All FreeDesktop.org Projects Now Appear To Have A Contributor Covenant

[DanL]

"Diversity" = handing out jobs / opportunities for less skilled people simply because of their gender or color of skin.

No, that would be a quota.

[tildearrow]

Typo:

The FreeDeskop.org'ized version of this covenant

[sirblackheart]

Making this claim as an axiom is wrong, I agree with that. On the other hand, if someone is too emotional to accept very blunt/harsh criticism, why should they be protected more than the person to whom it comes naturally, who on the other hand handles badly empathy and such?

Yes let us protect people who can not handle their own aggression and lack empathy. Or we just stop trying to fight for the right to be a dick to other people.

[Xicronic]

"Part of this problem [of "free, libre, and open source projects suffer from a startling lack of diversity, with dramatically low representation by women, people of color, and other marginalized populations"]

I don't care. Most of the 1st world is white, most programmers are male. OF COURSE there will be a low representation of women / people of color, there's way less of them that have the knowledge/skills to work on these projects! Diversity isn't a skill.

lies with the very structure of some projects: the use of insensitive language, thoughtless use of pronouns, assumptions of gender, and even sexualized or culturally insensitive names."

If someone's a dick, ban them from the project - that's totally fair. However, making other people use special words to refer to you is being a dick. "assumptions of gender"? "thoughtless use of pronouns"? Are these people fucking serious?

[Swiftpaw]

Just say no to racist, sexist, and anti-free-speech stupidity like this appears to be. Calling out and stopping obvious meanness is fine, but censoring or banning any and all differing viewpoints is not.

[laceration]

In the rancid political climate these days, codes like this are a self righteous declaration of what side they are on and forced conformity. It is really more divisive than that which it purports to curtail. If someone does something offensive how about trying to communicate directly like a human being instead of a cold condemnation by some admin? Conduct code types can't stand the messiness of argument + difference. They will write computer code that will not work and think something else is wrong besides their code.

[Xicronic]

In my opinion, the idea you posted is very close to racism. Current (year 2017) employment and workforce specialization statistics shouldn't be used to give support for maintaining the status quo. It is deeply encoded in worldwide culture that pregnant women shouldn't be working in heavy industries, but the relatively young software programming industry isn't a workplace that can hurt a pregnant woman.

Let's say you flip a coin. Heads should appear about 1/2 the time.
Now let's say you roll a fair six-sided die. a 6 should appear about 1/6th the time.
Now lets say you have a bag of 100 marbles: 20 red, 80 blue. If you pick 5 randomly, you're usually going to get mostly blue. You may not get any red at all.

Now, due to thousands of years of random events we've had no control over*, it just so happens that Europe and North America are currently leading the world in technological developments. If Europe and North America were 50/50 purple and green people, about half of software developers would be purple, and the other half would be green. But they're not. Europe and North America are mostly white - so most software developers are white. It's not racist, it's just statistics based on how the world developed.

IK this is simplified, but that's the gist of it. Same sort of principal applies for male/female ratios, but it's due to biological tendencies that are harder to argue, because we don't fully understand the human mind yet.

*EDIT: I didn't mean that this was actually random, I meant that everyone alive right now has had no impact on how history unfolded.

[bison]

Now, due to thousands of years of random events we've had no control over, it just so happens that Europe and North America are currently leading the world in technological developments. If Europe and North America were 50/50 purple and green people, about half of software developers would be purple, and the other half would be green. But they're not. Europe and North America are mostly white - so most software developers are white. It's not racist, it's just statistics based on how the world developed.

Well there you go, sounding like Charles Murray.

This discussion puts me in mind of a quote by Robert Heinlein:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as "bad luck."

I think FreeDesktop.org are setting themselves up for some bad luck.

[NihilMomentum]

Want to see how stupid this thing (censorship) is? What do you think would happen if it was applied to Linus Torvalds?

This SJW bullshit is a cancer. If it spreads it will cause a lot of damage... more than a "Microsoft" can do alone. Just look at what that "Leah" person did.

Heck, who's to say MS doesn't have a hand in it.

How funny that a "freedom" group can come up with this sort of thing.

[leipero]

Let's say you flip a coin. Heads should appear about 1/2 the time.
Now let's say you roll a fair six-sided die. a 6 should appear about 1/6th the time.
Now lets say you have a bag of 100 marbles: 20 red, 80 blue. If you pick 5 randomly, you're usually going to get mostly blue. You may not get any red at all.

Now, due to thousands of years of random events we've had no control over, it just so happens that Europe and North America are currently leading the world in technological developments. If Europe and North America were 50/50 purple and green people, about half of software developers would be purple, and the other half would be green. But they're not. Europe and North America are mostly white - so most software developers are white. It's not racist, it's just statistics based on how the world developed.

IK this is simplified, but that's the gist of it. Same sort of principal applies for male/female ratios, but it's due to biological tendencies that are harder to argue, because we don't fully understand the human mind yet.

Most of the workforce in high level IT sector in US (and very good part in Europe) are East-Asian descent (Indian, Chinese etc.), so I don't know on what you base your claim. I personally did not go trough freedesktop.org list and investigated every single contributor by tracing them to their ethnic, racial, religious or whatever abckground, it's not something I'm interested in, nor it is something possible to do.

So I don't know, there's one proffessor (Michio Kaku) I disagree on tons of things with (he is spewing so much nonsense about AI, as most ppl in current "trend"...), but he explained very well that part of sociological sctructure, how and why is structured like that (why Google for example emloys proably over 80% of workforce of East-Asian roots).