Commit
This commit does not belong to any branch on this repository, and may belong to a fork outside of the repository.
While this commit could really just be the title I think it's important to expand on the "why have a Code of Conduct?" question that gets asked. Sometimes in good faith, but unfortunately often in bad faith. For those who think a Code of Conduct is bad and try to open up issues on the issue tracker about this addition we'll kindly ask you to leave and lock them. For those who are legitimately curious do read on as to the why. Often times tech is a pretty hostile space for many people, especially with Open Source Software (OSS), but also at companies themselves. Now you might be thinking "Well I've never experienced harrassment or rude people in tech" and that's great. Honestly I'd hope no one would be subject to that kind of treatment. That being said it's annecdotal and if you spend time talking to minorities in tech (whether it's sex, race, gender identity or something else) you'll find this is often not the case. Personally I've barely experienced anything at the level of harrasment that coworkers or friends in the industry have experienced. We want a Code of Conduct so that we have a mechanism to enforce safety within our community. While we'd like to be open for everyone we don't want to be open at the expense of the well being of others. Working on code just isn't fun if all you're going to recieve is angry threats from developers and worst of all if we tolerate that kind of behavior people will leave and they won't make a fuss of it they'll just go. Worse, people see this behavior being tolerated and won't want to be part of that community or participate in it. By tolerating intolerance by others, a community either diminishes or becomes intolerant itself. This is where the paradox of intolerance comes in, in order to have a tolerant and welcoming community we must be intolerant of intolerance. This is what the Code of Conduct is for! We don't want people who are rude or make people feel unwelcome. We want others who are kind, caring, and make others want to be here and feel supported. A Code of Conduct is by no means perfect and only one part of this, but it's the bare minimum needed to have a healthy community. If you feel excluded because of the Code of Conduct, I'd ask you to think why. Is it because you can't be rude towards someone you probably don't know online? Is it because in a public professional space you can't swear? Is it so bad that you can't do these things? The Code of Conduct doesn't ask for a lot and while you might say "We're all adults here, we don't need one", consistently that just hasn't been the case in this industry. We're always open to contributions we just want to have a certain level of professionalism. At Fastly we also have our own values and code of conduct and part of this includes the values "We are trustworthy" and "We are good people" and if we want others to trust us and if we want to be good people looking out for our community's well being over the hurt feelings of an individual who feels excluded because they can't be rude is a tradeoff we'll make in a heartbeat. In summary while a Code of Conduct does exclude people, it excludes the kinds of people we'd rather not interact with and instead invites the people who we would want to interact with into the community. We want people who care and who are kind and compassionate. If you've read this long do come join us. A better world of software where we are nice to each other, where we build each other up, and build some really neat things is possible. [fastly-coc]: https://www.fastly.com/code-of-business-conduct-and-ethics/
- Loading branch information