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The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusion in open source

[Posted December 21, 2021 by corbet]

The Linux Foundation has announced the posting of a report on its research into diversity, equity, and inclusion in open-source communities.

The research shows that while a majority of respondents feel welcome in open source, many in underrepresented communities do not. We hope that the data and insights that this project provides will be a catalyst for strengthening existing DEI initiatives and creating new ones.

The full report can be downloaded from this page.

to post comments

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 21, 2021 21:55 UTC (Tue) by eplanit (guest, #121769) [Link] (11 responses)

It's sad to see this DEI trend spread so widely. I was going to make a joke about there likely being templates for such things....and of course: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffsb&q=dei+templates&ia...

I guess DEI is 2021's "Green Building Initiative".

I'm all for full participation in business and industry by all races and cultures; and, I like energy efficient buildings -- but these contrivances become predictable and annoying. It's almost like self-parody.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 21, 2021 22:08 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

The problem is that those in the majority fail to realise that their attitudes actively re-enforce that majority, and drive out dissenting voices. It's not deliberate, and it's not conscious, it just IS.

While I haven't read the report, the snippet from it seems to say to me "there IS a problem, and here's the evidence". It's up to us to take that on board and do something about it. DON'T leave it to someone else, try and meet minorities *more* than half way.

And yes, sometimes minorities alienate themselves. But if they don't feel able to be themselves in our company, then that's OUR problem, and we shouldn't be burying our head in the sand.

Cheers,
Wol

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 21, 2021 23:24 UTC (Tue) by gerdesj (subscriber, #5446) [Link]

"While I haven't read the report"

It's not very long. Don't dive straight for the Conclusion because unlike in a scientific paper it is a finale and not a summary.

A simple first step to encourage an inclusive approach for yourself is to avoid using skin colour when describing someone. It is quite a tricky habit to get out of. As a useful side effect you get in the unconscious habit of noticing more details about people but it does take some effort to start with and takes years to become close to unconscious, depending on quite a few factors.

You might make a pact with your partner, family, friends or a group of colleagues and agree to call each other out. You might pick other attributes instead or add others. Do use common sense, though. Sometimes skin colour might be a useful attribute to use in a description but it should not be a primary discriminator that is reached for routinely.

I'm well aware that there is an awful lot more to an inclusive first mindset but it's a very positive and easily understood start that anyone can make without tying themselves up in knots.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 21, 2021 23:35 UTC (Tue) by tux3 (subscriber, #101245) [Link]

To pull a couple numbers from the report, 82% of respondents reported they felt welcome in open source.
For men overall, the rate was 85%, for women 74%.
Respondents with LGBA+ sexual orientations also come in at 74% welcome.
The lowest subgroup reported in the study is "Black in North America" at 55%.

Among respondents that feel unwelcome, twice as many have disabilities compared to all respondents.
16% of unwelcome respondents were transgender, compared to 4% of all respondents.

This suggests the sort of attitudes that make people feel unwelcome doesn't affect every minority equally, which was not obvious to me.
From the above, there may exist some specific behaviors that the community might want to focus on first.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusion in open source

Posted Dec 21, 2021 23:32 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (7 responses)

The report's not bad. It's not strident or SJW-ish; it just reports on what people's experiences are and gives pretty basic suggestions on how to improve the experiences.

That said, I belong to a minority group, which I don't go out of my way to advertise but which is pretty easy to discover with some Internet searches, and I've never felt unwelcome or excluded by an open-source project. I guess I've been lucky.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusion in open source

Posted Dec 21, 2021 23:55 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (4 responses)

I think the thing is, you feel comfortable here, and we've got to know you before we've realised there's something "different". I feel uncomfortable using that word, because "normal" isn't normal at all, but you know what I mean ...

But anyways, we got to know you as a person first, and that makes all the difference.

Cheers,
Wol

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusion in open source

Posted Dec 22, 2021 0:01 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

That's true and insightful.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusion in open source

Posted Dec 22, 2021 8:39 UTC (Wed) by ericonr (guest, #151527) [Link] (2 responses)

> But anyways, we got to know you as a person first, and that makes all the difference.

Should it make all the difference, though? If someone mentions at the start of an online conversation that they are blind, or have some motor issue, so "please excuse any typos", are they suddenly not a person?

People should be able to introduce themselves however they wish and remain people in everyone's eyes regardless of that.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusion in open source

Posted Dec 22, 2021 11:01 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Whether it should or not, the fact is it does :-(

You may wish all you like that the moon is made of green cheese, that has no effect on reality.

To give a very good example of my own biases, I'm a native English speaker. "Everybody speaks my language". Unusually for the English, I actually find it rather offensive that we expect other people to use our native language.

So how I react to someone in an on-line forum is closely related to my *perceptions* of their nationality. If I think you're a foreigner struggling with English, I will put in effort to understand you. If I think you just can't be bothered to "speak proper", I'll ignore you.

And as somebody who has (tried to) learn at least four foreign languages I think my ability to tell the difference is pretty good, but I'm sure I make mistakes ...

Cheers,
Wol

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusion in open source

Posted Dec 23, 2021 9:04 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

As I get older, I've come to realise that there are almost as many languages calling themselves “English” as there are native speakers in England. There's a roiling sea of creole and rapidly changing euphemisms, and it feels like a national sport to make one's words a shallow alibi while silently yelling the underhanded true meaning between the lines. Both en-GB and en-US have unique spins on it but for some reason I find the original far more tiring.

So whenever there's the slightest hint it's not someone's first language and their tone sounds a bit off, I'm usually far more patient with them, because at worst they're trying to give me a recoverable lossy transcoding instead of obfuscation and injection attacks.

My rule of thumb for receiving FOSS contributions: the barrier to entry can only require learning at most 1 language. If they've already done that just to report a bug, it's downright arrogant to then fob them off by asking for patches.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusion in open source

Posted Dec 22, 2021 8:02 UTC (Wed) by eduperez (guest, #11232) [Link]

> That said, I belong to a minority group, which I don't go out of my way to advertise but which is pretty easy to discover with some Internet searches, and I've never felt unwelcome or excluded by an open-source project. I guess I've been lucky.

I do not think you realize how insightful is your own comment...

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusion in open source

Posted Dec 22, 2021 13:34 UTC (Wed) by jafd (subscriber, #129642) [Link]

> That said, I belong to a minority group, which I don't go out of my way to advertise but which is pretty easy to discover with some Internet searches, and I've never felt unwelcome or excluded

Come on now, we know that there's hardly anything wrong with writing Perl.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 22, 2021 8:27 UTC (Wed) by jmarcet (guest, #73340) [Link] (36 responses)

It's deeply depressing and disheartening to see this trend reach the realms of what I always thought was reason and knowledge.

Someone please explain to me where does it have any say whatever your religion/color/age/sex/... is in order to do a PR to an open source project?

For god's sake, here too no!

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 22, 2021 8:42 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (28 responses)

Which trend? Tech isn't somehow immune from the social biases that exist elsewhere. Nobody's blocked from opening a PR based on any nominally irrelevant characteristic they have, but the way people react to that PR is extremely influenced by those characteristics. My partner's given up on contributing to open source projects they don't maintain after discovering that if they took patch submissions they'd submitted that received no feedback and then resubmitted them under a male-sounding name they'd get applied without question. Discrimination hasn't magically arrived here in recent years - it's always been here, and all that's changing is that we're actually paying attention to what we're missing out on as a result.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 22, 2021 14:35 UTC (Wed) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link] (26 responses)

> My partner's given up on contributing to open source projects they don't maintain after discovering that if they took patch submissions they'd submitted that received no feedback and then resubmitted them under a male-sounding name they'd get applied without question.

That doesn't make any sense at all. A reasonable maintainer would look at a person's name to determine whether a contribution is received by a new contributor (these generally require far more stringent review) or an experienced contributor (require less review), but no reasonable maintainer would care about a contributor's gender. That is just too hard to believe without extraordinary evidence this effect actually exists. It would also be an extraordinarily dumb way to miss out on good contributions.

What I would believe is bad luck. Maintainer is bad at keeping up with PRs, inbox is overwhelmed one day but not another....

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 22, 2021 15:52 UTC (Wed) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (4 responses)

I see two common behaviors in your posting:

* Dismissing evidence out of hand.
* Making excuses instead of trying to find solutions.

If people don't even see the problem, it's no wonder we struggle so hard with solving them. Even worse: the very first comment went a step further and declared the people who state that there is a problem (and are even working on solutions) themselves are the problem.

The greatest difficulty is that until you have suffered from the problem yourself, it's very hard to even see. And it takes a very healthy self-confidence to allow for seeing and admitting that people one admires and likes or even oneself are part of the problem. Especially with a problem that's socially stigmatized like discrimination.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 22, 2021 18:59 UTC (Wed) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link] (3 responses)

I'd be interested to see concrete evidence that the *extraordinary* claim in Matthew's post is true. Even if anecdotally true for a particular sexist software maintainer -- which I doubt, but if so, it might be possible to show with some links to pull requests -- it would be even more extraordinary to claim the result generalizes to other maintainers. Absent extraordinary evidence, dismissing extraordinary claims is appropriate. If you told me "maintainers rate PRs from men as higher-quality than identical PRs from women" then I would probably just accept that at face value, whether true or not, because it would sound plausible. But suggesting that gender determines whether a PR gets accepted or rejected is not plausible.

I don't believe I've made excuses for anything. If somebody is indeed accepting PRs from men while rejecting PRs from women, that would be indefensible. I doubt you will find anybody here willing to excuse such behavior.

I like the approach the Linux Foundation took here: simply ask people whether they feel safe and included. At least that produces a clear result that's hard to argue with, even if we don't know what to do with it.

> Even worse: the very first comment went a step further and declared the people who state that there is a problem (and are even working on solutions) themselves are the problem.

I've read more than enough offensive anti-D&I (diversity and inclusion) posts to know that something is sadly wrong with more than just a few bad apples on the internet. The good news is that anti-D&I views are now generally considered unacceptable among most serious software maintainers and large open source communities. I suspect you're far more likely to find today's open source maintainer adopting a new code of conduct than engaging in bad behavior.

That said, I'm going to take a tangent here to discuss inclusive language. The asinine focus on removing innocuous terminology like "master" from our lexicon *really* irritates me. I'm tired of meson subprojects and BuildStream elements and flatpak-builder modules failing to build because somebody decided to rename the master branch. Not only is this effort pointless -- nobody is offended to see the word "master" except perhaps diehards who have themselves decided it is a problem -- but I suspect it's actually contributing to additional animus against the D&I community. It's a shame, because *some* of these terminologies really are dated and offensive. "Blacklist/whitelist" is racist regardless of whether the humans who originally coined the terms intended them to be. "So easy your mother can understand it" is inarguably both sexist and ageist. It's not hard to see how these could cause reasonable people to be genuinely uncomfortable and discourage community participation. But instead, we're arguing over the names of git branches, which could not plausibly offend a *reasonable* human. The D&I community should accept that this strategy might be reducing community support for other more serious D&I efforts.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 22, 2021 19:59 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> I'd be interested to see concrete evidence that the *extraordinary* claim in Matthew's post is true. Even if anecdotally true for a particular sexist software maintainer -- which I doubt, but if so, it might be possible to show with some links to pull requests -- it would be even more extraordinary to claim the result generalizes to other maintainers. Absent extraordinary evidence, dismissing extraordinary claims is appropriate. If you told me "maintainers rate PRs from men as higher-quality than identical PRs from women" then I would probably just accept that at face value, whether true or not, because it would sound plausible. But suggesting that gender determines whether a PR gets accepted or rejected is not plausible.

> I don't believe I've made excuses for anything. If somebody is indeed accepting PRs from men while rejecting PRs from women, that would be indefensible. I doubt you will find anybody here willing to excuse such behavior.

Women get discriminated against massively elsewhere - ever heard of the "glass ceiling"? Why not here too? And I've come across this claim far too often, and from far too many people, to be ready to dismiss it out of hand. When people repeatedly say "I can't be bothered TO TRY to contribute any more" then we've got a problem.

As I said elsewhere, we usually don't even realise we're discriminating, but there are almost always subtle clues in our writing as to who we are. Like I discriminate against people who don't bother to speak decent English, there are almost certainly plenty of people who don't realise they are discriminating against women, or asians, or ...

Okay, here I've picked on two groups who are traditionally seen as not being strong at fighting their own corner, but there's plenty of ways other people get excluded ...

You've got a reputation of steam-rollering things through - the irresistible force. If you hit the immovable object, you're going to respect them. But if you hit a bending reed, chances are you're not even going to notice them, even if they are better and cleverer than you. You need to make a CONSCIOUS EFFORT to avoid that, and you've just come over as oblivious to the problem.

Cheers,
Wol

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Jan 7, 2022 21:50 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> Women get discriminated against massively elsewhere - ever heard of the "glass ceiling"? Why not here too?

Because everyone can easily do the opposite test: send patch from a female name and see what will happen. Have you done that? I did. Result: my fake name is still there, in the sources of GCC along with the testcase (actual fix was rejected, but not because of my name, but on technical merits… that's also why I had no need to send the copyright grant letters).

Now, perhaps my experience is totally unusual and I was just lucky. Perhaps. But then — the opposite side also couldn't offer a comprehensive study where dozens of different projects were tried and submissions from males under female names were rejected.

> When people repeatedly say "I can't be bothered TO TRY to contribute any more" then we've got a problem.

Yes. But that's not related to gender in any shape or form. Some of my male friends have the exact same stance and exact same experience (patch was rejected, they tried few times, eventually gave up), yet somehow this is considered normal, because hey, they are male, there couldn't be anything wrong.

In my experience people which belong to one or more minorities have become accustomed to being treated better then how others are treated and when I say I have no idea if you are native speaker or not, female, male or whether you are 10 years old or 100 years old many would turn around and leave, because, hey, they are mi-no-ri-ty, I have to provide that red carpet to them.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 28, 2021 5:48 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> it would be even more extraordinary to claim the result generalizes to other maintainers

So far so good. Next, your "tangent" has some extraordinary generalizations:

> nobody is offended to see the word "master" except perhaps diehards who have themselves decided it is a problem -- but I suspect it's actually contributing to additional animus against the D&I community. It's a shame, because *some* of these terminologies really are dated and offensive. "Blacklist/whitelist" is racist regardless of whether the humans who originally coined the terms intended them to be.

So, _nobody_ is made uncomfortable by the word "master" (wrong), _everybody_ thinks "blacklist" relates to skin color (wrong),...

The very first Inclusion step is to realize different people interpret the same words differently; that there is a very large spectrum.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 22, 2021 15:53 UTC (Wed) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link] (4 responses)

> What I would believe is bad luck. Maintainer is bad at keeping up with PRs, inbox is overwhelmed one day but not another....

There's an easier explanation as well. If a maintainer remembers that they procrastinated on handling the PR and sees the same contribution appear a 2nd time, it triggers a guilt reaction and they're likely to take time for it.

To fix this bias, it would be necessary to perform a the experiment in reverse: create some initial contributions under a male-sounding name and if they get ignored, try if a female name fixes the problem. :)

This approach also has issues (How do you control for whether the initial contribution is more likely to be handled with a male-sounding name? It would take a lot of contributions to reach statistical significance. And the decision, which gender name to use, should be randomized to avoid selection bias from creeping in).

It's great when people perform personal experiements, but the results shouldn't be taken too seriously if there isn't a solid attempt to control for biases. It's too easy to set up non-rigorous experiments and be misled by our own preconceptions.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 22, 2021 16:40 UTC (Wed) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (2 responses)

There have been experiments that have done things like ask professors to review the same paper, one with a male-sounding author name and one with a female-sounding author name, and the paper got better reviews if seemingly written by a man. That said, I, too, find it very difficult to believe such a phenomenon would occur with pull requests. You'd have to go to an extraordinary amount of trouble to even find the author's name. I agree that mjg59 should ask his girlfriend to do your experiment.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 23, 2021 1:21 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

They've done similar experiments with colour. Things like Tae-kwondo, or Boxing, where one participant is in red, the other in blue.

Using CGI to swap colours, then asking judges to score the match, it is very noticeable that the person in red does better. Similarly, in football, teams that play in red are more likely to have questionable decisions go in their favour.

Cheers,
Wol

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 23, 2021 15:39 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

Here is a peer-reviewed paper which investigated this specifically — that is, pull requests on GitHub. https://peerj.com/articles/cs-111/

From their conclusion:

> Our results show that women’s pull requests tend to be accepted more often than men’s, yet women’s acceptance rates are higher only when they are not identifiable as women. In the context of existing theories of gender in the workplace, plausible explanations include the presence of gender bias in open source, survivorship and self-selection bias, and women being held to higher performance standards.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 23, 2021 23:11 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link]

See this paper: "In the audit experiment we demonstrated that Roma individuals were about 13 percent-points less likely to receive responses to information requests from local governments, and the responses they received were of substantially lower quality."

There are some typical Roma family and given names, names that adult Hungarian people are expected to connect to Roma people.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 23, 2021 0:16 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (7 responses)

> no reasonable maintainer would care about a contributor's gender

No reasonable human would care about anyone's gender under most circumstances, but sexism exists anyway. I think the extraordinary claim would be for free software to be somehow immune from it.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 23, 2021 1:01 UTC (Thu) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link] (6 responses)

OK, fair enough. But you're saying the problem rises to such an exceptional level of severity that multiple maintainers would routinely ignore pull requests from your partner, except when submitted under male names? And this problem is so widespread and extreme that your partner decided to stop contributing to *all* software projects maintained by other people? That goes way beyond typical unconscious bias. It only makes sense if free software maintainers are -- collectively -- excessively and irredeemably sexist.

I'm not saying it's impossible for a single maintainer to do this. Anecdote: back in college, somebody thought it was a good idea to inform my friend that she should be starting a family rather than pursuing a chemistry degree. This person sincerely believed that women should not hold STEM jobs or even pursue higher education. That's about as sexist as can be. But I highly doubt that it was *typical*: I only remembered this event because it was sufficiently shocking and outrageous, far from something that regularly happens. My anecdote involving extreme behavior is only believable because it describes an isolated occurrence: if I had said that happened regularly, you'd probably suspect me of disingenuity. It would be one thing to say that free software maintainers collectively exhibit *some* unconscious bias against women, but trying to argue that maintainers are collectively *extremely* biased to such a degree they would ignore good pull requests seems like a tough position.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 23, 2021 1:10 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (5 responses)

It doesn't need to be universal (or even typical), just to happen enough times that someone feels that there are better ways to spend their time. I don't think most maintainers exhibit anywhere near this degree of bias (consciously or unconsciously), but a small number of strong negative experiences can have a disproportionate impact on which spaces people choose to participate in.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 24, 2021 13:26 UTC (Fri) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (1 responses)

It's the classic 1% screwing it for the 99%. Even if only 1 in a 100 is a bad egg, eventually every woman/trans/etc is going to run into one and for everyone else unless they're there at that moment paying attention, they'll not see it. Online it may be totally invisible to anyone else.

On the other hand, strictly positive interactions are probably just as rare (most interactions are neutral) so the bad interactions can easily outweigh the good ones.

It's a Hard Problem, with no easy solutions.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 29, 2021 12:15 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

And, looking back at my younger self, I can see that behaviour, although I was oblivious to it at the time.

And I doubt I've improved much, I just don't make those particular mistakes any more ...

Cheers,
Wol

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 28, 2021 15:59 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> It doesn't need to be universal (or even typical), just to happen enough times that someone feels that there are better ways to spend their time

As brilliantly shared by a friend recently:
- Is it all men?
- No, of course not. But it's all women!

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 29, 2021 12:13 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

The problem is, there is a real "how do we square the circle" problem here.

It is *natural* for us to modify the environment to suit us. Women don't feel comfortable in a male environment because, well, it's male. And vice versa!

(I was a card-carrying Girl Guider for a while :-) but I had pretty much nothing to with it, other than assisting my wife, for which I needed to be security-checked, for which I need to be card-carrying ... so while they made me welcome I didn't want to join in ...)

But the reaction of the sexes to this scenario is different - men are quite happy to let women get on with it. Women aren't. But this isn't sexism, this is Power Politics - most politics plays out in those men-only environments, and there's a vocal minority of women who want to be heard. I don't blame them - MEN DON'T HAVE THIS PROBLEM.

But men don't like it because their male-only environment is under threat. So at the end of the day, it is the blokes' problem, and we need to create an environment where women feel heard. Made all the more difficult because gender alters the definition of "heard"!!!

How DO you square the circle?

Cheers,
Wol

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusion in open source

Posted Dec 29, 2021 21:58 UTC (Wed) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

> How DO you square the circle?

You create a story - a mythology - which uses heroic deeds of the past to teach how much we need each other, how we as individual are weak but that by lending our strength to the weak around us - and only by doing that - we can collectively be strong. You include tales of rewards and punishments, of glory and ignominy, to help motivate the reluctant to act when they are comfortable because most of us ignore the reality that by the time we become uncomfortable, it is too late to act.
You teach this story to your children, and to your peers. You get reminded of it at various community events. You even spend time on a regular basis studying the implications of the story and seeing how they apply in your life today.
You create rituals and holy-days which serve as constant reminders of the core truths - "you need your neighbour" "stronger together".

You might think this looks a lot like religion, and you would be correct. Though the actual stories told by most current religions are not as fit-for-purpose as they once might have been, the unifying power of a shared story that they all attempt to realize is just as powerful as ever.

We in the FLOSS movement has a shared story about the value of openness and that story works. Unfortunately we don't have a shared story about the value of every contributor. We hear whispers of that idea, but we have no story.
To square the circle we need to write that story, and tell that story.

Which chapter will you write?

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 23, 2021 9:00 UTC (Thu) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link] (6 responses)

I was wondering how discrimination against trans people even works.

Maintainer asks for naked photos before accepting a PR from a new person?

I'm sure there must be more to the story since over the internet it might be possible to tell m/f names (with a very high failure rate for people from other countries), but telling if someone is trans seems to require way more information.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 23, 2021 10:03 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (1 responses)

If a contributor changes their name and asks to be referred to with different pronouns, you're going to notice.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 23, 2021 11:19 UTC (Thu) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

But that's only if the person was a long time contributor… It seems even more unlikely that an established long time contributor might be asked to leave or ostracised… good contributors are hard to come by.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 23, 2021 15:39 UTC (Thu) by mcatanzaro (subscriber, #93033) [Link] (1 responses)

"I was wondering how discrimination against trans people even works." If this is a serious comment: on the internet, it generally involves deliberate misgendering. In meatworld, it involves that, plus snide comments, dirty looks, and bathroom legislation. Discrimination against trans people is a very serious problem, and your comment could be read (hopefully misread) to make light of it.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 27, 2021 16:06 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

You've also got people who make stupid/offensive jokes about non-binary gender identities (which I will not repeat here, but I'm sure you can find them if you go looking), people who insist that singular "they" is ungrammatical (OED says it's attested all the way back to 1375, which makes it significantly older than singular "you"), etc.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 29, 2021 21:46 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> I'm sure there must be more to the story since over the internet it might be possible to tell m/f names

You don't even need to look at the names. Given a moderate amount of context, the language gives away the gender of the speaker. It's subtle, you probably wouldn't even realise, but just like I'm sensitive to the difference between foreign speakers and bad native speakers, people are probably aware of the difference between male and female speakers. Disguise it with a clearly male-sounding name, and the signals are confused enough for the patch to get through.

(Oh, for names though, is Robin a man or woman? Likewise Sam? Florence? Evelyn?)

Cheers,
Wol

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Jan 7, 2022 22:16 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> Given a moderate amount of context, the language gives away the gender of the speaker.

Yet somehow that factor doesn't play any role in reality as study shows.

> Disguise it with a clearly male-sounding name, and the signals are confused enough for the patch to get through.

Nope. It's pretty hard to quantify but I'm sure what happens is quite conscious bias similar to your native speaker / foreigner story.

It's not enough to have female name. No. What's needed is to not flaunt your gender. Don't bring it up, don't talk about it, don't flaunt it — and your contribution would be accepted. Easily.

But if you would demand to be treated “fairly” (read: better) because you belong to some kind of minority… then sure enough, I would try to silently ignore you.

Not because your contribution is bad and not because of some kind of crazy “unconscious bias”, but because of quite conscious avoidance of someone who would continue to demand unreasonable level of attention and unreasonable expenditure of my time.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 27, 2021 17:04 UTC (Mon) by ebwb (guest, #144520) [Link]

Popping in with my first comment to say that, a lot of times, what seems like a one-off event with an easy explanation really is evidence of a trend that's wider than one might realize. These events don't make sense on their face, because "who would so clearly discriminate like that," and yet here we are. What used to sound so obviously discriminatory and ridiculous started to be much more widespread than I realized when I started listening to the stories of more folks not like myself; e.g. a colleague of mine works in sales and has stopped going by Jamal in exchange for his middle name, Michael, because of this blatant discrimination. He'd done the same trick! Tried re-submitting his resume with the name Michael and got a callback, for once. He tried it again, and it worked somewhere else. And we're just talking about names being used in voluntary submissions of content or opportunity!

As for git branches of 'master', it's likely been lumped with the other, more obvious naming scheme of 'master-slave architecture'. I don't think that 'main' is a bad name for that kind of git branch, either, though.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 23, 2021 4:14 UTC (Thu) by tbrownaw (guest, #45457) [Link]

My first ever OSS contribution got ignored, and then accepted on the second try. No attempt to look like someone else, but if I had for some reason tried to change something that I expected to be causal I rather imagine I'd have taken it as confirming that expectation.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 22, 2021 9:24 UTC (Wed) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link] (1 responses)

Let me put it that way: we're all more or less STEM affine around here. That means the "scientific method" of trying to approach some kind of "truth", step by step should be familiar to you, too.

Part of this is to not take your own perceptions face value, but as the result of some process with an inherent bias (read on "personal equation" for a stunning historical example of what we might consider "early" science). Your perceptions are essential in doing science, but are not, in themselves "Truth".

So you have to check back critically with others. Intersubjectivity, yadda, yadda.

Now if someone from a minority group comes along and says "I don't feel welcome in 'your' community"... you say "trend"? This disqualifies you as scientist right away!

Besides, please, leave god out of this game.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_equation

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 29, 2021 12:20 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Now if someone from a minority group comes along and says "I don't feel welcome in 'your' community"... you say "trend"? This disqualifies you as scientist right away!

So you go out and ask a bunch of random people who you think *should* be in your community. And when they ALL say "I don't feel welcome" you do a double take and ask "what the hell is wrong with ME?".

If you won't do that, THAT disqualifies you as a scientist, too!

Cheers,
Wol

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 22, 2021 10:06 UTC (Wed) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link] (2 responses)

>...realms of what I always thought was reason and knowledge
That's a mistake, making things with other people is a social endeavour.

It plays out in communal behaviour which has in-groups/out-groups where we must choose to overcome those distinctions to arrive at this notion that the best code wins out.

What I think matters when trying to welcome contributors: working code wins out. What I think matters when hosting a community or building a business: working code is harder than you think, so we want to avoid additional hardship for contributors.

If new people no longer face biases that people in the community (at present) can't see and won't talk about, we're closer to the goal that reason and knowledge are valued in this social endeavour.

K3n.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 27, 2021 18:27 UTC (Mon) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (1 responses)

> It plays out in communal behaviour which has in-groups/out-groups where we must choose to overcome those distinctions to arrive at this notion that the best code wins out.

In this case, the in-group explicitly identifies itself as "the group of reason and knowledge." This is not just wrong, but dangerous, because it makes it more difficult for the in-group to accept that it is guilty of exactly the same cognitive biases as everybody else (such biases are antithetical to the in-group's identity). Ironically, this makes the in-group even more vulnerable to the in-group/out-group bias that you are describing, as well as a host of other biases that correlate with it. The more "rational" the in-group believes itself to be, the less rationally it will in fact behave.

How do we fix that? Be more humble. Listen more, accept greater uncertainty, and think very long and hard before you contradict or disbelieve somebody else's lived experience. Why do you doubt their experience? Do you think they would lie about it, or do you think they have misinterpreted something? If the latter, remember that intentions are invisible, and mostly irrelevant (the environment is welcoming or unwelcoming as a product of our behavior, not our intentions). Be dispassionate - don't take it personally if someone else points out problems with the in-group. Above all, be kind to people.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 28, 2021 0:08 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Ask yourself this - you think you're a sane, rational being. What makes you think they are NOT sane, rational beings - what makes you superior? Because you're an arrogant fool?

And if they are sane, rational beings they will have sane, rational reasons for disagreeing with you.

And what makes you right? Because the law of averages says it's 50-50 whether you or they are right!

Cheers,
Wol

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusion in open source

Posted Dec 29, 2021 21:26 UTC (Wed) by mpg (subscriber, #70797) [Link]

> what I always thought was reason and knowledge.

Hmm, we're talking about a research report... how is that not consistent with reason and knowledge?

Now, your comment on the other hand, seems rather low on facts. If "reason and knowledge" if not just an identity for you, but something that you really believe in, you might want to start engaging with the vast body of research that has been produced on bias, exclusion and discrimination, including (and especially*) in communities that like to think of themselves as meritocratic.

* for example: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.2189/asqu.2010.55...

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 30, 2021 15:50 UTC (Thu) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> Someone please explain to me where does it have any say whatever your religion/color/age/sex/... is in order to do a PR to an open source project?

Congratulations, looks like you live in the perfect world!

Unfortunately we're not so lucky so we have to talk about it. So that, you know, one day we can join your perfect world. But it takes work. This kind of work.

Categorizing human being with nicknames and/or emails?

Posted Dec 22, 2021 8:30 UTC (Wed) by kronat (guest, #117266) [Link] (14 responses)

I'm assuming that the majority of interactions, in open-source communities (I supposed the verb only applied to software) happen behind an email address, or a nickname, or a combination of the two. The other assumption I am making is that a whatsoever problem in diversity, equity, and inclusion, should be active (i.e., the community actively discriminates against a person, or treat differently a human being for some characteristics, or explicitly reject contributions from individuals not based on technical grounds, etc). Under these premises, I fail to see how open-source communities may have ~30% of people who have problems. Can someone help me understand it better?

PS: I would appreciate an answer that doesn't go against my assumptions. If it goes, then just save your time and go on without posting, don't try to fix me. Thanks!

Categorizing human being with nicknames and/or emails?

Posted Dec 22, 2021 8:51 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (7 responses)

> I'm assuming that the majority of interactions, in open-source communities (I supposed the verb only applied to software) happen behind an email address, or a nickname, or a combination of the two.

This assumption is incorrect. Email addresses tend to tie to other identities, and in many cases so do nicknames. People can create a separate identity purely for the sake of contributing to open source projects, but they then need to be extremely careful not to link that to anything else. And maintaining an identity that is inconsistent with how you present in the physical world means you're never going to be able to attend a conference and give a presentation on your work or participate in in-person interaction with your peers, something that's going to have a strong influence on how effective your ability to contribute actually is.

> The other assumption I am making is that a whatsoever problem in diversity, equity, and inclusion, should be active (i.e., the community actively discriminates against a person, or treat differently a human being for some characteristics, or explicitly reject contributions from individuals not based on technical grounds, etc)

Plenty of the discrimination that occurs is either subconscious (ie, based on people's existing social biases, they treat submissions differently based on how they perceive the contributor) or due to broader context (eg, a project may not reject submissions from a trans contributor, or discriminate directly against that contributor, but may make jokes about other trans people that leave the contributor feeling unsafe).

> I would appreciate an answer that doesn't go against my assumptions.

This seems equivalent to explaining that you can square the circle as long as you assume that Pi equals 3.2 and then rejecting any counter arguments that reject that premise? Your assumptions are wrong, and as a result the conclusion you draw is also wrong. It's impossible to explain the observed results without contradicting them.

Categorizing human being with nicknames and/or emails?

Posted Dec 22, 2021 9:57 UTC (Wed) by geert (subscriber, #98403) [Link] (5 responses)

> People can create a separate identity purely for the sake of contributing to open source projects

Which is a violation of the Developer's Certificate of Origin, as used by e.g. Linux.

Categorizing human being with nicknames and/or emails?

Posted Dec 22, 2021 10:12 UTC (Wed) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (4 responses)

The text in question from submitting-patches is:

"using your real name (sorry, no pseudonyms or anonymous contributions.)"

There's no definition of "real name", and the entire nymwars saga should demonstrate that attempting to define that in a meaningful way just results in a whole bunch of sadness. There's a number of well-established contributors to Linux whose SoBs don't match the name on any government-issued IDs they have, and that's something that holds true outside Linux as well.

Categorizing human being with nicknames and/or emails?

Posted Dec 31, 2021 2:27 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (3 responses)

There's a few FOSS projects that go well off the deep end with requirements like these. A few months back, Gentoo silently outed and purged all developers from its ranks who had “suspicious” names — pseudonyms in use since the early 00s, plausibly real names that changed, names that didn't match what they used elsewhere.

The rationale for any of this was seemingly never spoken aloud, but if anyone wants a conspiracy theory it began around the same time Sony muscled the distro into creating a copyright owners file in the package tree for it (last I checked that file contains exactly two lines: the other being a developer who saw through how ridiculous it was and added themselves out of spite).

Categorizing human being with nicknames and/or emails?

Posted Dec 31, 2021 4:22 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Reminds me of: https://i.imgur.com/beI5i7Y.png

Categorizing human being with nicknames and/or emails?

Posted Jan 7, 2022 22:39 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah. Seen that. If some FOSS-project would ask me to participate strictly using my legal name — I would consider that much bigger issue than the unfair treatment of minorities.

I'm Ok with sharing my legal name with lawyers (if they are involved in the project), but please, make sure they are the only ones who know me.

That's much more effective policy than attempts to ensure that females, transgenders, inuits and who knows who else are not mistreated when the information needed to discriminate them is added to each and every message (and helpfully highlighted).

It just makes no sense!

Categorizing human being with nicknames and/or emails?

Posted Jan 8, 2022 0:03 UTC (Sat) by pebolle (guest, #35204) [Link]

> If some FOSS-project would ask me to participate strictly using my legal name — I would consider that much bigger issue than the unfair treatment of minorities.

> I'm Ok with sharing my legal name with lawyers (if they are involved in the project), but please, make sure they are the only ones who know me.

Because it's embarrassing to be known to contribute to Free Software?

I'm really struggling to make sense of your position here. I'm rather attached to things like privacy and anonymity but I still have no problems with projects wanting to match my contributions to my legal name. What's the harm?

Categorizing human being with nicknames and/or emails?

Posted Jan 7, 2022 22:31 UTC (Fri) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

> People can create a separate identity purely for the sake of contributing to open source projects, but they then need to be extremely careful not to link that to anything else.

I don't think that's true. I have dozen of identities (because I prefer to join different communities as nobody without any preconditions) but I'm 100% sure someone with good detective skills may join all of them up.

But most people are not that diligent, I've even had contributions in the same project listed with two separate identities.

> And maintaining an identity that is inconsistent with how you present in the physical world means you're never going to be able to attend a conference and give a presentation on your work or participate in in-person interaction with your peers, something that's going to have a strong influence on how effective your ability to contribute actually is.

Why would you need to do that? At the point where you are involved deep enough with a certain community to visit the conference you original identity no longer matters, you may safely reveal who you are for real, except for a few gasps it rarely causes any long-lasting consequences.

Categorizing human being with nicknames and/or emails?

Posted Dec 22, 2021 10:04 UTC (Wed) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link]

> I would appreciate an answer that doesn't go against my assumptions. If it goes, then just save your time and go on without posting, don't try to fix me. Thanks!

lol, you must be joking and I'm feeding a troll

...or this is rhetoric and what you say needs a rebuttal: your assumptions and conclusion are wrong, your rhetoric 'begs the question' -- and this discussion continues for other correspondents and the search engines. (It's only fair to balance out what you've said with a contrasting side, right? And why would your assumptions have elevated status?)

...or you don't want to listen to anything different from you and so you need to hear a call to *be better* -- especially when it comes to welcoming people different than you to collaborate with you in the world. I think it's also possible that you need to be told in no uncertain terms that this attitude will make you do things that harm people (whether you mean to or not) and is unwelcome in civil company. When it comes to 'unwelcome', this isn't an approach conventionally used on this site and I'm also a guest of this site's host, so I'l hold in back.

K3n.

Categorizing human being with nicknames and/or emails?

Posted Dec 22, 2021 11:52 UTC (Wed) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link]

> PS: I would appreciate an answer that doesn't go against my assumptions.

Please lead with that statement next time instead of ending your post with it. If we can't reply to your (faulty) assumptions, it would be nicer to save us the time we took reading it.

Categorizing human being with nicknames and/or emails?

Posted Dec 23, 2021 10:09 UTC (Thu) by kronat (guest, #117266) [Link] (2 responses)

> (...) due to broader context (eg, a project may not reject submissions from a trans contributor, or discriminate directly against that contributor, but may make jokes about other trans people that leave the contributor feeling unsafe).

This is one of the active discrimination that I missed, and that alone would have been a good answer for my post, without arguing over my assumptions. Thanks. I must say that the focus of an open-source community should be (at least, in my opinion) to improve the technical content and/or offers. Anything that goes against that is either something to remove or fix, and making jokes about trans (or women, etc.,) is not improving in any way the technical matter.

> (...) Your assumptions are wrong (...)

I still believe that they are not. And, as reported above, there is at least one answer (I guess there are more) that holds without going against them. Maybe we had two different views on what "active" discrimination is (and, after your answer, I realized that I must have switched the phrase and used the term "passive" discrimination, which would have been less prone to misunderstanding).

> Please lead with that statement next time instead of ending your post with it.

I will, thanks for pointing it out.

> If we can't reply to your (faulty) assumptions, it would be nicer to save us the time we took reading it.

Assumptions based on personal beliefs cannot be disputed or imposed, right? Unless they are used against (as opposed to) other assumptions based on personal beliefs as well (in which case, it is wasted time), a circumstance that doesn't apply to what I wrote. I did not try to impose my view on someone. I simply asked for an explanation, or an example, without going against my personal opinion (the example existed, in the end). Anyway, at least some of you were polite, rather than someone else (nice example of inclusiveness). Thanks.

Categorizing human being with nicknames and/or emails?

Posted Dec 24, 2021 14:10 UTC (Fri) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] (1 responses)

> Assumptions based on personal beliefs cannot be disputed or imposed, right?

Opinions cannot be disputed or imposed. Facts are (almost always) either right or wrong, with your personal beliefs in the matter being irrelevant. Trying to assume a fact is a logical fallacy (appeal to false authority).

Categorizing human being with nicknames and/or emails?

Posted Dec 24, 2021 15:33 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

What you are missing, is that facts are VERY OFTEN a matter of belief ... a very quick look at history will provide ample evidence ...

And science is very much a matter of statistics - no right or wrong there, just probability.

I guess you're thinking of Maths - things there are usually much more black-and-white - but even there it's a fact that people CHOOSE TO BELIEVE that whatever theorem they take a fancy to actually has some relevance to reality.

Cheers,
Wol

Categorizing human being with nicknames and/or emails?

Posted Dec 23, 2021 23:30 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

> I would appreciate an answer that doesn't go against my assumptions.

You just prove that you don't know what a scientific method is.

Sad.

This article is not about an opinion, it reports about observable differences.

What if I'm a Nazi, am I welcome ?

Posted Dec 22, 2021 15:52 UTC (Wed) by Lawless-M (guest, #155377) [Link] (6 responses)

If you don't allow Jewish-Holocaust deniers into your group you are underrepresenting that community.

How many openly racist contributors do you have? Zero - surely that's problematic.

What if I'm a Nazi, am I welcome ?

Posted Dec 22, 2021 16:07 UTC (Wed) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (3 responses)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance may help here.

It is perfectly in order to say "XYZ is off topic here and is not tolerated in this discussion". Harder to positively permit and justify conversations espousing Holocaust denial in a multi-national project where it may actually be illegal in several jurisdictions - more straightforward to say that it cannot be tolerated and Holocaust deniers will not be tolerated here.

I've the (abstract) right to shout "Fire" in a crowded auditorium and cause a stampede: exercise of that right is unlikely to be tolerated anywhere in practice.

What if I'm a Nazi, am I welcome ?

Posted Dec 22, 2021 17:04 UTC (Wed) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (2 responses)

There are two ways that democracy can die: from the right, and from the left. In Western liberal democracies, it is most likely to die from the right through politicians and their followers refusing to accept the results of free and fair elections. In those same countries, it is most likely to die from the left through people reciting that idiotic drivel from Karl Popper.

The premise of Karl Popper's assertion is that a people with the freedom to speak both tolerant and intolerant thoughts to each other will by majority choose to agree with the intolerant and not to live in an open society, and therefore that an open society can only be maintained by suppressing dissent. Screw him, because what he's proposing wouldn't be an open society, but an autocratic regime run by the illiberal left. The fact that leftists always respond to "no, you can't use the government to enforce your pet ideology" with Karl Popper quotes is because an autocratic regime run by them is exactly what they're going for.

What if I'm a Nazi, am I welcome ?

Posted Dec 23, 2021 8:40 UTC (Thu) by k3ninho (subscriber, #50375) [Link]

(Aside: it's still illegal in some countries to be a Nazi, so don't break the law. If you do want to break the law for the sake af fascist power, you are more likely than not to be difficult to work with and bad for the community. Because "you create bad outcomes for us," I would not tolerate a fascist.)

Back to this conversation, I think your quote is incomplete, "right" and "left" being poles at each extreme of a single dimension:
>[When considered as a line with everything mapped to points on the line] There are two ways that democracy can die: from the right, and from the left.

Do you want power and/or do you want responsibility? That's *two* dimensions, and you might get clustering, but there's individual variation you have to pay attention to it you're going to get enough people to form a consensus for the /Demos/.

Another two dimensions: is your authority over land you've got generally-agreed property rights to absolute within that space and/or are the consequences of what you do unavoidable in the closed-loop ecosystem.of our planet?

I concede maybe life is one-dimensional for you: insiders versus outsiders. Change it up because civilisation has moved on, we can accommodate people different than us and we found we have better outcomes for more people when we do. Democracy doesn't die when we work with outsiders, that's the point of this Diversity effort by the Linux Foundation.

p.s. any sincere investigation of what "the left" wants find more opinions than bodies and more things-wanted than decisions made, a much wider collection of people where you'd hope to, but it's harder to, find consensus. I think you've got the "only tool us a hammer: every problem a nail" view on government: it might look like an autocratic regime when you don't agree with the choices made by government, but that is irrelevant once you've voted to recod your contribution to the consensus of the demos.

p.p.s. Even this voting process does not give you the level of agency that is promised. I look like the people who run my country, I'm educated and technical and let's imagine I'm kind and want to help out. Practising rhetoric, how to make points persuasively to a crowd, feels like it ought to make a difference -- I find me persuasive! -- but it's more noise in a crowded space and doesn't change hearts and/or minds. So I have to find another way to help out, and it turns out that protecting democracy looks nothing like the things figurehead politicians appear to do.

K3n.

What if I'm a Nazi, am I welcome ?

Posted Dec 23, 2021 15:32 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

You are badly misrepresenting Karl Popper on this. To be fair, many people shutting down discussion with a cartoon are too, but I think you seem to be taking the cartoon at face value.

In fact what he said was (and, I'm dangerously paraphrasing, but you can look this up): it would be foolish to try to suppress speech about intolerant philosophies, as long as they can be countered by argument, but if someone says no to having a rational discussion and goes to violence instead, we should as a society retain the right to meet that with violence.

I'm going to leave out my own opinion on any of that, but it's clearly not what you're saying his premise is.

What if I'm a Nazi, am I welcome ?

Posted Dec 22, 2021 23:58 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> If you don't allow Jewish-Holocaust deniers into your group you are underrepresenting that community.

"You have a right to your own opinions, you don't have a right to your own facts".

There's a big difference between believing something that lies somewhere on the spectrum between fairytale and reality; and believing something else that has been thoroughly debunked (or proven).

Cheers,
Wol

What if I'm a Nazi, am I welcome ?

Posted Dec 23, 2021 23:32 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

Well, with that attitude, you as a contributor will be problematic since you obviously are not interested in a common good and in positive contributions to a project.

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Dec 23, 2021 8:53 UTC (Thu) by LtWorf (subscriber, #124958) [Link]

As a person with a disability… wow they wrote "dis/ability"… now all my problems are solved!

(it just makes ctrl+f harder)

Well, this is embarrassing for LWN readership

Posted Dec 23, 2021 15:51 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] (6 responses)

The report notes that many people do not feel comfortable in our communities.

The overwhelming reaction? Is it "wow, I wonder what we could do to make that better?" Nope. It's disbelief that there's a real issue.

A first comment saying that it's "sad" that efforts to do something about it are spreading. A comment a little further down framing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts as in opposition to "reason and knowledge". The phrase, and I am not making this up, "I was wondering how discrimination against trans people even works."

And of course, yes, a comparison involving Nazis.

No wonder people don't feel welcome.

It's exhausting.

Well, this is embarrassing for LWN readership

Posted Dec 23, 2021 16:13 UTC (Thu) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link]

It is. It is _so_ exhausting.

I am working in a corner of the free software world that has some pretty good rules and processes -- I came out as trans, and in a day KDE's sysadmins had changed everything except for my mailing list subs, Libera's people had helped me change my irc presence, and I was basically good to go and tell my team. Yay!

Within my team, most people were fine with version 2.0 of me, though some people were worried I was going to poison myself, and also that there would be a huge on-line backlash on vKontakte, which didn't happen, but for which they made contingency plans.

And KDE is good: we have at least five trans project maintainers, that I know of. I'm just the newest one.

But then... Yes, discussions like this one. When I saw the title of the post, I knew the direction the discussion would take. I've also gotten explained the nature and purpose of Krita, the project I maintain, at me. Casual misgendering, casual "we were friends for so long, can't I just deadname you, having to rightname you is so distressing to me". On the KDE e.V. internal mailing list, I've had to stay silent when a member talked about "why are people okay with casual genital mutilation of kids, but can't accept..." -- fill in the blanks, not a discussion for right now, but I still get worked up about it because I couldn't answer.

Then again, even without me being me or me being about me, going back a bit... I always made sure that anyone who wanted to work on Krita got welcomed. This caught attention at LGM in Saarbruecken. I was literally interviewed by Heise journalist about "why come there so many women in Krita, and none in any of the other projects" -- and that was before I came out, even. We had three women and one man present (me...).

I got told off by maintainers of other libre graphics projects for having so many women -- surely that was just me being a perve and looking for them, for it was clear that women weren't really interested in free and open source software, otherwise they would hang around and contribute, right?

You're so right about it being so exhausting. Thank you for saying that.

Well, this is embarrassing for LWN readership

Posted Dec 23, 2021 23:36 UTC (Thu) by jschrod (subscriber, #1646) [Link]

Thank you for writing this comment.

It is scary.

Well, this is embarrassing for LWN readership

Posted Dec 28, 2021 16:16 UTC (Tue) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (3 responses)

> The overwhelming reaction?

This sounds like comments here (or anywhere else) are representative of something. They're not. Here comments don't even have a number of "likes" to feed that universal misconception.

> It's exhausting.

I'm sure it is. Genuine question: why make it even more exhausting by reading the comments here? I sincerely hope reading these is not part of your job or something?

The Internet has given all soapbox preachers the extraordinary power to reach the entire world. It will be progress only after most of us learn to actively ignore them. It may take a generation or two but I'm confident we'll get there.

BTW this is why many "social" platforms have no "dislike" counter. Youtube just removed theirs. Don't dislike: spend your time better and like something else.

https://xkcd.com/386/

Well, this is embarrassing for LWN readership

Posted Jan 4, 2022 15:59 UTC (Tue) by nye (guest, #51576) [Link] (2 responses)

> > It's exhausting.

> I'm sure it is. Genuine question: why make it even more exhausting by reading the comments here? I sincerely hope reading these is not part of your job or something?

On that topic, I took a couple of years from reading LWN, on the grounds that it's *so awful* that it was severely harming my mental health and progressively making me a worse person online as a consequence.

Underneath it all there is enough valuable information here that it seemed worth tapering back on to once I was in a better place, but it's by far the most unpleasant part of the web that I interact with on a regular basis, so I know to Avoid if I'm already stressed.

Well, this is embarrassing for LWN readership

Posted Jan 6, 2022 19:08 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (1 responses)

You must never be using Twitter, Facebook and other popular "social" media...

Back to the original point: it's not like anyone reads _all_ comments on LWN. The comments for this article were especially easy to avoid: very strange to find you here now.

There are very long and off-topic digressions sometimes in other articles but the threading makes it possible to skip them. A feature to "fold" any sub-thread would be awesome.

Well, this is embarrassing for LWN readership

Posted Jan 7, 2022 3:29 UTC (Fri) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

I read all comments on LWN, via the unread comments link:

https://lwn.net/Comments/unread

Admittedly I do a lot of skim reading of them though.

Dis/ability, of course it's a PDF, and no one asks us

Posted Dec 24, 2021 1:02 UTC (Fri) by Devinprater (guest, #144011) [Link] (6 responses)

So, I'm a blind person. I'd like to be one of the people who call themselves "a person that is blind," but blindness isn't just a nuisance to me. It darkens everything it touches, and it touches everything about my life. I can only see bright light, and only ambient light, not directed light, like on an LCD.

As for my thoughts on this research:

* Dis/ability, because who would do Control + F (or C-s on a real operating system) to find the parts one is interested in?
* Of course it's a PDF, because there are no open document formats, or electronic publication formats, and PDF's are known to be the most accessible formats out there. Right? Right? Oh well don't worry, blind people wouldn't want to read publications that slightly concerns them, right? Right? Naaaahhh! This is for researchers, by researchers... Right?
* No one asks us: Which brings me to the last point, a side-point from the last. Like, I don't need stuff in Braille (although Cups does have a "print to BRF" option). I don't need it in plain text. I just need it in a good format, and PDF is *never* that. Ever. Also isn't PDF non-free? I mean, I think so, so much of FOSS' accessibility issues: Gnome 3 and 40 being pretty crappy with Orca, the Linux GUI screen reader, KDE only recently taking up the, now difficult, challenge of making itself the other *popular* desktop environment to be accessible to blind people, crossplatform GUI frameworks being pretty bad for accessibility, all would be extremely lessened if FOSS folks would reach out and ask "Hey, how does this (site, app, document, CLI tool) work for you?" There are very few blind people that use Linux, mainly because not many people want to practically downgrade their experience significantly just so they can say they use FOSS. There are few who have lived with it, from the days of Gnome 2, which was the best and why we all pretty much stick to Mate like glu, to what we have now, Gnome 3/4 being the default DE on all major distros because it's just that great, right? And KDE Neon now even having Orca during install.

Also, once you get Linux installed, you have to somehow find out about this checkbox in the "personalize" section of your preferences, and find the "assistive Technology" option, and enable it. Yes, you have to enable desktop support for this screen reader. No other platform does this. Once you turn on the screen reader, you're good. I think Debian does this for you, and maybe, just maybe, Ubuntu does too. But with Ubuntu Mate's installer having a problem where you have to log out and back into the live environment to have the installer be accessible, I wouldn't trust them if they can't even get that far correct. Of course, Linux isn't all of FOSS, but a lot of FOSS works best on Linux, or is better integrated there, and is the biggest test of FOSS everywhere. Also, we can't forget the GNU Accessibility Statement:

https://www.gnu.org/accessibility/accessibility.en.html

Here, it mentions stats from 2005, which I hope that page has been updated since then. It also mentions Silverlight and Flashplayer, which are both dead, or undead, technologies. Also hey lookie, PDF is one of the technologieis discouraged in usage. But what's the research paper in? Mmmm?

For the record, I love free/open source software. I love the community. I love what it stands for. But I hate how far it has to come. If I were sighted, I'd be all in on KDE on Arch Linux or Fedora, probably would be coding and helping out by now. And yes, blind people can code, but because so many of the easy ways to learn, visual highlighting and quick spotting of syntax errors and big IDE's that make things easier, I learn through books and sites like Codecademy and use Emacs or VS Code, although only Emacs with Emacspeak provides access to syntax highlighting and best keyboard access. Also while most sighted people can install Steam and Wine and get all the games they want, there are very few games on Linux that are accessible, Wine has no accessibility support, and neither does Steam. We can play some audio games in Wine, though, which is nice.

Also, CLI and TUI apps, I think, have the highest chance of being accessible. Stuff like Nano, VIM, and IRSSI work great, well as long as you turn off any status bars, timestamps, line numbers and extranious info. But CLI apps are seen as either a bad UI, like the Inform7 CLI app, or for power-users, like VIM or Emacs. I think if we focused on user-facing designed CLI apps, we could have a great environment for anyone that prefers text over icons and such, very much including blind people. And I'm not saying blind people don't like GUIs. Just about every blind person that has a smart phone has an iPhone, at least in the Western world. But it would take, I'd bet, much less time to make one of the TUI Reddit apps more accessible than it would take to make, say, a GUI card game accessible. For the record, all PDA-style devices before they all switched to Android, ran a whole OS based on text-based interfaces. File managers, word processors, email clients, web browsers, frotz interpretor for playing IF, calendar, clock and alarm, all that. The interface was spoken and displayed in braille, but it was still text. Most ran on Windows CE, one ran Linux and was how I was introduced to Emacs, although the source code is not, yet, available.

I still would much rather have the same interface as everyone else. I'd love to use KDE full-time, as an enjoyable interface. I'd love to feel like using a computer is fun and interesting and adventurous, with colorful soundscapes and things to give me an analog of font changes, formatting like bold and italic, interesting things like that. For now, though, Emacs is all that provides that, and most blind people find it much too complicated for them. FOSS still has plenty of chances, as Windows 7 and 8 become unsupported, and Windows 11 supports so few computers, and blind people don't have the money to get the new computers that have the TPM2 chip and all. Sometimes I have hope for FOSS. And then we get another PDF and my hope fades. Nothing for us without us.

Dis/ability, of course it's a PDF, and no one asks us

Posted Dec 24, 2021 14:04 UTC (Fri) by mmarsh (subscriber, #17029) [Link] (3 responses)

Thanks for posting this comment! I'm used to producing PDF from LaTeX, but now I'm going to make sure I can also produce good-quality EPUB. I was looking at that for a reference book I'm creating for my students, but I was hitting snags that were somewhat discouraging. I'll definitely work harder to make sure the book is as good in EPUB format as it is in PDF.

Dis/ability, of course it's a PDF, and no one asks us

Posted Dec 24, 2021 15:34 UTC (Fri) by Devinprater (guest, #144011) [Link] (2 responses)

Thanks. EPUB is a great format that should have taken over from PDF years ago. Read-only, readable on mobile devices, desktops, laptops, Emacs... and in structured, accessible HTML. All you really have to do is make sure your images have descriptions, I'm sure LaTex can do that, and just use structure like actual list items and headings and such, and you're good.

Dis/ability, of course it's a PDF, and no one asks us

Posted Dec 24, 2021 17:35 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Oh the joys of taking a hammer to a screw ...

PDF and EPUB address very different use cases. And HTML is god-frickin' awful as a replacement for EPUB.

PDF is a fix-once layout tool. EPUB is a display-anywhere no-fix tool. And HTML, well! It's absolutely useless for its intended purpose - the number of times I print a document only for the print version to bear no resemblance whatsoever to the on-screen version!

Still. I guess you're a perfect example of people who think that there's no place for specialist languages until they've been bastardised by corner case after corner case into a Turing-complete mess completely unsuitable for their original purpose...

Sorry, but PDF has its uses and EPUB/HTML is a totally unfit replacement. Although I feel your pain - PDF is unfit for many of the purposes for which it is abused ...

Cheers,
Wol

Dis/ability, of course it's a PDF, and no one asks us

Posted Dec 24, 2021 18:22 UTC (Fri) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link]

I work with colleagues who rely on screen readers: PDF is lovely if you want an archival format that won't change - but useless for screen readers in general. Well structured HTML following WCAG guidelines with ARIA - and anything can read it. EPUB - don't know.
See also https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/

Similarly, if you need to change foreground/background colours, font sizes, highlighting - you can do that from CSS or similar directives

PDF is a free format but use of it disenfranchises a small but significant minority. Text to speech, screen readers and other assistive technologies are behind on Linux - they pose hard problems and any informed programming effort would be more than welcome. The drift to handing everything "in the cloud" may also not help Linux users as it continues.
[And yes, there are a bunch of us living with other conditions / identifying as neurodivergent or whatever]

Dis/ability, of course it's a PDF, and no one asks us

Posted Dec 31, 2021 2:51 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

> Also isn't PDF non-free?

It's an “open” standard in the same way HTML is - technically possible to use it for good, but anyone who's ever used the View Source option on Google sites knows how worthless that label is.

Dis/ability, of course it's a PDF, and no one asks us

Posted Dec 31, 2021 8:10 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

:-)

Having tried to view pdf source I know exactly what you mean ...

Cheers,
Wol

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Jan 5, 2022 22:39 UTC (Wed) by amarao (guest, #87073) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm a white male and I feel uncomfortable in some opensource projects I've tried to contribute to. Is it racist androphbic bias or some mainteiners are just jerks?

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Jan 5, 2022 22:48 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I think there's a strong undercurrent of people on the autistic spectrum. With all that implies about lack of social graces.

Thing is, most people on the spectrum WANT to be nice blokes (because it is mostly men), but they just don't know how.

So it's two-way - you need to respect them for being good coders, but sometimes you need to call them out for being social jerks. One project I'm on, the guy who does most of the work knows he has problems, so he actually appreciates being called on it. I suspect that's a lot more common than people realise ...

That's why the advice is often to lurk on the communications channels before joining in - easier said than done sometimes.

Cheers,
Wol

The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusionin open source

Posted Jan 5, 2022 23:18 UTC (Wed) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

In the general case, yes, some maintainers are sufficiently generally-jerkish that any exclusionary behaviour blends into the noise floor of their general jerkishness. Some of them have become (in)famous for it.

(Oh, and I can assure you that plenty of my white countrymen are quite happy to indulge in exclusionary behaviour towards people that they would cheerfully agree are white, especially on a Saturday night after five pints and a couple of shots.)


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