Development quote of the week [LWN.net]

Development quote of the week

Posted Nov 10, 2019 5:26 UTC (Sun) by jonbayer (guest, #36490)
Parent article: Development quote of the week

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?

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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).