Monday, September 24th 2018
Linux Community Hit by the Blight of Social Justice Warfare, A Great Purge is Coming
Through the 1990s, Microsoft had become a super-corporation threatening to monopolize all of computing. A band of talented developers got together with lawyers that could fish out loopholes in proprietary licenses, and with some generosity from big software, Linux grew from a scrappy Unix-like OS kernel to the preeminent operating system for enterprises at first, and handheld consumer electronics later. Today it's most popular operating system on the planet. Like every big organization, the Linux Foundation is hit by employee-activism.
Employee-activism is the new unionism. Whereas trade-unions of the old fought for tangible bread-and-butter issues affecting blue-collar folk of the early Industrial era, today's employee-activist is an intellectual predator seeking to maximize their organizational footprint on the backs of other people echoing their political ideas, often through blatant insubordination and disregard for the chain of command. Survival of the fittest has changed to "survival of the loudest." From forcing Linus Torvalds to apologize for speaking his mind in public, to coming up with a new Code of Conduct document, social-justice activism within the Linux Foundation threatens to devolve the culture of meritocracy to a toxic "safe space" prioritizing inclusion of identity rather than skill, as HardOCP comments. A major blow-back from the meritocrats is taking shape.
In a major revision to the license, software developers contributing to the Linux kernel source-code will soon be able to withdraw their contribution, if they are ever cornered by the rest of the community over perceived code-of-conduct violation (i.e. not pandering to identity politics or speaking their minds like Torvalds does). This is big, as many of the older generations of contributors who have made critical contributions without with Linux cannot function, now have a legal recourse, and could reduce the amount of political activism within the community.
Since 2015, identity politicians have been trying to force the Linux Foundation to join the Contributor Covenant, a special Code-of-Conduct agreement that seeks to change the "the predominantly white, straight, and male face of programming." On September 16, the Foundation agreed to implement CC Code of Conduct. Shortly following that, groups of pro-CC developers went on a character-assassination spree of top Linux developers by amplifying and often distorting, their political views (which are irrelevant to the task of programming).
Sources:
Lulz, HardOCP
Employee-activism is the new unionism. Whereas trade-unions of the old fought for tangible bread-and-butter issues affecting blue-collar folk of the early Industrial era, today's employee-activist is an intellectual predator seeking to maximize their organizational footprint on the backs of other people echoing their political ideas, often through blatant insubordination and disregard for the chain of command. Survival of the fittest has changed to "survival of the loudest." From forcing Linus Torvalds to apologize for speaking his mind in public, to coming up with a new Code of Conduct document, social-justice activism within the Linux Foundation threatens to devolve the culture of meritocracy to a toxic "safe space" prioritizing inclusion of identity rather than skill, as HardOCP comments. A major blow-back from the meritocrats is taking shape.
In a major revision to the license, software developers contributing to the Linux kernel source-code will soon be able to withdraw their contribution, if they are ever cornered by the rest of the community over perceived code-of-conduct violation (i.e. not pandering to identity politics or speaking their minds like Torvalds does). This is big, as many of the older generations of contributors who have made critical contributions without with Linux cannot function, now have a legal recourse, and could reduce the amount of political activism within the community.
Since 2015, identity politicians have been trying to force the Linux Foundation to join the Contributor Covenant, a special Code-of-Conduct agreement that seeks to change the "the predominantly white, straight, and male face of programming." On September 16, the Foundation agreed to implement CC Code of Conduct. Shortly following that, groups of pro-CC developers went on a character-assassination spree of top Linux developers by amplifying and often distorting, their political views (which are irrelevant to the task of programming).
653 Comments on Linux Community Hit by the Blight of Social Justice Warfare, A Great Purge is Coming
What started this? A patch submitted to change "master/slave" relationship. The mere suggestion of changing it is absurd because in the contexts it is used, it's rooted in 20+ years of consistency. Torvalds said as much using his typical colorful language.
The only merit maybe that Torvalds has an abrasive personality but that's not news to anyone. Maybe Torvalds needs a secretary to filter his communication with the public.
No matter what happens, it was a mistake for Linux Foundation to commit the Contributor Covenant's Code of Conduct almost verbatim. Because of that decision, I think Linux Foundation is in danger of becoming a mirror of RedHat (very corporate) while all of the open source developers (like Torvalds) jump to a fork.
www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/code-of-conduct.html
To me, that's just a long-winded way of saying to other people: "Don't be a dick." I honestly don't get the drama, and that goes for the editorial as well. You can relax, the women will stay in the kitchen (for the unitiated, that's troll bait).
Good job, editorial poster, you've made me come out of my lurking closet. It only goes to show that drama sells :)
Why anyone wanted that is beyond me though.
Now read the introduction on Contributor Covenant's website:
www.contributor-covenant.org/ No highlighting necessary, it's all inflammatory, self righteous, assertive, and generally disgusting.
Going to emphasize this quote: "But 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." Why does that matter at all? It all boils down to machine code that is being executed. Either it does the job or it does not. What human wrote the code matters little. Only the result matters.
Not sure that making the programming community a stomping ground for people who feel offended is a good idea, but there's also something to be said wrt the fact that there are always more and less powerful people in any environment larger than 2 people. History shows us that those powerful people have a tendency to want to keep that power, and some will take drastic steps to do so. I know for a fact in the circles I've been in, women have been looked down on as less skilled coders, simply because they are women. To say that the same couldn't possibly happen to people who don't fall into the societal norms of male/female is burying one's head in the sand. I still fall back to my basic tenet. "Don't be a dick". It's very simple to express one's opinions without insisting on belittling anyone else, and we shouldn't need a committee, or a set of guides to do so. But, here we are.
The question is, I guess, how much annoyance are people willing to deal with in order to save lives? I'm not saying this is life or death. However, studies all over the place tie together animal cruelty and criminal violent tendencies. I don't think it's too much of a stretch to agree that children have been literally bullied to death. I think any time we can try to correct that behavior, we run the risk of saving a life. Fair question!! I know of at least one lady who in her early years, enjoyed programming and computers, but was repeatedly told she couldn't program properly simply because she was a woman. Last I talked to her, she was still in the Navy, desk work.
In a perfect world, I think society would be a socialist thing. From each what they can do, to each what they need. The best programmers would have programming jobs, no matter their social status or sex. Reality is Darwin: survival of the fittest. I think most people spend their lives trying to fit in the middle somewhere, and the best people pull people along with them....
I'm all for changing the CoC to be just that one phrase. "Don't be an asshole!!!" Simple, to the point, and with none of the extraneous political bullshit.
I would like to see more capable people in tech, would that result in more women ? I don't know, maybe, shouldn't it work like that ?
P.S. Weird reply system. Removes quotes from your post in the preview. Can't be bothered to figure it out right now as I want to go build my stronghold in Pillars of Eternity. Ha, you didn't expect such underhanded game advertising here. Seriously though, liking the game. Anyway, hope the post is easy enough to follow. And I don't think Linux will be dying because of this :)
I'm still of the mindset that women are just individuals though and aren't going to offer anything uniquely "feminine" that would suddenly change the paradigms of technology or anything silly like that.
I think you need to travel more if you think I was referring to WWII type ghettos. You only need to go to some of the poorer Asian countries to see massive ghettos. Hey, I was just in India, there we can talk about ghettos, in fact, some people are so damn bad off they sleep under a motorway bridge, as at least that way, they stay dry when it rains.
The housing prices in Sweden are messed up, but even that started long before the 2015-2016 refugee situation. There had been very little construction going on for about a decade before that, which was already pushing up the house prices. Obviously what happened, made the situation worse.
For abusing the social benefits system, you got some concrete examples here, or just more media hype?
And the far right party gained a massive 4.68% and they're still only the third biggest party. How is this historically the biggest percentage when they gained 7.2% in the previous election? Are you just bad at math, or again listening to the media hype?
You clearly care a lot about it for some reason. Does Sweden have problems? Yes, but many of them have been around since the 1960's when Sweden started to take in migrants from Eastern Europe. Oh and we took in quite a lot of Fins and Baltic people during WWII as well, maybe we should kick them all out too, along with their relatives, what do you think?
I really don't understand how a post about Linus Torvalds has anything to do with Sweden, apart from the fact that he lived there for a few years.
And I took the bait? Well, I don't understand why you started posting about Sweden. I would be equally engaged if you posted about where I live now, as there's a pretty shitty situation here too right now, but a very different one.
But please, do your research before spouting garbage.
If we aren't careful they will call down lighting or at the very least not vaccinate and kill us all with their pseudoscience, or just themselves.
The real issue here is the village idiots now have the world wide web to find each other and come up with more and more retarded ideas that the average news agency runs with, making it seem like an actual issue.
HAES, gender is a spectrum, anti-vax, gluten, gmo, flat Earth, modern feminism, open borders, socialisim, himilayan salt, healing crystals, homeopathic, and other stupid bullshit are easy ways to identify if someone is stupid.
Poor people don't create jobs, Bill gates didn't get rich forcing poor people to buy MS products, and democratically deciding to take more money from those who earned it is still theft.