Development quote of the week
Development quote of the week
Posted Nov 11, 2019 6:33 UTC (Mon) by jonbayer (guest, #36490)In reply to: Development quote of the week by mjg59
Parent article: Development quote of the week
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.