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> [Contributing to kernel development] requires having free time, a computer, and a reliable internet connection — something not everyone has access to. It also
by RichEO 5y ago
> [Contributing to kernel development] requires having free time, a computer, and a reliable internet connection — something not everyone has access to. It also helps to have a good education and to be fluent in English. As a result, the community leans toward people with those privileges, largely white men.
This was quite a jarring leap in the article.
On the global scale that development of the Linux kernel takes place, this statement feels very neo-colonial. Does the author really believe that people in the rest of the world live lives devoid of free time and internet access?
Being generous, I have to imagine this is a careless application of US racial theory to matters of international significance, but it appears the author is unwilling to be that generous herself.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 908B64B197 5y ago"studently hundreds of commits from Samsung vanished inexplicably from the repo, since they were all submitted by engineers of Korean ancestry".
- kevincox 5y agoYeah. - Free time. Sure, you need free time to do anything. But the async-workflow of kernel dev is actually fairly forgiving. - A computer. Yes, if you are patient even a fairly slow computer will do. Not a huge barrier for someone who wants to work on something that is only useful if you have a computer to run it on. - A reliable internet connection. You don't even need reliable. Cloning the first time will take a while (a shallow-clone won't be too bad), but the async email workflow is very forgiving of poor connections. Overall I struggle to see how the kernel development workflow could be made more accessible. The only possible improvement would be making it easier to hack on a small part of the kernel without downloading and compiling the whole thing.