21–30 of 80 posts
You can jump right in and start writing some code. Will it be deployed? I don't imagine the pay-off to be immediate, or self-correcting (teaching/mentoring). I can't imagine how open source is somehow a teaching/development code base for beginners.
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 i…
> 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. You have been watching too much MSNBC. Young Blacks and Latinos watch 3-4 hours of television per day and play 2+ hours of video games. There goes your free…
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 i…
In this thread: Lies open source developers tell themselves.
It's a sad joke Rubyconf attendees yearly confuse @bryanl and @daksis with each other, but it's happened at every Rubyconf i've been too (which is granted 3 but it's there).
Open Source is a community, and communities are about who you know, and how you interact with them. Open Source communities do nothing to fix or address the structural or cultural elements of racism.
Success in open source is like success in anything else. It's about building something that other people care about, and promoting yourself and your work to others (or having someone else promote it for you). That last component is entirely socio-cultural. There is no meritocratic component to it.
It's again worth noting that the modern etymology of the term 'meritocracy' was satire against the concept we identify it with: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meritocracy#Etymology
Being good at what you do and working hard is necessary but not sufficient to being recognized and successful.
According to Wikipedia 72% of the population of the USA are white, so maybe 8 in 10 is not really that much of an indication of discrimination or disadvantage. (72% boils down to "more than 7 in 10").
You can jump right in and start writing some code. Will it be deployed? I don't imagine the pay-off to be immediate, or self-correcting (teaching/mentoring). I can't imagine how open source is somehow a teaching/development code base for beginners.
So if not overt, the racism must be passive and environmental. But the relative abundance of Asian (Indo/Pakistani and/or Oriental) members in IT and FOSS software suggest that there's not an obvious or passive "White Power" conspiracy going on there.
Economic issues, education, and free time make some sense as barriers, and these are disproportionately shared among the different races (in the USA at least).
In case anyone is wondering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color
It's not clear to me that there's overt racism in any FOSS communities (e.g. racial slurs on email lists, active rejection of visible minorities at conferences). Perhaps I miss that kind of thing because I'm white, but I've certainly never met any overt bigots. Or maybe the bigots save that kind of thing for one-on-one so as to have plausible deniability? (For what it's worth, no one confided in me, as a white man, a…
It's not clear to me that there's overt racism in any FOSS communities (e.g. racial slurs on email lists, active rejection of visible minorities at conferences). Perhaps I miss that kind of thing because I'm white, but I've certainly never met any overt bigots. Or maybe the bigots save that kind of thing for one-on-one so as to have plausible deniability? (For what it's worth, no one confided in me, as a white man, a…
This is a common argument but I think it's kind of irrelevant. It's not untrue, but it doesn't suggest that there is no bias against other groups (women, blacks, hispanics, etc.). I think it's fair to say Americans by and large are extremely comfortable around Asian people and not so comfortable around blacks or Mexicans. Programmers are no different.