Patch submission should not imply agreement to policy (was Re: Promoting the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines?)

[Mark H Weaver]

Christopher Lemmer Webber <address@hidden> writes:

> Thorsten Wilms writes:
>
>> On 29/10/2018 09.59, Björn Höfling wrote:
>>> In law, there is the term of "conduct implying an intent". So even not
>>> signing anything you could argue that by sending a bug or a patch you
>>> silently agree with the community guidelines, CoC, etc. You enter the
>>> community be interacting the first time. And will be judged by their
>>> guidelines.
>>
>> It used to be that you could pick a Free Software project and send a patch.
>>
>> Now sending a patch is supposed to imply agreeing to the equivalent of
>> an EULA? Everyone is expected to welcome that as progress?
>
> Submitting code to a project under a copyleft license is also agreeing
> to policy.

What is the basis for this claim?

While I'm generally in favor of the CoC, I strongly oppose the idea that
submitting a patch or communicating with us implies automatic agreement
to our policies.

We should not claim that someone has "agreed" to anything without their
conscious knowledge and consent.  Even if the law would allow us to make
such a claim, we should not do it because it would be unjust.

Please, it is enough to make our policies clear and highly visible, to
encourage people to read them, and to give the lead project maintainers
the authority to issue warnings, and if deemed necessary, to ban people
from our communication channels who repeatedly or severely violate our
CoC.  I support that practice, as long as it's used judiciously, and I
have every confidence in Ludovic and Ricardo to do so.

We do _not_ need to extract promises from contributors ahead of time
that they will follow our policies, and I think it's a bad idea to ask
them to.  It's a worse idea to claim that they've done so implicitly
without their knowledge or consent.

      Mark