I think that the CoC is a good document, and good guidelines in general for reasonable participation in online communities. When i originally signed the document, i thought the Shuttleworth-exceptionalism was odd, but decided i'd be willing to hold him to a higher standard than the rest of the community, if he wanted me to. That is, i figured his position as project leader meant that he could have made the CoC different than it is, thus he was (perhaps indirectly) asking me to hold him to a higher standard.
Why does this matter to me now? Shuttleworth has apparently signed the Ubuntu Code of Conduct, but as i wrote about earlier, his recent sexist comments at LinuxCon were a Bad Thing for the community, and his apparent lack of an apology or open discussion with the community concerned about it was even worse.
So i'm asking Mark Shuttleworth to abide by the following points in the Code of Conduct that he has signed:
UPDATE: It seems that Mako and Daniel Holbach have recently revised the CoC resulting in a new version (1.1) which has just been approved by the the Ubuntu Community Council. The new version 1.1 looks good to me (i like its broadening of scope beyond developers, and its lack of superhuman claims for Shuttleworth) and when it is available on Launchpad, i'll most likely sign it there. Thanks to the two of them for their work! I hope Shuttleworth will consider abiding by this new version.
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I put the "perhaps" in there, because i take the things i sign seriously, or else i wouldn't sign them. But given the SABDFL's behavior, and apparent unwillingness to take his own signatures seriously, it doesn't seem like a good idea to sign onto anything (joke or not) that claims i expect him to be superhuman. I don't. I expect him to be human (which means mistakes do happen), but i also hope that he'll have the integrity to adhere to his own proclaimed code of conduct.
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We should treat Ubuntu as we would treat any contributor: with respect and consideration. This means if they do things we disagree with, we need to hold them accountable for it as well, which is what i was trying to do here.
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