Comment by spaceheeder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spaceheeder | Hacker News Reader

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The user you're responding to was trying to articulate that whether or not people submit code is often silently affected by intangibles, like whether or not they think they'll be welcomed into the community and treated with respect and as an equal.

Even if you want to argue that the reasons people have for deciding not to get involved in open source are wrong or that those intangibles shouldn't affect open source projects for some other reason, the fact is that the pattern will nevertheless self-reinforce and affect open source by deterring more hands from coming on deck.

If x% of the white male population is developing on open source, but only x% * y% of the non-white-male population is, and getting people interested in open source isn't a zero-sum game, then making y as close to 100 as possible can only be a good thing. Making a concerted effort to recruit diversely, it is hoped, will have accelerating returns as intentional involvement of diverse contributors will lead to more and more organic involvement of diverse contributors.

Differences in rates between <enter social class here> will always exist. Instead of trying to shoot for equality between every single social class(which will never exist anywhere), we should consider fostering an environment that accepts its inequity in a positive manner.

The goal isn't to make everything equal (at least not in the exact sense that cannot exist anywhere), but to change the widespread perception that treatment of different groups is not equitable.

The goal of getting more hands on deck by going after low hanging fruit (ie people who are capable of contributing to open source but currently aren't doing so because they feel uncomfortable or excluded) seems to be a worthier goal than "fostering an environment that accepts its inequity in a positive manner."

If you disagree, you are welcome to flesh out your proposal and submit it to the FSF as a candidate high priority project.

  but to change the widespread perception that treatment of different groups is not equitable

What do you mean by this? I'm afraid I do not understand.

Quoting from above:

> ...whether or not people submit code is often silently affected by intangibles, like whether or not they think they'll be welcomed into the community and treated with respect and as an equal.

> Even if you want to argue that the reasons people have for deciding not to get involved in open source are wrong or that those intangibles shouldn't affect open source projects for some other reason, the fact is that the pattern will nevertheless self-reinforce and affect open source by deterring more hands from coming on deck.

Do you know how you appreciate your opinions being evaluated on their merits rather than through a political lens? Social movements -- which is something that the free software movement explicitly considers itself to be -- cannot hold anyone to that expectation and expect to make inroads with them. Just as countless entrepreneurs have commented in various threads on HN observing that making your product is never as hard as marketing it, so too are the challenges of convincing people to change...well, damn near anything, inclusive of how they think about the ethical relationship between people who make software and people who use it.

This new high priority project is, in the most cynical and utilitarian interpretation, very good marketing. More likely, it was proposed and approved by people who see an inherent value in it that you might not. If you still don't understand that value, there probably aren't a whole lot of other ways to explain it than have already been offered to you in this thread.

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