Bonum Certa Men Certa

Code of Ethics Versus Code of Conduct in Action

Reprinted from Daniel Pocock's Web site

The Fedora Council is currently considering a proposal on Community Publishing Platforms which appears to apply Fedora's Code of Conduct in more places.

Consider the following quote from the Code of Conduct:



Members of the Fedora community should be respectful when dealing with other contributors as well as with people outside the Fedora community and with users of Fedora.




Animal Farm

It seems quite reasonable. Think again: George Orwell's Animal Farm was seen as incredibly disrespectful to friends in the Soviet Union, comparing Stalin's totalitarian regime to a bunch of pigs. Russia was a British ally. Most publishers didn't want to touch the book for this very reason. It should be clear that there is no way Animal Farm's pig metaphor is compatible with the Code of Conduct as it is currently written.



"Russia was a British ally. Most publishers didn't want to touch the book for this very reason. It should be clear that there is no way Animal Farm's pig metaphor is compatible with the Code of Conduct as it is currently written."Red Hat owns the Fedora trademark and any trademark owner has a right to control the trademark. At the same time, when somebody does work and contributes intellectual property to any free software project, they have a right to assert that they are the Developer and this will inevitably involve using the trademark too. With at least one organization, Debian, refusing to recognise all Developers equally, it is important to scrutinize this issue. After all, not fully and respectfully crediting every Developer is as unpleasant as plagiarism.



There are many signs that Fedora and Red Hat have no intention of going to such extremes. Nonetheless, it is always a good idea to learn from the mistakes of other organizations that are trying to re-invent intellectual property rights to beat people over the head.



Oddly enough, both Red Hat's trademark rights and the Developers' authorship rights can be traced back to the same place, Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.



  1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
  2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.


Last time I cited this article in a blog post, the blog was immediately censored from Planet Debian and Planet Mozilla. I feel that some free software organizations take a one-sided view of these rights, they insist on the freedoms to use free software while showing contempt for any other rights, such as volunteers' right to speak or vote.



It is an interesting moment to look at the stated goals of some of these organizations. Fedora's Mission page defines the Four Foundations. The first foundation is Freedom, which includes:



We are dedicated to free software and content. Advancing software and content freedom is a central community goal, which we accomplish through the software and content we promote.




Mozilla's Manifesto states:



We are committed to an internet that promotes civil discourse, human dignity, and individual expression. We are committed to an internet that elevates critical thinking, reasoned argument, shared knowledge, and verifiable facts.




When that blog post encouraged critical thinking about the rights of volunteers, this is how Mozilla burned their own manifesto:



planet_mozilla_censorship

Fedora's Community Publishing Platforms proposal on its own doesn't appear very controversial until you think through all of this context. To understand why there is a problem, we need to consider how Codes of Conduct have been misused.



The term Code of Conduct has been used to give smears an appearance of credibility. If a smear against a volunteer is based on the Code of Conduct then it suggests there may have been some misconduct. To suggest misconduct, with the weight of the organization's reputation, is an attempt to harm somebody.



Whenever I see a reference to a Code of Conduct in a free software community, the first thing that comes to mind is that I resigned from some of my voluntary roles after the loss of a family member and the people who were oblivious to that immediately started the CoC-insult routine. Each time I see another volunteer being insulted and attacked with this weapon, in any free software community, it also reminds me of the same attacks on my family and I.



Looking through the history of our industry, before Code of Conduct mania, we can find many examples of people resigning or forking projects without any public acrimony. An example is Theo de Raadt leaving NetBSD to start OpenBSD, Wikipedia dedicates only a few words about personality clashes to the split. When Paul Allen left active operations at Microsoft in 1983, there was no public shaming on account of his medical condition. He continued to support the company in various ways. Since we have Codes of Conduct, each time there is some resignation, each time somebody forks a project, a narrative of wrongdoing can be falsified.



"Since we have Codes of Conduct, each time there is some resignation, each time somebody forks a project, a narrative of wrongdoing can be falsified."Codes of Conduct have created a form of extremism. People can't resign gracefully and move on with their life: some organisations retrospectively change a resignation into an expulsion. This is illogical, you can't expel or fire somebody after they resign. Alternatively, if somebody resigns and a vindictive leader feels cheated because he can't indulge himself expelling the person, the organization uses the Code of Conduct to publicly declare they have been banned.



Think of teenagers breaking up, both parties rushing to their social media accounts to publicly claim who-dumped-who first. Do we really want free software projects to be governed with the mentality of adolescent romance?



"Think of teenagers breaking up, both parties rushing to their social media accounts to publicly claim who-dumped-who first. Do we really want free software projects to be governed with the mentality of adolescent romance?"Leaving a voluntary role in a free software organization has become akin to leaving North Korea: any officials who want to resign have to run across the border to the south while getting shot at.



In 2011, immediately after the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) on false rape charges, the police sought to publicly shame and humiliate him by taking him, the head of the IMF, on a perp-walk, handcuffed, in front of the TV cameras. Yet after it became obvious that the police had been fooled, they came off looking like keystone cops.



DSK

Most countries don't indulge in these perp walks. Some countries, like Germany and Switzerland, give significant privacy protections to anybody accused of a crime up until a trial has been completed. Proponents of Codes of Conduct have sought to usher in the practice of perp walks as if these things automatically go together.



The most prominent examples of this have been the attacks on Jacob Appelbaum and Richard Stallman. In the Appelbaum case, I recently documented how existence of first-hand accounts was falsified and amplified across multiple free software communities. Appelbaum was accused of using his membership of free software projects to achieve privilege escalation in other organizations: yet the only evidence of privilege escalation is those using their Codes of Conduct to propagate a one-sided story. The effect of Codes of Conduct in that instance was to induce ongoing harassment of Appelbaum, his friends and neighbours. Using Codes of Conduct and the associated processes induced organizations as far away as Australia to take sides and jump to conclusions. The Code of Conduct was inferior in every way to the proper authorities for handling such complaints, this underlines how important it is to reject these inferior Codes of Conduct.



In parallel, the Fedora community is currently investigating a Code of Ethics and that may provide a credible way forward. Many professional organizations have a Code of Ethics and these codes typically have safety mechanisms encouraging dispute resolution rather than vendettas. I feel the Code of Ethics initiative is far more important than the proposed Community Publishing Platforms policy. I strongly believe these documents need to be worked on together, rather than rushing through the Community Publishing Platforms policy in two weeks.



The difference between a Code of Conduct, as we know it in free, open source software and a Code of Ethics in a professional body is much like the difference between adolescent romances and a well organized professional sporting team.



The ACM's Code of Ethics provides interesting reading. Consider the paragraph on Conflicts of Interest:



Computing professionals should be forthright about any circumstances that might lead to either real or perceived conflicts of interest or otherwise tend to undermine the independence of their judgment.




This has far reaching consequences. If we go back to the Appelbaum example, we can see that people who made decisions on behalf of the Tor organization had been personally and romantically involved in the case. These people were therefore ineligible to use Tor's name to make a public statement. They had the option to make statements on a personal basis but not in their official capacity.



"The difference between a Code of Conduct, as we know it in free, open source software and a Code of Ethics in a professional body is much like the difference between adolescent romances and a well organized professional sporting team."One of the questions that arises whenever a Code of Conduct is introduced is the question of who will interpret it. What does this mean, interpreting the Code of Conduct? Most Codes of Conduct are incredibly short and overgeneralised so you can actually read anything you like into them. When a free software organization appoints some person or group to interpret their Code of Conduct, they are giving them a weapon that they can use at will, the smear of suggesting misconduct whenever such a conclusion is politically useful, even after somebody has resigned.



You can have your say on the Community Publishing Platforms proposal by subscribing to the Fedora Council discussion list.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Throwing Away "Old" Computers (Mozilla and Other Climate Deniers)
Mozilla is not leftist
Further Media Cut-downs
media reporting about the media being cut
Gemini Links 09/09/2025: Moon Eclipse and ROOPHLOCH Reports
Links for the day
Official SUSE Blog Still Uses LLM Slop (Bots) to Make Fake Articles (Marketing)
The company is all about sound bites
Companies Realise That Slop Doesn't Work as Advertised, Accordingly Dump It
"Hype dims as a country-wide survey of US corporations shows a sudden drop-off in AI use among firms with more than 250 employees."
Microsoft-Funded Lawsuits Against Critics of UEFI 'Secure Boot'
Remember that no company (or law firm) ever survives collaborations with Microsoft
 
Blaming Everything on China
TikTok works for China. GAFAM works for fascists.
People Get Tired of "Hey Hi" (AI), Unlike the Subservient Money-Obsessed Media That Gets Paid to Pretend This Bubble Still Matters
"crash will be way bigger than dot.com burst in 90s. and that was Internet, actually transformative technology, not this expensive AI toy with direct dependency on the energy input which is not scalable"
Brett Wilson LLP Accepts That the Serial Strangler From Microsoft Filed a Case That Also Implicates My Wife (Everything is Connected)
They used to pretend that there were two separate cases
10 Reasons to Disable (or Enable) UEFI Secure Boot
Tomorrow the "trusted corporation" Microsoft will see a certificate expire
Gemini Links 10/09/2025: Hospital and Large Feeds
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, September 09, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, September 09, 2025
The Bluewashing of Red Hat is Being Completed, Many Staff Understand They'll be Made Redundant
Jim AllowHurst (Whitehurst) is meanwhile promoting Microsoft's agenda from within other companies
statCounter Sees GNU/Linux Exceeding 10% in Bulgaria This Month
What can Microsoft still do to stop GNU/Linux?
Dark Patterns
Microsoft saying "security" is like a Convicted Felon in the White House saying "law and order".
It's Almost Fall (Autumn)
To "Facebook prison" you are bound
Bruce Schneier About "Secure Boot"
Bruce Schneier isn't a fan of "Secure Boot"
Links 09/09/2025: Microsoft Mass Layoffs Again and "RTO" (Timed Like It Serves as a Distraction From the Mass Layoffs)
Links for the day
RMS Told Microsoft to Stop 'Secure Boot' (He Even Went There to Say That), But They Didn't Listen
Dr. Stallman (RMS) assumed that speaking to sociopaths would work
What Richard Stallman Told Me About 'Secure' Boot in 2012
"if the user doesn't control the keys, then it's a kind of shackle"
Those Who Helped Microsoft Weaponise "Secure Boot" Against GNU/Linux and BSDs Are Fleeing
Microsofters doing what they do best: they evade accountability
Simple is Better, Simplicity is Power
That is "the advantage of having commodity GNU/Linux systems," an associate notes
Much Ado About Nonsense
Microsoft Lunduke is still all dramatisation and sensationalism
Current Events in France
It needs to dump Microsoft and other GAFAM (US) giants, move to Free software
Links 09/09/2025: US-Korea Tensions and Meta Whistleblowers
Links for the day
Links 09/09/2025: “Torrents of Hate” and Political Crisis in France
Links for the day
Gemini Links 09/09/2025: "Dedigitizing" and Forgejo on FreeBSD
Links for the day
Google News (Not Just Google Search) Lets Itself by Gamed by One Slopfarm - to the Point Almost Half of "Linux" News is Bot-Produced Plagiarism (LLM Slop With Slop Images)
That says a lot about what Google thinks of quality, even in Google News
Bill Gates-Funded Media Inadvertently Refutes the Microsoft Lie That in 2025 Microsoft Had Just Two Waves of Layoffs
There were about 12 rounds of layoffs so far in 2025
From theregister.co.uk to theregister.com (US) to The Register MS (Run by Microsoft Operatives) and theregister.ai
The best way to break this racket (or cycle of hype and harm) is to break the chains of funding
Open Source Initiative (OSI) Culture of Censorship Necessitates More Speech
The OSI bans dissent or people who merely point out that the OSI is abusive
How to Reach Us Discreetly (Other Than Encrypted E-mail)
We're still managing to maintain a 100% source protection record. We soon turn 19.
LLMs Are Vastly Worse Than a Waste of Energy and the Externalities Are Huge
Worse than just higher power bills for everybody
LLMs Versus Search (Not Replacing Search But Engaging in DDoS Attacks Against Web Sites That Permit Searching)
The state of the Web isn't just bad; it's utterly terrible
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, September 08, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, September 08, 2025
It's Only the Second Week of September and Already Two Waves of Layoffs at Microsoft, Slopfarms and Microsoft-Funded Sites Spin It as "AI Investments" Rather Than Commercial Failure
A very large third one expected next week
The UEFI 9/11 - Part IX - Shunning Old Computers (in 2023 the Certificate Was Updated/Overridden, Underlying Aim May Be Herding/Forcing People to Get TPM and Other 'Novel' Restrictions)
the "upgrade treadmill"
Rumour: Second Wave of Microsoft Mass Layoffs in September to Commence Third Week of September
That basically answers questions like, "Any specific date or time of the month?"
If Your Machine Still Has "Secure Boot" Enabled, Then Microsoft Has a de Facto Kill Switch (Even If Your Machine Doesn't Have Windows and Never Had Windows)
It is not incorrect to call UEFI 'secure boot' a "kill switch"
Gemini Links 08/09/2025: Reality, ROOPHLOCH 2025, and Writing Another Gemini Client
Links for the day
Updating Firmware is Not the Solution But Only Additional Risk, Disable "Secure Boot" Today
firmware blobs are buggy, secret, impossible to audit, and barely tested
Microsoft Tim's DevClass (Part of The Register MS/Situation Publishing) is Full of Slop
Looking at many sites that are full of slop images is becoming an eye sore and hallmark of text too likely generated by LLMs or 'assisted' (tainted) by them
Microsoft Trying to Fake Demand for Slop. At What Cost?
That's a giant demotion and broken promises
Reddit is Corporate Propaganda
To make matters worse, Reddit ousted many original moderators
Jeff Geerling Shocked to Discover Many Metrics in YouTube Are Fake (His Audience Turns Out to be Much Smaller)
Maybe self-host all videos, don't rely on Google's "FOMO" cheating (addiction based on false assumptions)
Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant and Kryptonite/Garlic to Vampires
Transparency (sometimes described by words like "Sunlight" or "Truth") is paramount
The Register MS Uses Slop in Articles About Slop
we are fairly certain it's slop or CG based on other people's work
Visiting a Web Page or a Public URL Should be Safe, Predictable, and Benign
It's probably too late to "fix" the Web
The Register MS (Situation Publishing) is Paid to Spread Mindless Hype for the "Hey Hi" Ponzi Scheme and That's a Serious Problem
"Sponsored by Zoom."
Links 08/09/2025: Burger King Cracked, Cox v. Sony Analysed
Links for the day
Gemini Links 08/09/2025: Socialist Computer Museum and GAFAM/ByteDance/TikTok-Dominated Net
Links for the day
Links 08/09/2025: Tim Crook Disappoints Apple Faithfuls and Zuckerberg Lies (Financial Fraud) for Cheeto King
Links for the day
EPO Workers Point Out that the EPO is Destroying the Planet Under the Guise of "Hey Hi" (It Also Grants Many Invalid Patents Illegally
On 12 March and 16 June 2025, staff representation met with the administration in the Local Occupational Health, Safety and Ergonomics Committee (LOHSEC) in Munich
Turn Off Microsoft's Restricted Boot ("Secure Boot")
We're still running a series on this issue
Social Control Media Sites Have Become Bot Farms (Not Limited to LLMs and Automation)
linkedin.com was nothing but trouble and losses for Microsoft
Deep in Debt With the Magnitude of Losses Quickly Growing, Microsoft "Open" "Hey Hi" Now Uses Broadcom for Vapourware, Pretending It'll Do OK Next Year
At some stage it'll collapse
You Can Tell Microsoft is in Trouble When Its Own Fans and Staff Blast it
"Microsoft sinks billions into chasing artificial intelligence fads to hype up its share price."
Multiple Undersea Cable Cuts and We're Still OK
Microsoft customers experience problems
Lawyers Who Think They Are Online Assassins Don't Deserve a Licence to Operate
they've become a laughing stock in their "sector"
Microsoft Windows Fell to 3.9% "Market Share" in Bahamas
Based on statCounter
How the European Union (EU) Fell Out of Love With Free/Libre Software
Lots of bribery
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, September 07, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, September 07, 2025