[keldaris]

CoCs on their own solve exactly nothing, they're just a tool that's supposed to enable project leadership to solve certain issues more effectively. Whether they actually serve that function is an open question since the practice is still fairly new. I haven't seen any meaningful evidence one way or the other (feel free to provide some).

While I'm sympathetic to the argument that sufficiently large projects should, on average, benefit from some degree of formalization of behavioral norms (whether you call it a code of conduct or something else), the recent trend of insisting (often abusively) that every open source project, however small, should adopt this practice is silly, annoying and has obviously caused a backlash in some parts of the open source community, hence this thread.

[pgeorgi]

> since the practice is still fairly new

"in tech". The CoC we're discussing here exists - as CoC - for Millenia.

An even older example would be the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath, which might have been more appropriate as an example of a "code of work conduct", but "I swear by Apollo the Healer, by Asclepius, by Hygieia, by Panacea, and by all the gods and goddesses" might rub some people the wrong way, including, in this case, sqlite's author.

[keldaris]

I'm specifically talking about open source communities. I think the context of these social structures (spontaneous organization, lack of traditional coercive motivators (money, enforcement mechanisms, social pressure), the fact that many people are pseudonymous, the fact that most projects are effectively tyrannies, etc.) makes them sufficiently distinct from the classical examples you list to make any direct comparison very difficult.