Comment by fivelessminutes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fivelessminutes | Hacker News Reader

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fivelessminutes

> Someone working two jobs to support a family has little free time for open source development

Yeah, so because of that they don't 'select' themselves to contribute to FOSS. If they don't have a PC, or can't program, likewise. I'm not responsible for any of that, as a FOSS maintainer, they turn up with patches in their hand, or they don't. If they don't, it's totally out of scope for me. With FOSS I don't even have a way to know such users exist.

If they want to contribute something, I can spend my time assisting that to happen, or not, that's the only button I can push.

>> cares > slave

I mean cares about race in the context of treating their patch differently because of it, this is the implication of the article. Maintainers are motivated to take in useful code.

> developers regular post pictures of sexy

If devs want to do that, they're not breaking any law. But a lot of contributors (eg, ones logging in on a work pc) would find it intolerable to the project's detriment. They'd lose me at tne word 'discord' anyway.

Then you agree there are other factors than "self-selection", yes?

> If they don't, it's totally out of scope for me

This article about "Open Source Communities" and "Open source leadership".

There's plenty of FOSS projects which have no communities. I have several. I don't need a CoC since I'm the only point of contact.

Do you want a project community? I don't. I'm a lousy community manager.

If you do, which people do you want to encourage to be in that community? What social practices do you want to have frowned upon? If you have no limits, what do you do about griefers? If people break those limits, what do you do?

> I mean cares about race in the context of treating their patch differently

I understand. But why not also care about people who could submit patches but don't?

> intolerable to the project's detriment

Good point! Losing possible corporate contributions due to NSFW images is very similar to, say, losing possible voluntary contributions for having a rude and aggressive management style, or for other harassing community practices.

I'll try to remember that example in future discussions - thanks!

You might be surprised how many contributors you might gain with NSFW content. All the evil people need an occupation too. That business doesn't want to be associated with it is mostly due to other reasons.

If your open source project is for business, you can of course chose to have any content restriction you want. But there cannot be a general rule. Projects on github are endangered enough to be both, abused and helped by corporate input. I don't the MS embrace care program to be extinguished in phase 2.

Most projects are projects of passion and if that passion includes pictures of naked people, who am I to argue against that?

"evil people"? Do you really think that or are you trying to put words in my mouth?

I'm not arguing for or against any type of project. Even those "mostly due to other reasons" include Bona Fide Occupational Qualifications; a FOSS project for nudist organizations may include pictures of naked people and be developed at someone's work even within EEOC guidelines.

What I am arguing against are the ideas that, when talking about "WTF is Wrong with Open Source Communities": 1) "self-selection" is all that meaningful, esp. as the piece mentions issues with that concept, and 2) lack of discrimination of patch acceptance due to submitter's protected group membership status is the primary standard.

You can look at the pipeline of programmers and you will see a demographic pretty similar to open source. The usual story here is that this is also due to discrimination, which isn't based on evidence and should be dismissed without further comment.

I do think there are factors, large ones even, that keep some women out of tech and they aren't sourced in biology. None of these are adressed by the suggestions in the article.

I think the largest expression of sexism actually comes from people that suggest "solutions" like this. Using stereotypes now to make it clear in how I see positions like these. They wouldn't ever go into a nail saloon, complain about legal security or their behavior and cite it as the reason why they have difficulties hiring males. But it is with males that you insinuate discrimination. That sounds very well like prejudice to me and I also think the referenced studies came to prederterminded conclusion and are of little scientific value.

Most open source projects don't contain nudes, but some actually do. I don't think this is a problem. To think this is the reason women are kept out of the industry is nonsensical to me. I am missing even the hint of truth here.

> You can look at the pipeline of programmers and you will see a demographic pretty similar to open source.

Source please? Last I heard of, that was not the case.

As https://www.wired.com/2017/06/diversity-open-source-even-wor... contexualizes about the research published at https://opensourcesurvey.org/2017/ :

] GitHub, the world's leading repository of open-source code, surveyed 5,500 open source users and developers from around the world on a range of topics. It also asked for demographic information. And it was informative. Of that randomly selected cohort, a full 95 percent of respondents were male. Only three percent identified as female and one percent as non-binary. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, about 22.6 percent of professional computer programmers are female. About 16 percent of respondents said they belonged to ethnic or national groups that are in the minority in the country they live in. Black, Asian, and Latino programmers account for a total of about 34 percent of programmers in the US, according to the bureau.

This is one of the studies referenced in the paper.

To be fair, these numbers (world-wide participation vs. US labor representation) are not directly comparable. But since a large number of FOSS developers come from the US, there would need to be a huge number of non-US male software developers to shift the demographics meaningfully.

Other counter-examples:

> Several surveys have found that existing FOSS communities are very homogenous populations and made up of mostly men. There are significantly fewer women participating in FOSS when compared to the percentage of women in computing in general. - https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_o...

> Although organizations are taking actions to increase gender diversity, the percentage of women in OSS projects are in average lower than 10%. Only 7.5% of the contributions to public code from the last 50 years were authored by women [6]. Women represent only 5.2% of the contributors to the Apache Software Foundation [7], 9.9% in Linux kernel [8],and 10% of OpenStack contributors [9], three of the largest and most well-known OSS communities. Indeed, women represent only 9% of GitHub users [10]. - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.08763.pdf

and here's the US statistics, from https://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.htm :

  Computer programmers: 417k employed, 21.1% women
  Software developers: 1,883k employed,  19.4% women
  Software quality assurance analysts and testers: 82K employed, 25.1% women

I don't know what '"solutions"' you are talking about. I don't understand your nail salon analogy. I don't know which referenced studies you refer to. I don't know why you are sure they are wrong, when your doubt could be an expression of your own prejudice.

And you're the one who brought up "naked people". The point wasn't that NSFW images keep women out of FOSS, it was an example of how FOSS project participation CANNOT be viewed as "self-selection" because, as fivelessminutes correctly points out "a lot of contributors (eg, ones logging in on a work pc)" would be in workplace environments which prohibit certain types of imagery, like "sexy women", which was the term I used.

To turn that into "the reason women are kept out of the industry" is completely misreading my comments.

In my country there are about 5% women in computer science. We had 5 women and 115 men in my bachelor degree, 1 and 15 in my master degree. Other European countries look quite similar. The 18% of the US is actually quite high in comparison, although that number is also declining. Not sure about the difference computer programmers and software developer, that is probably a topic of definitions of US labor statistics.

Women aren't discriminated against joining CS, they just decide themselves against it. The discrimination explanation does not hold up under scrutiny. But furthermore, it is quite easy to explain the OSS numbers on Github. It is pretty much exactly mirrors in the CS pipeline.

You are also a bad patron for those few women that are in OSS. Because the demanded formalities aren't meant to reduce discrimination, it is about big tech "embracing" OSS in my opinion. That is based on observations vastly nearer to reality than the discrimination story. So, wtf is wrong with the author?

And even IF numbers would be different between pipeline and OSS participation, it doesn't allow for the conclusion that were drawn. They are made up in my opinion.

Where is your evidence that "You can look at the pipeline of programmers and you will see a demographic pretty similar to open source"?

You described your country's employment statistics, although without evidence.

You haven't listed the breakdown of gender representation in your country's OSS participation, so there's nothing to compare.

And "Europe" is rather diverse region.

As counter-evidence, I point you to https://blog.honeypot.io/women-in-tech-germany/ which claims women make up 16.58% of IT in Germany, and that percentage is lower than 15 other European countries.

To be sure, I can't vouch for the quality of that research, but so far you have presented none.

> they just decide themselves against it

Again, where is your evidence. I have already in this thread listed reasons for why women (who have more pressure to be unpaid care givers) and the working poor (which in the US is correlated with minority status) may have LESS choice than average, so saying "just decide themselves" ignores the factors which go into that decision.

> "It is pretty much exactly mirrors in the CS pipeline."

Evidence please. Since the citations I gave show otherwise.

> it doesn't allow for the conclusion that were drawn

Which specific conclusions do you disagree with and what evidence do you have besides your personal observations and biases?

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