Development quote of the week [LWN.net]

Harmful behaviour comes in many forms. Some people, for example, say outright that they don't want women involved in free software development. Others attack gay, lesbian, trans, queer, black, old, young, Christian, Muslim, atheist, any other other group of people identified by whatever attribute the attacker happens to dislike. Yet others are more subtle, not attacking directly, but not giving people in the group they dislike the same chance to participate, learn, grow, and generally be the best person they can be in the context of free software development.

This doesn't just harm the groups of people being targeted. It harms others, who see it happen, and think they might be targeted too, later, maybe for some other reason. It harms reaching the vision of software freedom, because it shoves large parts of humanity outside the software freedom movement, robbing the movement from many voices and much effort. This makes it harder to achieve the vision.

Excluding people from the movement for irrelevant reasons also harms humanity in general. It propagates the hate, hurt, and harm that is emblematic of life and politics around the world. While the software freedom movement can't solve all of those problems, we can and should at least not make it worse.

— Lars Wirzenius

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Development quote of the week

Posted Nov 7, 2019 12:06 UTC (Thu) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (5 responses)

I find it interesting that the essay is about how Debian is an example of how unbounded inclusion is actually detrimental.

While I agree with his general conclusion of "we need to talk about these things civilly, and decide what is acceptable", he only indirectly acknowledges that the purpose of those discussions is the explicit *exclusion* of certain folks, ostensibly for the greater good (of the project/whatever).

... and that reasonable folks will disagree what "harmful", "irrelevant reasons", and "greater good" are in these contexts.

Governance is _hard_.

Development quote of the week

Posted Nov 7, 2019 13:18 UTC (Thu) by ncultra (guest, #121511) [Link] (2 responses)

"Most importantly, we need to stop being tolerant of intolerance " ... which is logically impossible. And that is his most important point.

Development quote of the week

Posted Nov 7, 2019 21:41 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

I would say the very first sentence of the article is the most important point.

Being tolerant of everything, including doing nothing in the face of intolerance, is nothing but cowardice. Anyone near FOSS who thinks that's an acceptable way to live life can and should have their job replaced with a shell script, because having a sense of empathy is the only thing that differentiates real people from software on the internet nowadays.

Development quote of the week

Posted Nov 9, 2019 5:12 UTC (Sat) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

That is a fundamental misunderstanding of the function of tolerance, it's a corollary to tit-for-tat, i tolerate you as far as you tolerate me, if you harm me (tat) I harm you in equal measure (tit), with the occasional turning of the other cheek and letting a harm go by unpunished, ideally formalized through the criminal justice system. What is illogical is a system where unlimited giving to another is expected without getting something equal in return.

Development quote of the week

Posted Nov 11, 2019 6:47 UTC (Mon) by jonbayer (guest, #36490) [Link] (1 responses)

IMO the problem is that the success of open source has attracted many who have nothing to contribute besides their amazing moral high ground. Throw a fit, make it into a news article being all "rampant sexism, racism and basically evil commonplace and accepted among open source software" and then leverage it into a speaking tour.

To generalize, have _any_ of the people claiming to have been hounded out of the open source community been able to show how they were targeted due to their status as an oppressed-type human? Or really had anything other than the most basic of "learn $hot_language in 83 minutes" type projects with less than 10 commits to their name? Why can't you just go bother some people and let the rest of us get back to work?

Development quote of the week

Posted Nov 13, 2019 22:03 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

You sound in a good position to answer that one for the rest of us.

Development quote of the week

Posted Nov 10, 2019 5:26 UTC (Sun) by jonbayer (guest, #36490) [Link] (4 responses)

What about the people who view this as pointless virtue signalling at best, and an implied insult at worst? What is the point of this kind of moralizing absent explicit examples or *specific* changes they would like to see outside of unaccountable committees designed to punish those deemed sinners?

Development quote of the week

Posted Nov 10, 2019 12:09 UTC (Sun) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (3 responses)

How do those who perceive this as an implied insult feel insulted?

Development quote of the week

Posted Nov 11, 2019 6:33 UTC (Mon) by jonbayer (guest, #36490) [Link] (2 responses)

It implies

you haven't heard this before or
are some backwards fool who can't see the evils of discrimination that are happening constantly while you do nothing
it posits the existence of a problem and implies to not take action would be a moral wrong, but provides no evidence of said problem or proposes any sort of solution or mitigation that would actually forward the cause of equality

While at the same time using the weasel words of "some people say that women shouldn't be in free software" . Who? Who said this? How are they in a position of influence or authority? You mean some guy somewhere has backwards beliefs? How does that demonstrate this is a problem in the open source community that has demonstrably and consistently affected the aforementioned groups. What evidence statistical or otherwise do you have that this is a measurable factor that has somehow been hiding in plain sight. I mean, git commits are rich sources of data that could be mined to prove this is a) widespread and b) this attitude is encouraged or tolerated

Would you consider it approval of discrimination if a person has revealed beliefs that some others find offense but by all accounts and metrics has never shown any sort of discrimination in decision making, much less a pattern thereof?

Or perhaps is just a productive contributor and said code does not contain any racism or sexism. Should they be banned from contribution? Open source projects need all the help they can get, why would you turn away help because someone may have backwards beliefs? How does this make the world better for anyone?

I may be naive in that I prefer to think better of people who volunteer their free time and talents to work on software to help the world run a little bit better. Like, if I'm wrong and this is a real issue it seems like it could be proven very easily given the incredibly wealth of metrics available on open source hosting platforms such github. Otherwise, I don't see what the message is or could be other than a sort of smear by implication or far more likely just preaching from the faithful.

Development quote of the week

Posted Nov 11, 2019 8:41 UTC (Mon) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)

I wish LWN had a "save draft" button. That might help people sit down, cool down, reflect and then delete things that probably should not have been posted.

Development quote of the week

Posted Nov 13, 2019 18:37 UTC (Wed) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

It has. It's called "Preview comment". Once you have pressed that button, you can let the comment rest some time, then look it up in your account information under "comments you have posted" (it's in state P), and then reply to its parent comment again, copying from the preview (unfortunately, I don't know how to continue directly from this preview).