Re: Code of Conduct plan

On Tue, 5 Jun 2018 at 01:18, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> I think you're forgetting the sequence of events. That was posted in
> Feb 2016. In May 2016 we posted a draft CoC which was open for public
> discussion, and was discussed extensively at a public meeting at PGCon
> in that same month [1], and the draft was subsequently revised a good bit
> as a result of that, and republished [2]. It's taken us (mainly meaning
> core, not the exploration committee) way too long to agree to a final
> draft from there, but claiming that there's been no public input is just
> wrong.

Fair; however I still maintain that there was no further consultation
on whether one was required, which was the implication of your
message, and which your latest email implied had occurred when it
suggests that the wider community was consulted on whether it is
required.

However searching through the lists for concepts, rather than words,
is pretty difficult, so it's quite possible that I missed the email
asking for votes and as I said, I'm just going to drop that one.

> In reality I suspect actions under that provision will be quite rare.
> You'd need somebody to actually file a complaint, and then for the CoC
> committee to agree that it's a good-faith complaint and not a form of
> using the CoC as a weapon. Given reasonable people on the committee,
> that seems like it'll be a fairly high bar to clear. But, given an
> unambiguous case, I'd want the committee to be able to take action.

I'm just worried that expressing a political (or other) opinion on
(eg) twitter that some people find disagreeable could easily be
considered to bring the community into disrepute.

eg a patent lawyer might reasonably consider that a hypothetical core
developer (let's call him Lon Tame :P ) making public statements on an
ongoing patent dispute implying that the case is baseless could make
patent lawyers look upon the PostgreSQL community less favourably, ie
his actions have done damage to the reputation of PostgreSQL in the
eyes of other patent lawyers.

I'm pretty sure no-one here (or indeed on the committee) would think
that that was reasonable but because of the wording a court might well
disagree; I'm not a lawyer so I'm unsure whether you could leave
yourself open to action in the event that the person bringing the
complaint considers it was mishandled by the committee: by including
this line there's a potential legal argument that you really don't
need to be having.

Geoff