Well, one thing that could be done to change this would be to stop complaining about how one of the most meritocratic groups of people in the history of mankind is hostile, and get forking.
The code is thataway:
The code is thataway:
Why don't you tell me. One of these is female (and pretty accomplished in the open source community), one of these is non-white ... which is which ?
* thegrendel.abs
* tille
* pgquilles
If you can't, obviously the reason is not just racism. On mailinglists, github and irc, skin color and sex don't exist. If there is a difference, MAYBE it's the result of companies not hiring these people to work on open source, or because sex and ethnicity influences whether and how much you work on open source (actually I think it's more about location. Open source contributors almost always live close to universities that were very involved in the creation of open source 20-30 years ago. Because those universities are effectively only in USA and northwest Europe, the ethnicity is skewed, but there are plenty of mostly white countries that are massively underrepresented in open source projects).
As to why people are hostile to other groups, a very significant portion of them are either teenagers in highschool or university students (and even then, skewed towards the younger univ students). They're not a welcoming group, no, that's true. But they are pretty universally not welcoming, asking for someone's sex/color on lkml ... is not something you want to do if you want your reputation to survive. Hell, there are flamewars that started because of statements that someone was somewhat richer in kilograms than medically advisable, when it was absolutely true.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/10/13/social.networking... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_segregation
Neither race or gender are fields that even CAN be filled out on Github. An individual's propensity to integrate into the programming community is still their own. Your life is yours to create.
Although it may be true that existing social and economic circumstances add obstacles to these individuals finding the endeavors of the open source community attractive -- it straddles absurdity and comedy to address these social and economic forces here.
Frankly I find this pretty weak. If you want offensive pieces of known science relating to race, why not go with Darwin's "island species", which basically says that there are 2 ways evolution can go:
1) there are barriers (artificial or not) between races. At this point races slowly evolve into species (at which point they fully diverge). Racism is theorized to be one such barrier.
You might think the above is a bad situation ... until you think about the only alternative.
2) There are no barriers between races. At this point races are a temporary phenomenon : all but one race will die out. Now you might think that if you put 2 races of animal together the surviving group will be a mixed form, however that appears not to be the case. The result of mixing 2 races, is that one only a single race survives.
The reason is simple. Take "most blacks" genetic makeup in the united states. There was a period where people preferentially had kids with white people. This has resulted in that the large majority of african americans have a number of generations which were mixed-black + white person in their ancestry, increasing the ratio of white:african genes. The problem is what happens in a couple where a mixed + white marriage is in both parents' ancestry. When 2 second-generation mixed black marry, the odds are very good that the child will have more indo-european genes and less african ones than either of their parents. This is already plainly visible on the street in the US, if you've been to Africa. Most african americans lack several typical black characteristics (large lips, large color change between front and back of the hand, and the individual hairs on the skin are much thicker, but there are less of them) and in more internal characteristics (for instance there is barely any difference between african americans and whites in lactose intolerance anymore, whereas in Africa it's easy to find regions with 80%+ of people lactose intolerant). It is no longer unheard of for 2 african-american parents to have a child that is white (in phenotype), and it's about to become the norm.
Now while it's true that the advantage of one set of genes was generated somewhat artificially for this group, the theory says that there will always be some reason that one group's offspring will outnumber the other group (same argument as for natural selection, really), and this will always happen. Whether it be because of social preferences or some other property doesn't really matter.
To be clear? Slavery made most of America's economic infrastructure possible. The subjugation of women made America's economic infrastructure possible. The Internet was born out of those economic foundations. There is no meritocracy in a vacuum.
Not to be too reductionist, but I believe a big narrative may help here: It's like when some bully barges in on a group of kids playing a new game unknown to the bully. The bully calls its friends over, and they all demand that scores be kept and aggression be matched. Yet they fail to understand that the game could be played just as well without the contrivance.
[0]: http://www.genderratic.com/p/1140/patriarchy-1-0-and-the-ape...