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

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.