I want to respond to jb’s cry, after all I’m his favorite teletubby and his message is full of references to events where I’m involved. I’m sure he’s honest in his message but still he misses some points.

Julien says :

we never agreed to be nice to each other

That’s true I’m part of several other associations and I never had to sign a paper saying that I’ll be nice with others. Nevertheless, each time that someone misbehaved he was sanctionned. And nobody in the club took the defense of the faulty person in the name of “free speech”. Understand me, if we didn’t have any problem, I wouldn’t make efforts to define a “Code of conduct”.

I’m not a fan of “Ubuntu’s love here, love there” and I certainly don’t want a world of friendly clones within Debian. I believe there’s room for a code of conduct that would let us work together in a friendly manner.

this project used to be open-minded

Being open-minded applies to people not to a project. Now it’s time that you discover that with 1000 people you have far more chance than with 200 to have several narrow-minded people in the set … and that everyone has his own definition of what open-minded means.

That’s why we need to write down what’s acceptable and what’s not. I’ve heard you several times complain about the behaviour of other Debian developers, why not use the opportunity offered by a code of conduct to define how we should aim to work together ?

We are doing it all for fun

True again ! So how difficult is it to imagine that being insulted is *not* fun ? And since we’re all volunteers, there’s no good reason to let some people kill the fun out of it…

I don’t use kill-files

That’s because you have the luck to have a thick skin. I avoid kill files as well. But look at Lars Wirzenius, look at Theodore Y. Ts’o, they all recognize that they can’t stand the level of unfriendliness that we sometimes reach. I want to be able to work with everyone and not only with those who have leather instead of skin.

Help tell those people to FOAD

Is that your way of being open minded ? Ok, it’s a bit out of context but nevertheless, there’s some truth in my criticism:

• Stop yelling each time that someone mentions Ubuntu, Debian is not Ubuntu but we have so many things in common that we can both take advantages of what the other is doing.
• Even if you have a thick skin, it’s not a reason to be harsh with any other Debian developer, not everybody is like you !

And to finish this (long) post, let’s agree on something: yes we’re a technical community, yes we should put Debian’s interests first !

(By the way, on this subject it looks like I agree with MJ Ray. It doesn’t happen very often! ;-))