Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Crooked Timber Guest Post on FLOSS Licenses and Codes of Conduct
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2015 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
The social sciences group blog Crooked Timber has published my guest post, "Codes of conduct and the trade-offs of copyleft".
A lot of open stuff -- such as the Wikimedia/Wikipedia and Linux projects -- are discussing or adopting codes of conduct, or expanding their existing policies. I'll reveal my biases at the start and say I think this is a good thing; for more, read my speech "Hospitality, Jerks, and What I Learned". But in this piece, I want to talk about the similarities and differences between codes of conduct and a set of agreements that some of these communities are more used to: "copyleft" or other restrictive software licenses. And I'd like to draw out some ways that the kinds of acts and artifacts that these policies cover reveal different attitudes towards contracts and governance.
Also I make silly references to Antitrust and Ducktales while oversimplifying free software licenses and political theory. So check it out.
Much thanks to Skud for an initial conversation about face-to-face versus online codes of conduct; my article, in the end, barely addresses that, but it was a seed for this piece. Thanks to Henry Farrell of CT for editing and publishing my guest post. And thanks to Naomi Ceder, Paul Tagliamonte, Leonard Richardson, and several other people who talked about this topic with me or beta read bits or drafts of the piece -- of course, all errors are mine.
Feel free to comment over at Crooked Timber!
