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by pcthrowaway 1915 days ago
1. Yes, this is certainly an assumption I think everyone makes, though I wouldn't entangle my personal opinions on non-software things with my open source projects

2. Not quite; the community is closed to people who have a different opinion from them. As a software project they're publicly going on record stating that they think their opinion makes them better people, and they don't accept contributions from people outside that community (lesser people). I think in the context of religious beliefs it's a discriminatory stance. If they were an employer in Canada, they would be fined or possibly shut down.

1 comments

> the community is closed to people who have a different opinion from them [...] they don't accept contributions from people outside that community (lesser people)

I didn’t read it that way at all. SQLite has been closed-contribution and maintained by a very small group of developers since it’s inception, and I have seen no evidence to suggest that religious beliefs or any supposed self-righteousness plays a part in that. In other words: the community is closed to everyone, not just “to people who have a different opinion from them“. While a closed-contribution model may be uncommon among popular open-source projects, I don’t see a problem with it (no random project on GitHub is obligated to accept my PRs).

The preamble makes it quite clear that agreeing to the code of ethics is absolutely not mandatory within the closed group of contributors to SQLite. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see anything discriminatory about choosing to personally pledge oneself to a specific behavioral standard without placing expectations on others.

> In other words: the community is closed to everyone, not just “to people who have a different opinion from them“.

I get that viewpoint, but respectfully, I believe differently. What does it really mean to be closed to everyone? And is it really? The source code is in Fossil, and I don't have any experience with this unfortunately, so I couldn't tell you if the author information is preserved, but presumably there is a team contributing to it, and I suspect that team hasn't been 100% the same group of people since inception.

So if a business says 'they're not hiring', and also (supposedly unrelated) that all of the current employees subscribe to this dogmatic code, and then slowly you see people added to the team, but through backchannels, really that's just a way for them to maintain their 'company culture' which, in this case happens to be tied to religious beliefs.

Like I said, I think in Canada the business wouldn't be able to get around discrimination laws by doing this. More likely they'd have to also avoid discussing their religious beliefs publicly.

You also say:

> The preamble makes it quite clear that agreeing to the code of ethics is absolutely not mandatory within the closed group of contributors to SQLite.

but I took a look again, and the closest thing I can find is:

> "individuals" are free to dispute or ignore that advice if they wish.

Yes, individuals can do whatever they want. But

> The founder of SQLite and all current developers have pledged to follow the spirit of The Rule to the best of their ability

To me, it's written between the lines that if you want to penetrate the inner sanctum of core sqlite developers, you'd need to make a really good case for your inclusion on the team in addition to agreeing to this code.