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)
In reply to: The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusion in open source by Wol
Parent article: The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusion in open source

> 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.