Funny that their code of conduct contains all the standard equal rights no matter what XYZ, while this was never Linus problem. He never lashed out on people because of gender, race or sexual preference. It should simply have said "Don't be an elitistic assh*le aginst people just doing their best."
Is it bad that nowadays I've trouble identifying whether this kind of categorization is redpillers bile or an accurate representation of an increasingly dominant extreme left? Would you have a quote from that lady, and if correct, how did she get in the position of writing Linux COC?
> Why didn’t anyone punch the reporter giving the nazi air time?
(Note that the last one is endorsing violence against journalists. Not cool.)
Though I think you have the wrong impression. Coraline wasn’t asked to write the Linux CoC. They just used a CoC she wrote: https://www.contributor-covenant.org/
OK, so I can't really find fault with the CoC itself, but the motivation as described in your link is indeed questionable, though I'd say worthy of discussion:
> Studies have shown that organizational cultures that value meritocracy often result in greater inequality. People with “merit” are often excused for their bad behavior in public spaces based on the value of their technical contributions. Meritocracy also naively assumes a level playing field, in which everyone has access to the same resources, free time, and common life experiences to draw upon. These factors and more make contributing to open source a daunting prospect for many people, especially women and other underrepresented people.
So, if merit is used to excuse bad behavior I agree that it's a problem (a fairly solvable one though I'd think). But I also detect an inequality-of-outcome kind of stance here, as inequality due to merits is seen as a bad thing. I just always have trouble imagining the end game of that kind of thinking - even in Stalinism, people with higher abilities were selected for various more demanding tasks. Are they saying that everyone is absolutely born with the same abilities? Because that's just so easy to falsify with data.
I think that quote reflects a concern about the equality of opportunity ("access to the same resources"), not outcome. And in particular, that rewarding merit as measured solely as the outcome, and not the struggle to reach it, will only reinforce that inequality, since two groups of people who have (on average) the same abilities will have different outcomes if they start from two different positions.
Part of the point is that the unprivileged don't get the same opportunities in many ways, so they don't do so well in tests but they still do well at the job; therefore, you need to give them extra leeway during recruiting and such.
Also, the experience of the less privileged is that some people use claimed-impartial tests and barriers to exclude them in particular, and so when a test comes along it is demotivating, as it might just be an attempt to exclude them. Look at the voting reforms in various places for examples of this.
Using tests to try for pure meritocracy only works when everyone has had the same kind of background and nobody has bias. Look at the examples of CVs/books sent around with just the name/gender changed and the huge difference in response rate to see the bias. Essentially, if you're recruiting (or filtering any set of people) and aren't actively controlling for bias (anonymization is key), you will be biased.
> Look at the examples of CVs/books sent around with just the name/gender changed and the huge difference in response rate to see the bias.
That's not true. The original studies used low class names for blacks and hispanics, but not for whites. (For example, they didn't use names like Cletus or Billy Ray.) Once this was corrected for, they found almost no bias in resume screening.[1]
From an organisation’s point of view, does it matter how one person came to be a better performer than another? Surely they just care about current state: this person performs better than this other person now.
Perhaps had their backgrounds been different, their performance would be different. Perhaps if the under-performer had more training, their performance would be better.
But right now, things aren’t different. From the organisation’s self-interested point of view, they should just choose the better performing candidate.
"Studies show" is carrying a lot of water. I don't have access to the study that is linked, but almost all of these studies about sexism in tech end up not being true. An excellent example was Gender Bias In Open Source: Pull Request Acceptance Of Women Vs. Men.[1] This study claimed to find evidence of sexism. If you looked at the data, it was clear that there wasn't any.[2] Still, it was the basis for articles by Vice.com[3], The Guardian[4], Business Insider[5], and the BBC[6]. None of these news organizations issued retractions. The bias in both academia and news organizations is such that they simply cannot be trusted to be accurate on this topic.
The bias in bay area tech companies is just as bad. If you express the slightest doubt about sexism being rampant in tech, you will be ostracized. If you speak up in protest when all the women in the office go to a free screening of Wonder Woman during work hours, while all the men have to stay and work, you will become persona non grata. These sorts of things have happened to me and others I know. It's infuriating. Even if sexism and racism are as bad as people like Coraline Ada claim, these "solutions" are making the problem worse. Discriminating on the basis of race and sex only serves to balkanize us and polarize opinions.
> None of these news organizations issued retractions.
And then this gets repeated, retweeted and multipied, and finally people start the discussion with "obviously...", "it is widely known that...", "as it's been established...". Not only it gets a life on its own, but you can receive social punishment for just trying to discuss that.
No, it's about how many so called meritocracies are not actually meritocracies and instead are nepotistic circle jerks of self reinforcing bad behaviour.
That people think it is about enforcing equal outcome shows how threatened they are by the idea that maybe they didn't get where they are by being brilliant but by being a mediocre straight white male promoted and supported by other mediocre straight white males.
It is extremely easy to look this up... Just check the screenshot in my above comment, Twitter, the post-meritocracy site, Coreline's blog, etc... When Coreline was Corey, he was not an activist - and was not given such power. When he was a man he worked in a meritocracy. Now that he's changed his gender he wants a "post-meritocracy." This is not hateful to say; it is merely an account of history. And if you're going to call me out for saying "he" - remember every cell in his body has a Y chromosome in it, and what language policing you will have to endure if it were enforced (which is it becoming, as you can see by the fact that my comment history is mostly censored).
That's actually pretty typical of crusaders, IME. Most of them don't actually want to end the Lord of the Flies pecking order. They just want to shift around who is on top crapping on people and who is getting crapped on. Generally speaking, they want to do the crapping (along with some highly arbitrary set of "their people") and whomever currently has privilege they would like to see getting crapped on.
Their "vision" is a form of revenge fantasy, basically, not actually a better world.
She is not communist, communism is all about meritocracy, I don't read anywhere in the books of Marx all this gender and equality bullshit.
Communism says that no matter who you are you are evaluated for the work you do, having policies that explicitally favorites womans is not communism, is discrimination against mens
I'm assuming by 'communism' you mean Marxist philosophy. The most accurate description would however probably be that morals like this don't exist in a metaphysical sense, but are tied to each stage in social development (hunter/gatherers, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and communism) [0].
Under socialism (the next stage from ours) workers would be rewarded according to contribution (meritocracy) whereas the final stage (communism) would reward humans according to need instead. It's a philosophy colored by the positivism and development optimism of the 1800 century, which tried to superimpose a deterministic (scientific) model on development, with contemporary Europe at its pinnacle.
Whether it is a correct theory remains to be seen (in a few thousand years, but I wouldn't hold my breath), but the case could be made that we are already gradually leaving the capitalist stage, and that we are already moving into communist territory (rewarding according to need - affirmative action etc), i.e. with the stages simultaneously superimposed on one another without the violent revolutionary disruptions that traditional Marxists anticipated.
I really wonder what's going to happen to Linux once Linus is gone. I think we've seen now that just a week after he took a break the community started falling apart rapidly.
Kernel fragments into a dizzying array of forks, TrueLinux, RealKernel, Linux Core, LinuxPlus and DogeKernel fight for supremacy on obscure making lists and github issue trackers.
The public remains largely unaware.
Huge PR battles over which logo to use erupt, somebody sneaks backdoors into the majority of the kernels. Somebody else backdoors the backdoors. Pretty soon over half the code base consists of backdoors and embedded nVidia graphics drivers.
Buzzfeed publish a list of 15 linux kernels you won't believe exist. A week has now passed since Linus left the project, and we have hit Peak Kernel.
Linux fades from the cusp of becoming a mainstream desktop OS and eventually settles into a niche server role until the 2038 bug wipes out humanity due to some buggy memory management running on an ICBM launch computer.
He left after detonating a bomb. It would have played the same even when he stayed. He probably just left to avoid the shitstorm and his first violation of the CoC.
Though, it's true that with "eternal" project-leads like Linus, or recently Guido van Rossum at Python, we never think about what will happen when they are gone. But I think with big projects like Linux they will be fine. There are enough people to replace them, even if things might change, the project moves on.
We should think more about important projects from single developers. What about vim? Or all the important plugins/addons? There are so many small important gears around which depends on so few support.
"Some people on the internet with no involvement whatsoever in kernel development shouting about political correctness gone mad" !== "Falling apart rapidly"
It would probably be for the best if Linus stayed away for a while and saw what happens. That way he and the community could make a better plan for when he retires for real, and start steering in that direction now.
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