Miss Dada  🏳️‍⚧️

I’ve done a lot of training and consulting on this, and CoC and license adoption have way different needs. A checkbox approach tends to leave people very unprepared for enforcement, especially the governance aspects.

I 100% agree, especially WRT enforcement. But I don't think the outcome has been folks become better informed, they've just reached for what's easiest without understanding the implications

I'm not necessarily arguing for a checkbox approach as much as somewhere that has a curated list of what the options even are, and talks a bit about the tradeoffs between them. Maybe with education that these are not legal docs and you can change them more freely

So -- with the caveat that I'm just going to focus on open source projects for a minute, and not other uses -- I'm one of the primary authors of the Citizen Code of Conduct and we didn't know we'd be listed in GitHub's materials.

I've written my own guide at http://safetyfirstpdx.org/resources/ . I wouldn't personally encourage open source projects to add a CoC to their repo en masse -- I think it leaves people on all sides unprepared and leads to backlash.

If a project doesn't have a license, the outcome is that companies won't use the software because it's an open liability. So, projects that don't care very much about controlling their IP choose something permissive. That also makes it easy for contributors.