of people that will quit working on a project because they do not feel comfortable in discussions are in most cases *precisely* the people who will not publicly explain why they are leaving. Also, the development discussions that happen privately are private, so you don't know they are happening, unless you're specifically told about them. Because of my unique position in this project, I've been regularly made aware of the above happening since the beginning of the project. In my experience many professional mathematicians are unusually considerate sensitive people, who choose mathematics as a career partly because they greatly appreciate the extent to which discourse about mathematics and among mathematicians is very civil and about the mathematics itself, rather than politics and personal attacks. Such people have little patience for being involved in a community that is not exceptionally civil. Many of these people can contribute enormously to Sage, implementing code that only they can implement, which takes thousands of hours of careful thought, benchmarking, design, and coding. They are extremely valuable to our project and community. -- William -- William Stein Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
