Herein lies the problem, who defines "civility"? My idea of civility and yours may be quite different and my actions may keep within my bounds but exceed yours.

For example the "Donglegate" incident I, to this day, don't feel like they said anything directly sexist or with sexist intent. They were making, admittedly lame/off-color, private jokes and were overheard. If I had heard these 2 guys I would have just ignored it if not finding "I'd fork his repo" a little funny (Really, we are going to crucify someone for making a slightly-dirty joke when we use sex to sell everything from bail bonds to web servers??? Where is the Godaddy outrage? Yes I know it exists but no one is losing their job over that AFAICT) and understanding the actual meaning of that statement. At this point I still see no fireable offence. What she did next, tweeting an image and getting them kicked out, was stupid on her part. She was in a dev relations position and by getting devs kicked out of a dev conference for joking amongst themselves she might as well have signed her pink slip. The developer should not have been fired from his job IMHO and I'm glad he has since found work.

This whole thing terrifies me, to know that a single off-color joke, drunken mistake, or similar in my off-duty time could cost me my job. I'll agree to that when I start getting paid 24/7...

I also think that what this fan did was not comparable to the PyCon incident as he went out of his way to make these comments (drunk or not) to the reporter while the PyCon dev's were talking privately and were overheard. That said we are setting a dangerous precedent here. Don't get me wrong "FHRITP" is terrible but the alternative is that we all start self-censoring everything we say for fear of it being misinterpreted or taken out of context. It's all well and good when we all agree on what's right/wrong but not too long ago supporting gay marriage and/or being gay could have the same argument made to fire someone "We are a company built on values and we cannot employ people who support something like gay marriage or the gay lifestyle". Today we might laugh at that or ready our pitchforks if it actually happened but 10-20 years ago? It could be viewed just as bad (if not worse) than FHRITP.

I'm terribly conflicted on the whole Brendan Eich situation. On one hand how can you lead a company (containing homosexuals) that promotes openness while having donated to stop those homosexuals from marrying? At the same time it wasn't like he directed Mozilla money to it (COUGH Chick-fil-a), it was his personal money. The issue I took was that he obviously hadn't changed his mind or he would have simply blogged about how he held those views at that time but had since revised his way of thinking and no longer stood by the decision to donate/support that cause. I was one of the many that called for him to be sacked and I felt sure it was the right thing to do and by and large still do, leadership is different than just any employee. If the president of my company comes out anti-gay then I'm probably going to start looking for a new job, if an employee does I don't assume the entire company feels that way and I'm going to ignore them and get on with my life. Now if they bring it up all the time, make it focal point of discussions, or actively campaign in the office for their views then I might take issue. So what I'm saying is I still think I was right because leadership is different than just any employee. But then it becomes "where do you draw the line?" is it just the CEO? Is it all senior management? There isn't a good line. Also the line of "representing the company" continues to blur further and further or I'd just say "If you are in a position that you obviously represent a company then you need to watch what you say and what personal views you display". For examples does a dev at a conference represent their company? I think it in part comes down to "did your company send/pay for you?" but at the same time these developers did not go into PR so why should we expect them to behave as such?

It's a very complicated topic and like I said, I'm very divided on it and truly I'm not sure what to think, I've asked way more questions than I've answered and at the end of the day I feel like making the "pornography argument": "I can't describe it but I know it when I see it" which I 100% understand is a cop out on top of it being a HUGELY biased to the person who "know's it when they see it".