Han-Wen Nienhuys <[email protected]> writes: > A couple of people (me, Janek, Werner), want to add a CoC to the LilyPond > project, and there were some questions about why we would want to do that: > > There is a definite advantage to having a community with gentle > interactions and without flames and personal attacks. It makes being part > of the community more fun and rewarding, which in turn helps us attract and > retain contributors. For almost all of us, working on LilyPond competes > with other things in life, and if participating is net drain of emotional > energy, those other activities will end up winning, and we'll see > contributors leave. > > Having a CoC gives us a set of guidelines, a process and a set of > corrective actions to take to help keep things nice. They are not an > iron-clad guarantee that bad things won't happen, just as laws cannot > prevent dictators from taking control always, but at the same time, most > people prefer to live in societies that do have laws and means to enforce > them. > > In open source projects, the BDFL model is pretty common, but if there is > no process around how things work, the model falls apart if the BDFL > departs. As a former Benevolent Dictator, I have been guilty of this too. > Instituting a CoC is a tool to manage the community atmosphere that can > outlive individuals responsible for doing so, and that spells out what the > community can expect from those individuals.
For better or worse, a substantial part of the discussion is now on <https://codereview.appspot.com/575620043/> where the original proposal as an addition to the LilyPond development source tree has been posted. -- David Kastrup
