And I thought this was THE fascinating thing about Richard that led to the database and other things.
But then I talked to him. He's a great engineer but a regular guy running a business around a thing he built.
He gets to be a bit whimsical because he can. He can use his own source control and license, and he can certainly make up a code of ethics, to check a check box on some form somewhere.
The cool thing about SQLite is that he built this thing and gets to do things his way.
This is just a specific instance of that.
Shameless plug: https://corecursive.com/066-sqlite-with-richard-hipp/
I'm happy that he's found a way to integrate his values into his products. Richard is not enforcing his beliefs on anyone; moreover the values espoused in the Code seem fair to any reasonable mind. It asks us to do good, and calls for good human/humane values whatever your religion or ideology or spirituality. How can that be wrong?
Often times these days in tech it's all about progress, liberal ideologies, and there's no sense of values or ethics rooted in anything but money. SQLite's code of ethics is a refreshing change.
SQLite itself is also an amazing piece of engineering, that I use daily and can't express enough thanks to him for.
P/S: I love your podcast! Have heard so many great episodes that changed my mind.
Hearing positive feedback keeps me going and I'm always happy to take guest or topic suggestions as well.
You did a great job, and it was really informative. Thanks for making it!
> No one is required to follow The Rule [...] or even think that [it] is a good idea. [...] anyone is free to dispute or ignore that idea [...]
> This is a one-way promise [...]. the developers are saying "we will treat you this way regardless of how you treat us"
No one is forcing their beliefs onto anyone. keep the pitchforks in the shed.
I'm grateful to the author of SQLite for releasing this excellent piece of software into the public domain and continuing to maintain it for the benefit of all. If providing this good work to the world was driven by his Christian principles, then really, who are any of us to criticise. Indeed, we should all be thankful.
The elephant in the room in many current attempts to encourage "diversity" is that a genuinely diverse range of opinions and/or beliefs ends up being not welcome at all.
This one seems to be just the same, for better or worse?
The SQLite developers (developer?) are not interested in inviting more contributors to the table and that's fine, but for a functional public community the Contributor Covenant or something like it is pretty much table stakes.
> Scope:
> This Code of Conduct applies within all community spaces, and also applies when an individual is officially representing the community in public spaces. Examples of representing our community include using an official e-mail address, posting via an official social media account, or acting as an appointed representative at an online or offline event.
https://www.contributor-covenant.org/version/2/1/code_of_con...
What's your motivation here?
I don't want a solution, I want to be mad.
Sure, as far as I'm aware code of conducts/ethics only ever apply to contributors, no-one has beliefs being forced upon them. But that seems to be about the highest bar of entry for an interested developer I have seen in any project.
Not waving pitchforks here, I'm fine with them having this code of ethics, even tough I disagree with about half the points and find being asked to do such a pledge way to intrusive into personal life.
"45. Be in dread of hell."
In zeal for mutual understanding, and practical fruit in general solutions that solve problems escaping a single perspective, would be that opposite for me.
We cannot approach the sublime within ourselves by fear, in my opinion.
There are a few other well-known teachings that appear to be missing from these rules, the first among them is the New Commandment.
It is an important distinction many people over look
I get frustrated at the SJW CoCs but this is arguably just as bad or worse.
...how could one possibly get this impression, when it literally says "No one is required to follow The Rule"?
Now I don’t think that’s the sql lite folks and plenty of folks don’t do that thing… but just a splash of religion doesn’t make me feel much better about anything.
I do not subscribe to all the beliefs the author espouses, but I am sympathetic with them. Admittedly, I feel myself cheering him on for standing his ground against this vacuous criticism.
Having a written agreement and guidelines to mediate conflicts is vital once a community gets to a certain size. Humans have been doing this since Hammurabi.
This one’s in the Oracle Master Agreement too.
"SQLite: Code of Ethics" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26547201 (March 22, 2021 — 37 points, 23 comments)
"SQLite updated Code of Conduct" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18313131 (October 26, 2018 — 41 points, 89 comments)
"SQLite: Code of Ethics" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18297514 (October 24, 2018 — 34 points, 19 comments)
"SQLite: Code of Conduct" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18273530 (October 22, 2018 — 338 points, 288 comments [flagged])
"SQLite: Code of Conduct" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18273390 (October 22, 2018 — 157 points, 60 comments)
I’m out.
ROLLBACK TRANSACTION;It's truly about interior and exterior balance.
Do not murder -> Leave other people alive
Do not commit adultery -> Be truthful to your partner
Do not steal, Do not covet -> Be content with what you have
Do not bear false witness -> Speak the truth
Do not do to another what you would not have done to yourself -> Treat others like you want to be treated
Do not become attached to pleasures -> Practice moderation
Do not give way to anger -> Stay calm
Do not nurse a grudge, Do not return evil for evil, Do not curse those who curse you, but rather bless them, Do no wrong to anyone, and bear patiently wrongs done to yourself -> Practice forgiveness
Be not proud -> Be humble
Be not addicted to wine -> Drink in moderation
Be not a great eater -> Eat in moderation
Be not lazy -> Be diligent
(edit): formatting
Seems like a pretty simple case of CREATE TABLE ethics ( id INT PRIMARY KEY, rule TEXT );
There are also much more basic sects where the theology of the Gospel is considerably easier to preach, and where in particular the idea of God simply being other people, and our love for each other is prevalent. It is surprising to see this kind of Christianity here, in a piece of software. Surprising and uplifting.
It is all quite an Anglican perspective. I feel sorry for people who don’t have better access to Anglican Communion / Episcopalianism. The more deeply theological sects don’t hold a candle to it.
In fact the few priests, both Anglican and Roman, who I have encountered have all been practical people more concerned with people and their mundane problems than religion or theology.
I have failed, but sqlite yields no grumbling
I’m reminded of a passage in Great Expectations that helped me understand exactly just what this means:
> "so you're the blacksmith, are you? Then I'm sorry to say, I've eat your pie."
> "God knows you're welcome to it, so far as it was ever mine," […] "We don't know what you have done, but we wouldn't have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow-creatur.”
Here’s a guy, an escaped convict, who stole from them, and yet, he’s still being treated decently, and with respect.
I might be way off base, but I feel like that’s what it’s about.
Sure, some of us, try. Root our phones, host our own emails. But really, isn't being a good human underlying all that goes above it?
I'm not a Christian. I'm not even religious. IMHO though, if any software that I've ever written or would write in future, would help others realize that in the big picture, a belief and faith in humanity is the most important thing above all else, I would consider myself privileged.
The argument is tenuous but it reminds me a lot of the Shakespeare / Lope de Vega transition- sometimes population is dense enough to chnage something.
Each of the above civilisations went through a population / density transition - and did so within a few hundred years - and came out with some surprisingly similar religious / cultural rules that were a) different to what had gone before b) similar in some respects to each other
I am certainly not arguing there was some shared kernel of religion, just that there was a new economic/ social pressure and the "solution" to it was a new form of religion / social contract.
In short - as human economics and civilisation changes, so does the way we govern ourselves (religion is a governing force). It seems reasonable to argue that as different civilisations go through the same pinch points they will find similar solutions.
We also should assume we are going through such as pinch point today (either the long term industrial revolution or the near term internet revolution).
And yes - systemising minds need to be aware of their own proclivities- a hard won lesson
I do think it’s nice that “respect your parents” has been modified to “respect everyone”.
Having a code of conduct and explicitly informing the world that you are Catholic and run the place in a Catholic manner, can be divisive. Not because Catholicism is a Big Bad™ or whatever current scandal, blah blah.
Because Catholics have a very distinct management style that excludes free flowing ideas and a two-way relationship with management, and focuses on nailing down perfect form. Sometimes it produces great results, other times not so much.
When it doesn't, it can be even more difficult to offer an alternative method, because of a strict CoC. For employees, the rules are sometimes used by management as an unintentional denial of different solutions.
People who know how this management style impacts their work life, may avoid the company. The internal environment becomes over-specialized towards one particular way of thinking and enacting technological change. Which is probably fine for SQLite to forever be the same as it was, which is all most people want out of the project anyway.
As a general trend though, it's concerning that otherwise solid companies are closing the front door to new ideas and opening the window so the non-CoC thinking can fly away.
The relationship everyone wants in the corporate world, is with the most skilled people at the best price. It doesn't necessarily correlate with perfect form or political CoCs.
If you re-read this with that interpretation, it's pretty amazing stuff.
> No one is required to follow The Rule, to know The Rule, or even to think that The Rule is a good idea.
Oh thank god for that...
Looks like we get this every quarter..
Anyway, if you dont like it, fork it... or use another Db.
Philosophize this has some good discussions about religious vocabulary when discussing Kierkegaard.
That want, for some, takes root in their beliefs and faith. May sound ridiculous but many things do to anyone alien to it.
2. Then, love your neighbor as yourself.
5. Do not steal.
6. Do not covet.
14. Relieve the poor.
15. Clothe the naked.
18. Be a help in times of trouble.
38. Be not lazy.
Those are all pretty deeply in line with marxism. Jesus was a communist, after all.
> Obey in all things the commands of those whom God has placed in authority over you even though they (which God forbid) should act otherwise, mindful of the Lord's precept, "Do what they say, but not what they do."
This would have you willingly submit to sexual assault by a priest. And really should be revised considering the slew of cases against the church, or at least be revised with some sort of exception not just to “not do as they do, do as they say”, but to not obey them when they commit such acts.
And yes, I understand that this is in no way forced upon anyone and is just a “I believe” statement, but still I would argue that the suggestion that those who live by these rules live happier lives is countered by every choirboy who submitted and obeyed a person god had place in authority over them, and got assaulted as a result. Plenty of those rules I would agree, though it seems every mention of the institution which is “god” is irrelevant, redundant, harmful or downright sinister. I think it right to cut down the list a slight bit.
Beliefs like this do matter. They inform the actions of millions of people across the world.
Well, I read the very first line and see that he doesn’t want me, or people like me to be a contributor to this project. And that’s fine. His project, so I hear. But personally, I’ve felt welcome to contribute to every other open source project out there. I’ve felt welcome to apply to any job out there. It feels jarring to be excluded like this. I feel hurt. I shouldn’t be made to feel like this, just because of my religious views.
And no, please don’t split any hairs like “no, he’s not excluding, he’s actually describing…”. You wouldn’t be supporting him if the first line changed to be based on race instead of religion. Then why are you supporting him now?
This is strange to me, because... we're not welcome in every other open source project. Many open source projects are maintained by a single person or a small team and are not particularly interested in accepting changes from outsiders. SQLite is one of those; they generally don't accept contributions.
Reading from the top, he makes it abundantly clear it is a code their team adhere to, and external contributors are not expected to adhere to it or even respect it.
> SQLite is open-source, meaning that you can make as many copies of it as you want and do whatever you want with those copies, without limitation. But SQLite is not open-contribution. In order to keep SQLite in the public domain and ensure that the code does not become contaminated with proprietary or licensed content, the project does not accept patches from people who have not submitted an affidavit dedicating their contribution into the public domain.
what makes you think that every open-source project should "make you feel welcome"? "I shouldn’t be made to feel like this"—where does that idea come from? "shouldn't" on what basis? many open-source projects' Codes of Ethics/Conduct/whatever make me feel explicitly unwelcome, but a.) I don't care, and b.) I don't feel entitled to feel welcome in everyone else's project. what makes you feel differently?
Most open source projects Code of Conduct boil down to "don't be mean to other contributors, treat them well". I'm sorry this makes you feel explicitly unwelcome. That said, it's never been a problem for me to adhere to that.
This is a first time for me being excluded, and it feels bad. I'm commenting on why this person has gone out of his way to do that.
Exclusion is not the norm in online programming spaces. Nor would we tolerate it if someone started excluding people on the basis of something like race. But seemingly there are apologists for exclusion on the basis of religion.
> Listen willingly to holy reading.
> Devote yourself frequently to prayer.
> Daily in your prayers, with tears and sighs, confess your past sins to God, and amend them for the future.
Anyway, sqlite is a good product and I don’t even mind all that much to have a code of Ethics associated to it, just not a thing you see often.
> "...[the developers] view The Rule as their promise to all SQLite users of how the developers are expected to behave. This is a one-way promise, or covenant. "
This speaks of the Founder and his team. Evangelism this is not, but an invitation to learn of the principles they pledge to adhere to.
I trust their sincerity, I trust the efforts they put into the products they shared.
I'm not sure that I claimed it's evangelism. For me personally it really did it's job of 'invitation to learn...' because I learned. I was surprised. This is probably not going to change my interaction with the product in any significant way, but it does make me wonder if 'ethical' reasons will in the future affect the technical decisions.
> I trust their sincerity, I trust the efforts they put into the products they shared.
Me too! They haven't given me any reason not to.
Why would you assume this about me and not take at face value that I really believe you don't find these often in the wild. It's just my personal experience that I haven't seen these out in the wild all that much (I can't think of an example), and it was surprising to me.
Edit: The unspoken part of the demand was a 'progressive' CoC.
[Edit] Found it: it's supported: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3912417/is-there-a-way-t...
Reeks.
But yeah, that's what a lot of other Codes of Conduct feel like. (And the discussions about them.)
Codes of conduct.
> Could J. K. Rowling require Harry Potter readers to follow a code of conduct? Could Werner Heisenberg demand that you subscribe to a code of conduct if you want to do quantum physics?
...
> Codes of conduct typically make laudable promises such as “We pledge to respect all people,” in an attempt to convince readers that they [the authors] will behave laudably. In my experience, though, people who put a lot of effort into telling you how laudably they will behave do not behave any any more laudably than other people do — slightly the contrary, in fact. ...
> ... I expect that I’ll be delighted if you send me patches and bug reports, but on that count I make no promises. Feel free to send them repeatedly through different channels if you don’t get a response at first, since I often don’t notice things. If you like how I respond when you send me patches or bug reports, then maybe it would be a good idea to do more of it. If you don’t like it, then maybe you would be happier if you stopped. I’ll do my best to be polite, but I screw that up pretty often, to be honest. ...
> But, as I said before, what humans tell you they will do is not a very reliable predictor of what they will do. If you want to know what to expect of them, look at their past behavior. Don’t just look at their self-reports of their past behavior, although admissions against interest there can be quite revealing; look at traces it has left that they cannot delete, such as your own memory, mailing list archives, past Gitlab issues, and other people talking about them.
Nobody attempts to apply codes of conduct to users of software - that's the domain of the license agreement. They only apply to communities. Virtually every online community around harry potter has some set of rules for participating in that community. e.g. https://stories.jkrowling.com/terms-of-use/
> Could Werner Heisenberg demand that you subscribe to a code of conduct if you want to do quantum physics?
Heisenberg was the post-ww2 president of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics (quickly renamed the Max Planck Institute post war) - which was involved in human "medical" experimentation in nazi concentration camps.
During his governence: "after 1945 neither active participants in the Third Reich nor hangers-on were called to account" - https://www.mpg.de/history/kws-under-national-socialism
So a guy who presided over an organization that didn't bother to clean house after being directly involved in the fucking holocaust isn't exactly my go-to for how to run a healthy community.
Ethical stance must stand alone unconditionally.
As for the actual rules, picking one in particular, respecting someone purely for being senior is stupid. Respect is simply earned. I respect more people younger and in more junior positions than myself.
Let's do the math:
Christianity has been around for around two orders of magnitude longer than any of the compilers or dev tools you're using on your project.
There are probably three orders of magnitude more people who use Christianity than are using any of the languages used in your project.
There are probably six orders of magnitude more priests and churches than there are maintainers on all but the top 1% of libraries (open source or closed source) you're using on your project.
I'm pretty sure the complete disappearance of Christianity from the face of the earth is not the highest probability risk to worry about for your project, and if it were to completely disappear there would probably be enough other stuff going along with that disappearance that we probably all have bigger things on our mind than the code of ethics published by a software team.
If the concern is just "what if the maintainers give up on Christianity," they're probably far more likely to get tired of programming (that happens far more often), but we can observe that their need to make a PR to edit their own code of conduct is not really going to be a particularly hard thing for them to pull off.
People don't tell you they lost their faith. They just stop following their code of ethics that was bound to it.
I trust a faceless corporation over this attitude.
Incidentally, the page has some internal consistency issues:
``` Honor all people. ```
has historically not played well with:
``` First of all, love the Lord God with your whole heart, your whole soul, and your whole strength. Deny oneself in order to follow Christ. Prefer nothing more than the love of Christ. Put your hope in God. Attribute to God, and not to self, whatever good you see in yourself. Fear the Day of Judgment. Be in dread of hell. Desire eternal life with all the passion of the spirit. Keep death daily before your eyes. Know for certain that God sees you everywhere. When wrongful thoughts come into your heart, dash them against Christ immediately. Listen willingly to holy reading. Devote yourself frequently to prayer. Daily in your prayers, with tears and sighs, confess your past sins to God, and amend them for the future. Obey in all things the commands of those whom God has placed in authority over you even though they (which God forbid) should act otherwise, mindful of the Lord's precept, "Do what they say, but not what they do." Do not wish to be called holy before one is holy; but first to be holy, that you may be truly so called. Fulfill God's commandments daily in your deeds. Pray for your enemies in the love of Christ. Never despair of God's mercy. ```
I dunno that I'd describe the most deployed database in the world "some (arguably small) thing", really?
There are religious folks whose work I reference or use frequently, but they keep their beliefs to themselves. Don Knuth is a canonical example of this for me. No issues there, anyone should be free to believe whatever gets them through their day.
In my (subjective, biased, maybe incorrect,) opinion, people whose code of "ethics" includes phrases like "keep death daily before your eyes, fear the Day of Judgment and be in dread of hell" are dangerous. I doubt they're even aware that hell was voted in existence centuries after their savior was crucified. The amount of life lost and the intellectual stagnation stemming from these religious fanatics, these broken people, is staggering. We'd have reached Alpha Centauri by now were it not for them.
But to rewrite them, see them there on the screen and not realise you have done it, in a much more inefficient way, and also much, much worse. Thats just a breakdown.