pretty nice babies, and awful, vile bathwater

Posted Oct 10, 2014 6:17 UTC (Fri) by louie (guest, #3285)
In reply to: On the sickness of our community by corbet
Parent article: On the sickness of our community

So, Jon, I hear what you're trying to say, and as I said in a comment above, there is an almost miraculous amount of good in what we, as a community, have done. It can be, I think, positive to talk about what we get right even as we engage in self-criticism about what we get wrong. So you're right to say "hey, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater" - the baby is pretty great!

But you have to do the self-criticism. Or to put it another way, the piece seems to be in denial about the state of the bathwater. Let's be clear-the bathwater is very, very dirty, to the point it risks killing the baby.

Your comment here doesn't help. As I said above, it is great that we have a community of thousands of people which is often very helpful and constructive, but there is no plausible way you can say those people are "from an incredible range of backgrounds". The vast, vast majority of us are from a very narrow range of backgrounds, hitting most or all of the privileges listed in this article- grew up with computers, great fluency with language, schools with nerdy friends, etc., etc. Not coincidentally, we're also overwhelmingly white and male. This is partially related to various "pipeline" problems, but given how much worse it is in open source than programming at large, it is also almost certainly related to the problems identified by Lennart and others of late.

So, I hear you about celebrating what we have done; I do think many (probably including Lennart) have gone too far in implying that there is no value in it. But please, step back and take a more serious, thoughtful look at the shortcomings. The first step towards solving these problems is for leaders like you to be honest with themselves and with others about what the problems are. They run much deeper than this article seems to admit. :/