Godot Engine continues advancing Vulkan support, adopts new Code of Conduct

I was concerned that the new CoC would be a dismal implementation of the lopsided and biased Contributor's Covenant.

It isn't!

They specifically mention "political orientation" as a trait that they are welcoming of, and one to not discriminate against.

"We do not tolerate harassment or discrimination of participants in any form."

I approve. This is a much better CoC.

I am a bit concerned about the "either publicly or privately" clause.

If someone is mean to someone else in a realm that isn't related to linux, gaming or godot, that shouldn't have any impact on their ability to contribute.

We will see how this plays out.

I am a bit concerned about the "either publicly or privately" clause.

Me too. But the rest, as you say, seems fair enough. “Always assume positive intent from others” is particularly welcome.

I am a bit concerned about the "either publicly or privately" clause.

If someone is mean to someone else in a realm that isn't related to linux, gaming or godot, that shouldn't have any impact on their ability to contribute.

I interpret it more in the way of being a dick to other contributors in private, not any random unrelated person.

If someone is mean to someone else in a realm that isn't related to linux, gaming or godot, that shouldn't have any impact on their ability to contribute.

Right, Hitler was very nice to his dogs after all...

This is a slippery slope... And not everyone might agree that Hitler should be barred from contributing code to Godot, let's not derail this thread ;)

Who doesn't love a big fat CoC?

I am a bit concerned about the "either publicly or privately" clause.

If someone is mean to someone else in a realm that isn't related to linux, gaming or godot, that shouldn't have any impact on their ability to contribute.

There's no need to be concerned. This section is only there to emphasize that being friendly and welcoming isn't reserved only to public interactions with other community members. If one contributor were to say find anothers Facebook profile and started to harass them there the CoC team may take action and remove the offender from the other Godot spaces. All of this is of course done withing reason, the CoC team is made of of human beings :) There's no evil AI that will look at all interactions on Godot platforms and off and make some kind of judgement.

There's no way for us to give an exact recipe for what human behavior is acceptable and what isn't. Humans are complicated and interaction never happens in a vacuum. A particular statement in different contexts can be interpreted differently.

Have a little trust in us, we want everyone to feel welcome and productive. :)

If one contributor were to say find anothers Facebook profile and started to harass them there the CoC team may take action and remove the offender from the other Godot spaces.

I'm more concerned about non-contributors finding a contributor's Facebook page and using the contributor's personal opinions and personal habits as a reason to evict them from the community.

I agree we should all work together to create great things, but I also have a low opinion of humans in groups.

There are limits to human reason.

I expect some folks to start scouring (well, to continue scouring) the web for expressions of wrongthink and to work towards removing the socially awkward (read: autistic) contributors from having a legacy.

I still believe that the only policing and gatekeeping that should be done in FOSS communities should be directly related to actions and expressions that happen within that community, not in the world at large.

(Edit: I guess I might prefer an evil-AI. One that is FOSS, objective (rather than subjective), is public and available for audit. Gatekeeping is too often done behind closed doors and based on subjective context that is impossible to audit.)


Last edited by psymin on 4 November 2019 at 10:04 pm UTC

I'm more concerned about non-contributors finding a contributor's Facebook page and using the contributor's personal opinions and personal habits as a reason to evict them from the community.

I am pretty sure if they start over-policing the CoC in places where it by no sane reason ever should reach, there will sufficient backlash by the community at large to make it stop. I do agree that it would have been better to define clear limits to where and what the CoC will apply, but I can understand that they wanted to give themselves a little leeway to be able to act when they feel it's needed.

Honestly, I wish "Don't be a jerk!" would be the only CoC humanity ever needed, but as we all know there is no much toxicity around that we need sufficient tools to snuff it out.

I am pretty sure if they start over-policing the CoC in places where it by no sane reason ever should reach, there will sufficient backlash by the community at large to make it stop.

Humans have different thresholds for over-policing.

There have been some rather high profile FOSS contributors who have been evicted from their projects in the past. It is disappointing. The backlash against the evictions seems to have been focused primarily on those who object to the evictions.

(Edit: evict might have been too strong a word. Coerced into consenting to leave is a better term. Coerced consent is a tricky subject.)


Last edited by psymin on 4 November 2019 at 10:24 pm UTC

I'm more concerned about non-contributors finding a contributor's Facebook page and using the contributor's personal opinions and personal habits as a reason to evict them from the community.

I am pretty sure if they start over-policing the CoC in places where it by no sane reason ever should reach, there will sufficient backlash by the community at large to make it stop. I do agree that it would have been better to define clear limits to where and what the CoC will apply, but I can understand that they wanted to give themselves a little leeway to be able to act when they feel it's needed.

Honestly, I wish "Don't be a jerk!" would be the only CoC humanity ever needed, but as we all know there is no much toxicity around that we need sufficient tools to snuff it out.

"Don't be a jerk!" SHOULD suffice, if the mods/admins are reasonable when making their judgments. By adding a metric ton of specificity (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, I've even started seeing "sinophobia" lately which honestly just makes it sound like the community is owned by the CPC) you're not adding more "tools" IMO, but rather turning your sufficient and straightforward rules into a blatant, sprawling political statement. Let's be frank with each other here - when you see those sorts of rules, do you expect anything but a group of far left, extremely biased people as mods and admins? It doesn't help that mods in online communities tend to be power-hungry douchebags to begin with, the political charge just makes things worse.

"Don't be a jerk!" SHOULD suffice, if the mods/admins are reasonable when making their judgments. By adding a metric ton of specificity (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, I've even started seeing "sinophobia" lately which honestly just makes it sound like the community is owned by the CPC) you're not adding more "tools" IMO, but rather turning your sufficient and straightforward rules into a blatant, sprawling political statement.

In an ideal world everyone agrees on what 'being a jerk' means. In this world we probably would not need a Code of Conduct at all. However in the world we currently live in this is not the case. We have created a set of community rules that describes what kind of community we want to have. In our case it is one where racism, transphobia, homophobia etc. has no place.

There is of course the paradox of tolerance. If you are tolerant do you need to be tolerant of the intolerant? Our Code of Conduct neatly answers our community's point of view of this matter: You do not need to be tolerant of the intolerant.

It is just not possible to cover this with just saying 'don't be a jerk'. As we needed to define what we consider 'being a jerk' is.

When I saw this I thought "Hm, a code of conduct. Well, don't much care one way or the other; if they think they need one I expect they have reasons, none of my business really."
And then I thought "But I'm not looking forward to the thread reacting to the code of conduct."

"Don't be a jerk!" SHOULD suffice, if the mods/admins are reasonable when making their judgments. By adding a metric ton of specificity (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, islamophobia, I've even started seeing "sinophobia" lately which honestly just makes it sound like the community is owned by the CPC) you're not adding more "tools" IMO, but rather turning your sufficient and straightforward rules into a blatant, sprawling political statement.

In an ideal world everyone agrees on what 'being a jerk' means. In this world we probably would not need a Code of Conduct at all. However in the world we currently live in this is not the case. We have created a set of community rules that describes what kind of community we want to have. In our case it is one where racism, transphobia, homophobia etc. has no place.

There is of course the paradox of tolerance. If you are tolerant do you need to be tolerant of the intolerant? Our Code of Conduct neatly answers our community's point of view of this matter: You do not need to be tolerant of the intolerant.

It is just not possible to cover this with just saying 'don't be a jerk'. As we needed to define what we consider 'being a jerk' is.

I don't know if I can put this in clearer terms than Patola has, especially considering English is not my native tongue, but I felt I should say something. First off, the "paradox of tolerance" is not the end-all be-all of the entire field of Ethics. Real life is a little more complicated than that. Just because you choose to believe in a particular principle or axiom doesn't render the rest invalid, and it doesn't make your choice of principle any better than anyone else's. Secondly,

In an ideal world everyone agrees on what 'being a jerk' means.

I feel like people are just as likely to agree on what "being a jerk" means as they are to agree on what "racist" or "sexist" means. Is it racist if you make fun of white men or call them fragile, weak incels? You'd certainly think so, but a big chunk of internet denizens disagree. Is it sexist if you make sweeping generalizations about men supposedly having easier lives or all sorts of innate privileges? Again, I'd say it is, and a whole lot of twitter users would say it isn't. They would say it's just FACTS. REALITY. Much like the Opus Dei regarding the existence of the Lord.

"level of experience, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, language proficiency, age, political orientation, nationality, religion, or other similar characteristics..." -- anything can be shoehorned into being "harassment" when being so broad, and there is even a broadening clause in the end to ensure that.

ANYTHING, huh?

Oh, well, if that's the case try to point out to me how even a rather confrontational piece of less-than-constructive criticism like e.g. "Your latest pull request looks like a total beginner to coding wrote it" could lead to CoC action using above clause. You can't use it for that. Now, if you wrote instead "Your latest pull request looks like a fat girl wrote it", you could. See the difference? At all? If not, you're a part of the problem, I am afraid.

And that person might be expelled for doing it elsewhere ("...either publicly or privately.")?

That's your interpretation. To me, it rather reads, either publicly (within our community), or privately (within our community). Admittedly, they should have be clearer if a CoC violation could happen when a community member attacks another on a 3rd party platform, etc.

There are indeed forbidden opinions today.

That's utter nonsense. There is a certain group of toxic people that resent that their toxic statements are no longer left standing without receiving dissent for them. In 1999, if you insulted a female player in a PvP game the rest of the male gang there would giggle. In 2019, at least some of the people there will call out for being a douchebag. There is no such thing as things you can't say. But there is no right to yell unintelligent garbage out to the world and expect not to receive negative comments for it. That's in the end what people mean when they complain there is no freedom of speech anymore. They mean THEIR freedom of speech and theirs ONLY. "I have the right to insult you, but no, you can't disagree with me, because free speech is for me only!!!"


Last edited by Kimyrielle on 5 November 2019 at 4:08 am UTC

Well, there is very big difference between receiving negative comments and being banned - when people have a chance to talk out of the problem they eventually solve it or agree to disagree, but when one side is constantly banned for what they say you remove all the discussion and all chances for a problem to be resolved.
Really you have the right to insult people - yes, you will get reaction you deserve, but that right is protected.
By shutting off some discussion you pretend it does not exist and as all communities shut off the discussion you can consider there is none but you might end up surprised. I'd say just let people talk as long as it is civil, or close to that. You don't need any Coc for that do you? Usually CoC is abusive tradition allowing some people to have more power than others not by their value to the community but by vocalization of what they represent (not personal value but belonging to a group). There are enough examples of CoC abuse in FOSS projects to not consider CoC implementation a healthy practice.

I am curious about what sets the Godot Engine apart from other similar engines. I see that it is free and open source, which is nice. However, there are other interesting 3d engines that are also "FOSS" (e.g. Gzdoom, OpenMW, Babylon.js, etc). For anyone that has used it, why did you use Godot over some of the other options available?

I am a hobbyist programmer that has developed two Electron apps that I use daily. I have an idea for a 3d game project that I want to get around to working on eventually. So I am in the process of trying to select an engine. :)

Well, there is very big difference between receiving negative comments and being banned - when people have a chance to talk out of the problem they eventually solve it or agree to disagree, but when one side is constantly banned for what they say you remove all the discussion and all chances for a problem to be resolved.

Oh, the problem is definitely resolved on their end. I call it the Genghis Khan method.

I am curious about what sets the Godot Engine apart from other similar engines. I see that it is free and open source, which is nice. However, there are other interesting 3d engines that are also "FOSS" (e.g. Gzdoom, OpenMW, Babylon.js, etc). For anyone that has used it, why did you use Godot over some of the other options available?

I am a hobbyist programmer that has developed two Electron apps that I use daily. I have an idea for a 3d game project that I want to get around to working on eventually. So I am in the process of trying to select an engine. :)

It is not best engine around but it is most vocal engine around. Also I'd say it is one to choose if you want to start multiplatform project of simple game and want rapid prototyping. Hype-driven development of sorts frequently confuses though, so if you're careful and check what people say beforehand, it is quite decent to use. If you keep yourself out of community and engine contribution/development and just maintain your own fork with your custom modules your game needs, it is very decent engine.

The problem is not about if Godot is good or not, the problem is that it is currently only FOSS engine in this niche which is close to usable and easy enough to adapt to usable state. Whan it comes to FOSS general purpose 3D engine it is easier to make Godot work than any other one. So I'd call it a good compromise engine. For 2D you can find a lot of much better competitors though.

As for OpenMW engine it is very hard to make it work and deploy on system, no easy way to build it, so this makes people completely ignore it as suitable engine even though their use of OSG and features could be considered by many.
It simply won't fly.

Thanks, you nailed it, that's a big part of the problem: the current CoC allows that expulsion to happen. After all, it lists level of experience. So that's an open door to abuse and abuse legitimization. Even moderators who at first would not be inclined to do that expulsion might do it because it's now in the rules.

That's the point, the line you quoted does NOT provide a basis to ban people for saying they code like beginners. It allows to ban people that hurl discriminatory insults on others, not because they criticize somebody's work.

Toxic is not an informative world. Usually it is just meant to convey "bad" but is lacks any descriptive power. What is toxic? Histrionic words? Extreme points of view? Right-in-your face insults like "idiot"? Acid sarcasm? Left-wing views? Right-wing views? Victorian moralism? I've seen this word used with all these diverse meanings. Which depends heavily on the reader. So in fairness you should not use that word as a criteria to exclude people.

You love to tackle wording instead of meaning, I gather? Fine, I could have replaced "toxic people" with "rude/sexist/racist/bigot douchbags", but the first is so much shorter and to most people not after splitting hairs, is clear enough.

Yes, Kimyrielle, that is nice and I also like it that way in general -- some jokes were considered funny two decades ago to which no one would laugh today. But this is very different from excluding and expelling people from projects and public discourse.

Hurling personal insults at somebody isn't a "discourse".

Freedom of speech is not exactly a right (although in many contexts it is made as such), it is more a philosophic doctrine, something to aspire to. It should guide not only public policy but also private group spaces, interconnected communities and so on. That's what makes me sad, it is distorted to the extreme in today's hysteric ideologies which try to suppress each another instead of instilling debate. And by the way, disagreeing to an insult is also quite different from expelling the messenger and mobs sabotaging its job opportunities and private life.

One of the most difficult concepts of free speech is that one should be free from reprisals for his/her opinions, which many people wrongly understand to be free of consequences (which is impossible and absurd), and that leads them to reject free speech altogether.

If you are into splitting hairs again, might as well have pointed out that "free speech" doesn't even apply to the interaction of private entities. It's a constitutional right governing interactions between citizens and their government, and that ONLY.

Which brings me to the point how utterly pointless your and the other posters ranting about the CoC really is. There are exactly two reasons why somebody might be opposed to it:

First, they defend people being toxi...errm, pardon me...rude/sexist/racist/bigot douchebags. In which case I will just go ahead and rest my case with the stating the obvious that the people causing the problem would of course be opposed to the solution to the problem.

Second, they are afraid of the CoC being "abused" to ban harmless innocent contributors. Now, while I can sympathize with being opposed to overreaching regulations, it's still 100% pointless to throw a hissy-fit over the CoC, because any FOSS project can ban any person at any time for any reason anyway. I don't get why some people think by donating some code they magically become co-owners of that project. They don't. Godot Engine belongs to the guys that started it. It's THEIR project. You don't own anything, except the code that, by donating it to a MIT licensed project, you have open-sourced anyway. They are under no obligation to work with you, and even if you contributed code, they can decide at any point to stop working with you. All the CoC does is clarifying some conditions that would make the project owners want to stop working with you.

You don't like their rules? Start your own project!


Last edited by Kimyrielle on 5 November 2019 at 6:30 am UTC

Freedom of speech is not exactly a right (although in many contexts it is made as such), it is more a philosophic doctrine, something to aspire to.

It isn't really that either. Really, no society can allow complete freedom of speech and function. It's just that most of the limits we place are so uncontroversial that we don't mentally process them as limits on freedom of speech, and this allows us to pretend to ourselves that such limits are rare and to be avoided. So we don't allow libel and we don't allow misquotation and similar misrepresentations of the speech of others and we're rather sticky about plagiarism and we don't allow threats of violence and we don't allow violation of copyright and we don't allow conspiracy to commit crime and we allow non-disclosure agreements, which inherently muzzle free speech (I'm actually not that enthused about NDAs) and so on and so forth. And for most of those limitations, I really don't "aspire" to get rid of them.

What this shows is, many kinds of speech not only are not worth protecting but in fact are worth stopping. And while the surprising number of deconstructionists in this thread may think it's impossible to establish the meaning of any text, all the existing laws and rules of conduct around these other kinds of speech, which work fairly well, suggest to me that rules of conduct around one more kind of speech can probably also work.

Sure, it's complicated. Big deal; codes, laws, rules of various sorts get gradually revised over time to deal with shortcomings in their wording. My union's collective agreement with management is decades old, but every time bargaining comes around there's always some language to be cleaned up because some manager or union member somewhere is interpreting it funny, or we realize they could potentially. Doesn't mean we should stop having a collective agreement; we need that thing. I'm sure this code of conduct is no different. It is certain to be a bit buggy; it will surely be amended repeatedly and never really finished. As with code, the fact that bugs exist or features are not present which could be, is not a reason not to ship--it's a question of degree.