Why Isn't Open Source A Gateway For Coders Of Color?

Relying on open source development to gain recognition and fame is like depending on unpaid internship to get your feet in the door.

...or coders with two X chromosomes?

Allegedly 1.5% of open source software contributors are female. So you are more likely to win the lottery than finding yourself working with a black woman on an open source project.

I agree there are systemic issues of racism keeping blacks and latinos away from open source, but those issues have nothing to do with open-source per se. The free time issue is a big one. Access to computers at home in early childhood is probably even bigger. Consider Bill Gates getting computer access as a 13 year old in 1968, this was an incredible leg up, something which gradually broadened but when I was a kid in the 80s I was still relatively privileged to have access. These days the financial barriers are extremely low as you can get started programming on the cheapest netbook, and free wi-fi abounds.

These days I think getting into open source is great advice for minorities, and I think they will find it to be as close a meritocracy and "color-blind" environment as they will find in America today. That said, it is an inherently harsh environment to learn where there is a pretty low tolerance for beginners, and it could be quite discouraging for someone just getting their feet wet in programming. Also, if it's pitched heavily as a gateway to a lucrative career by parents and authorities a lot of people are going to be pushed into it who might not have the intrinsic interest to succeed in the pedantic world of telling a computer exactly what to do.

That said, one has to imagine that the number of blacks and latinos with a very strong potential to be good programmers is probably severely under-represented in industry as well as open source simply due to lack of early opportunity and privilege.

It doesn't have to be explicit "use X% of your time to contribute to open source" to count as getting paid to do it.

When using OSS libraries on commercial products I've found the need to fix bugs or other problems and have sent pull requests with those changes afterwards. Granted not all clients approve this, but I wouldn't describe it as "few-to-no other companies" that allow it.

>One of the spaces you might think would be a gateway for developers of color to enter the industry is through open source software development. You don't have to know somebody or have a degree in software engineering or get hired to participate in an open-source project. You can jump right in and start writing some code.

This sounds like the author is resigned to the fact that colored people don't go to college. Is that the premise of this article? What about the tiny percentage of colored college students why have any interest in software development?

>But in Haibel's experience, the open-source world is even whiter and more male than the world of proprietary software. "It's very clear that the open source community is whiter than the software community as a whole," she says.

Wait, this seems to imply that the fact that there aren't many women or colored coders is because the white men in charge refuse to hire them on this basis. This is in stark contrast to reality where the fact that is not mentioned here is that there is little or no interest to code from these groups.

>There are larger societal factors that contribute to the whiteness of the tech world, more broadly. Blacks and Latinos are more likely to attend under-resourced schools, they're underrepresented in math and science fields at every level of higher education and increasingly so the higher they go, and are less likely than whites to

This is such garbage. Blacks and Latinos in the same schools and in the same socioeconomic status as their White, Asian and Indian counter parts become coders at the same rates. Why do journalists always try to make everything about race unfairness?

There is no story here. Blacks and Hispanics aren't coders very often because they don't have ambition to do that. Wither it be cultural or genetic is not exactly known but it is not because they are disadvantaged. what is all this crap about them contributing to open source?

Would we ever see an article about how Indians and Persians are overrepresented in gas station and liquor store ownership (a very lucrative career) and how white people should do x to catch up? White people don't aspire to do that, end of (non) story.