7 ms·

Why Isn't Open Source A Gateway For Coders Of Color?

29 points by peter-fogg 13y ago

evadne 13y ago
Relying on open source development to gain recognition and fame is like depending on unpaid internship to get your feet in the door.
- MaulingMonkey 13y ago
  It's a spectrum. Possible difference include copyright ownership of the work, applicability of the work directly to the business's goals, the reusability of the work as part of your portfolio... ...but if you're building something on a company's API to specifically get hired by them, it's effectively an unpaid internship, regardless of the license and the copyright.
lmartel 13y ago
Some good points made, but the part about many people in open source getting paid to do it is a stretch. Lots of google insiders have talked about the fall of 20% time (and most 20% time projects weren't open source), and few-to-no other companies offer this as a perk. I'm all for increasing opportunities for underrepresented groups, but don't discount all the passionate, unpaid work people provide to the open source community!
- jbrechtel 13y ago
  It doesn't have to be explicit "use X% of your time to contribute to open source" to count as getting paid to do it. When using OSS libraries on commercial products I've found the need to fix bugs or other problems and have sent pull requests with those changes afterwards. Granted not all clients approve this, but I wouldn't describe it as "few-to-no other companies" that allow it.
Theodores 13y ago
...or coders with two X chromosomes? Allegedly 1.5% of open source software contributors are female. So you are more likely to win the lottery than finding yourself working with a black woman on an open source project.
- srl 13y ago
  I would expect that the two aren't independent -- the proportion of black women to black men could well be very much higher than the proportion of white women to white men. The same qualities and situation that help a black man become a programmer despite the various forms of systemic bias would also be useful to a woman.
mariusz79 13y ago
Lack of time? Come on that's just a really lame excuse. It's hard but even with full school, full time work, part time startup, and two kids it's not that hard to find two three hours a week to do some os dev.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Sure, but many of us are lazy and don't have the motivation to work so much. The thing is, if you have two populations with roughly the same amount of lazy people, but one has on average more free time, it's more likely that it'll produce an higher volume of contributions to FOSS projects.
  - mariusz79 13y ago
    Yes, I totally agree, but I'm sure you can agree that it's still just a matter of deciding what you want to do with your free time. If you decide that the free time you have is better spend watching Braking Bad or playing EVE, you should not use "lack of time" excuse for any other activity. It's all about priorities.
- MaulingMonkey 13y ago
  The fact that you can still squeeze in two-three hours a week to do some os dev is a really lame excuse for working that hard; there is more to life than work. And there are those with more time obligations than what you've listed on top of struggling to make ends meet. Not everyone, granted -- and for some, lack of time will indeed be a lame excuse -- but it sounds like you're generalizing to everyone.
  - mariusz79 13y ago
    Lack of time is a lame excuse. Always. I often use it, but I'm not lying to myself, blaming stuff on something else. It's just an excuse. There is 24 hours in a day. If you sleep for 8 hours like I do, you still have time for 8 hours of work, and spend 3 hours with your kids, you still have 5 hours to do something productive. Even if you waste 3 hours on stuff like eating, commuting or watching television you still have 2 hours to do something productive.. And we should not forget about the weekend and holidays where you have eight hours that are usually spend working, freed up. And working hard? I'm lazy and I hate working hard, that's why I'm a soft dev. :)
dasil003 13y ago
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 in the 80s I was still relatively privileged to have access. These days the financial barriers are extremely low as you can get started programming on the cheapest netbook, and free wi-fi abounds. These days I think getting into open source is great advice for minorities, and I think they will find it to be as close a meritocracy and "color-blind" environment as they will find in America today. That said, it is an inherently harsh environment to learn where there is a pretty low tolerance for beginners, and it could be quite discouraging for someone just getting their feet wet in programming. Also, if it's pitched heavily as a gateway to a lucrative career by parents and authorities a lot of people are going to be pushed into it who might not have the intrinsic interest to succeed in the pedantic world of telling a computer exactly what to do. That said, one has to imagine that the number of blacks and latinos with a very strong potential to be good programmers is probably severely under-represented in industry as well as open source simply due to lack of early opportunity and privilege.
- goggles99 13y ago
  >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 time belief. Access to computers and internet? Poor blacks compared to poor whites have the same resources to computers yet the poor whites become coders in the same percentages as the general population. You are 0 for 2.
  - true_religion 13y ago
    Well his arguments are based on past experience, not current day trends.
goggles99 13y ago
>One of the spaces you might think would be a gateway for developers of color to enter the industry is through open source software development. You don't have to know somebody or have a degree in software engineering or get hired to participate in an open-source project. You can jump right in and start writing some code. This sounds like the author is resigned to the fact that colored people don't go to college. Is that the premise of this article? What about the tiny percentage of colored college students why have any interest in software development? >But in Haibel's experience, the open-source world is even whiter and more male than the world of proprietary software. "It's very clear that the open source community is whiter than the software community as a whole," she says. Wait, this seems to imply that the fact that there aren't many women or colored coders is because the white men in charge refuse to hire them on this basis. This is in stark contrast to reality where the fact that is not mentioned here is that there is little or no interest to code from these groups. >There are larger societal factors that contribute to the whiteness of the tech world, more broadly. Blacks and Latinos are more likely to attend under-resourced schools, they're underrepresented in math and science fields at every level of higher education and increasingly so the higher they go, and are less likely than whites to This is such garbage. Blacks and Latinos in the same schools and in the same socioeconomic status as their White, Asian and Indian counter parts become coders at the same rates. Why do journalists always try to make everything about race unfairness? There is no story here. Blacks and Hispanics aren't coders very often because they don't have ambition to do that. Wither it be cultural or genetic is not exactly known but it is not because they are disadvantaged. what is all this crap about them contributing to open source? Would we ever see an article about how Indians and Persians are overrepresented in gas station and liquor store ownership (a very lucrative career) and how white people should do x to catch up? White people don't aspire to do that, end of (non) story.
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  > colored people Just for your own sake, in case you're not a native speaker: you shouldn't ever, ever say this. The words you use send social signals to others, and 'colored people' sounds really, really, really racist. This is distinct from 'person of color,' which is not. Use it instead. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color
noja 13y ago
In case anyone is wondering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color
- theorique 13y ago
  Not to be confused with code of color http://www.colorforth.com/ http://www.colorforth.com/
knackernews 13y ago
I disagree with racism being an issue keeping blacks & latinos from open source / free software development and I don't understand why people keep talking about barriers to software development. These days computers are ubiquitous (in the developed world at least). You can be poor but still afford a computer, and all the knowledge and tools you need are available for free. The only potential barriers I see is having the skills required to make useful contributions to an established project (something at the level of the existing developers) and free time. About myself: I didn't go to a great school; Didn't have friends or classmates who were interested in computers or programming; Didn't have a role model to inspire or guide me; Never went to a workshop or joined a user group; Never attended a computer science class until I was in college. I got fascinated by computers by reading about them in a newspaper when I was a kid, and had to go on a hunger strike every night until my father caved in and bought one for the house. By the time I was 15 I worked together with 4 guys to build a popular website and we developed a file editor together. We collaborated over IRC and what's interesting is that we knew nothing about each other except our nicknames and where we lived (This was before social networks became popular). Nothing else mattered except our mutual interest and skill. Oh, and I'm not white.
- sergiotapia 13y ago
  >I don't understand why people keep talking about barriers to software development. Because 'white guilt', and people need _something_ to post about in their tumblr blogs. ;) I'd like to see some specific cases of racism in open source. I've been working professionally for 7 years, and I haven't seen a single case of racism anywhere in open source. I just can't imagine it; who would put themselves out there like that doing something terrible, and what community would allow that?
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    Earlier in the thread knowtheory describes a specific situation that happens over and over and over again.
    - sergiotapia 13y ago
salemh 13y ago
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.
- etanazir 13y ago
  Ever make a pull request and get some feedback on why not? Ever publish a package and respond to issues?
- knowitall 13y ago
  I've read somewhere that most open source contributors started their own projects, rather than joining existing ones.
  - NAFV_P 13y ago
    Makes sense, reading someone else's code is generally harder than reading your own.
paul_f 13y ago
How do you know what color other people on an open source project are? Is this a feature of GIT that I am not familiar with?
knowitall 13y ago
"more than 8 in 10 open source developers are white" 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").
- theorique 13y ago
  While OSS is not 'just' a US thing, it is probably heavily weighted toward US participation. Although India and China have huge populations of technically educated people, the language barrier is probably a factor there. I would imagine that the region with next highest contribution is Europe, which comprehensive English teaching. (also: mostly white)
theorique 13y ago
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, assuming that I might share their racist attitudes.) 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).
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  If you type slurs into GitHub code search, you'll get over 10,000 results for many of them. Some of these are bad word filters, of course, but many are not.
  - theorique 13y ago
    This is definitely a concern. What does it tell us, I wonder? I'm certainly not saying that there are no individual bigots in the OSS world. With thousands (millions?) of people you'll get all points of view, beneficial and toxic. A simple 'grep' of GitHub reveals a lot of crap, but are these influential projects? Do these projects have multiple committers who have signed off with pride that "my project contains 'n-----' in the code comments"? Do these projects have lots of users? It would be interesting to plot the occurrence of racial slurs against the number of participants in a project (controlling for offensive term filters or corpuses of 'real' language). My hunch is that the vast majority of these terms occur in one-time undergraduate projects or forgotten hobbyist repos.
    - steveklabnik 13y ago
      You're moving the goalposts. At first you wanted specific instances, now you want specific instances in major projects.
jere 13y ago
I love all the commenters in uproar: this can't be racism!!! Notice that the word "racism" was used in the article 0 times. >[Open source software] contribution takes time; I don't think anyone would contest that. Getting familiar with a project, finding out where you can fit into it, reading and responding to issues, testing and submitting patches, writing documentation. All of that requires a good deal of time. >Marginalized people in tech — women, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, and others — have less free time for a few major reasons: dependent care, domestic work and errands, and pay inequity.
- knowitall 13y ago
  "marginalized" implies discrimination
funkdat 13y ago
"We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias . . . My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for." "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."
V-2 13y ago
"Marginalized people in tech — women, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, and others — have less free time for a few major reasons: dependent care, domestic work and errands, and pay inequity." Why do LGTBQ people spend more time on domestic work and errands?

29 points by peter-fogg 13y ago

Relying on open source development to gain recognition and fame is like depending on unpaid internship to get your feet in the door.

MaulingMonkey 13y ago
It's a spectrum. Possible difference include copyright ownership of the work, applicability of the work directly to the business's goals, the reusability of the work as part of your portfolio... ...but if you're building something on a company's API to specifically get hired by them, it's effectively an unpaid internship, regardless of the license and the copyright.

lmartel 13y ago

Some good points made, but the part about many people in open source getting paid to do it is a stretch. Lots of google insiders have talked about the fall of 20% time (and most 20% time projects weren't open source), and few-to-no other companies offer this as a perk. I'm all for increasing opportunities for underrepresented groups, but don't discount all the passionate, unpaid work people provide to the open source community!

jbrechtel 13y ago
It doesn't have to be explicit "use X% of your time to contribute to open source" to count as getting paid to do it. When using OSS libraries on commercial products I've found the need to fix bugs or other problems and have sent pull requests with those changes afterwards. Granted not all clients approve this, but I wouldn't describe it as "few-to-no other companies" that allow it.

Theodores 13y ago

...or coders with two X chromosomes? Allegedly 1.5% of open source software contributors are female. So you are more likely to win the lottery than finding yourself working with a black woman on an open source project.

srl 13y ago
I would expect that the two aren't independent -- the proportion of black women to black men could well be very much higher than the proportion of white women to white men. The same qualities and situation that help a black man become a programmer despite the various forms of systemic bias would also be useful to a woman.

mariusz79 13y ago

Lack of time? Come on that's just a really lame excuse. It's hard but even with full school, full time work, part time startup, and two kids it's not that hard to find two three hours a week to do some os dev.

icebraining 13y ago
Sure, but many of us are lazy and don't have the motivation to work so much. The thing is, if you have two populations with roughly the same amount of lazy people, but one has on average more free time, it's more likely that it'll produce an higher volume of contributions to FOSS projects.
- mariusz79 13y ago
  Yes, I totally agree, but I'm sure you can agree that it's still just a matter of deciding what you want to do with your free time. If you decide that the free time you have is better spend watching Braking Bad or playing EVE, you should not use "lack of time" excuse for any other activity. It's all about priorities.
MaulingMonkey 13y ago
The fact that you can still squeeze in two-three hours a week to do some os dev is a really lame excuse for working that hard; there is more to life than work. And there are those with more time obligations than what you've listed on top of struggling to make ends meet. Not everyone, granted -- and for some, lack of time will indeed be a lame excuse -- but it sounds like you're generalizing to everyone.
- mariusz79 13y ago
  Lack of time is a lame excuse. Always. I often use it, but I'm not lying to myself, blaming stuff on something else. It's just an excuse. There is 24 hours in a day. If you sleep for 8 hours like I do, you still have time for 8 hours of work, and spend 3 hours with your kids, you still have 5 hours to do something productive. Even if you waste 3 hours on stuff like eating, commuting or watching television you still have 2 hours to do something productive.. And we should not forget about the weekend and holidays where you have eight hours that are usually spend working, freed up. And working hard? I'm lazy and I hate working hard, that's why I'm a soft dev. :)

dasil003 13y ago

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 in the 80s I was still relatively privileged to have access. These days the financial barriers are extremely low as you can get started programming on the cheapest netbook, and free wi-fi abounds. These days I think getting into open source is great advice for minorities, and I think they will find it to be as close a meritocracy and "color-blind" environment as they will find in America today. That said, it is an inherently harsh environment to learn where there is a pretty low tolerance for beginners, and it could be quite discouraging for someone just getting their feet wet in programming. Also, if it's pitched heavily as a gateway to a lucrative career by parents and authorities a lot of people are going to be pushed into it who might not have the intrinsic interest to succeed in the pedantic world of telling a computer exactly what to do. That said, one has to imagine that the number of blacks and latinos with a very strong potential to be good programmers is probably severely under-represented in industry as well as open source simply due to lack of early opportunity and privilege.

goggles99 13y ago
>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 time belief. Access to computers and internet? Poor blacks compared to poor whites have the same resources to computers yet the poor whites become coders in the same percentages as the general population. You are 0 for 2.
- true_religion 13y ago
  Well his arguments are based on past experience, not current day trends.

goggles99 13y ago

>One of the spaces you might think would be a gateway for developers of color to enter the industry is through open source software development. You don't have to know somebody or have a degree in software engineering or get hired to participate in an open-source project. You can jump right in and start writing some code. This sounds like the author is resigned to the fact that colored people don't go to college. Is that the premise of this article? What about the tiny percentage of colored college students why have any interest in software development? >But in Haibel's experience, the open-source world is even whiter and more male than the world of proprietary software. "It's very clear that the open source community is whiter than the software community as a whole," she says. Wait, this seems to imply that the fact that there aren't many women or colored coders is because the white men in charge refuse to hire them on this basis. This is in stark contrast to reality where the fact that is not mentioned here is that there is little or no interest to code from these groups. >There are larger societal factors that contribute to the whiteness of the tech world, more broadly. Blacks and Latinos are more likely to attend under-resourced schools, they're underrepresented in math and science fields at every level of higher education and increasingly so the higher they go, and are less likely than whites to This is such garbage. Blacks and Latinos in the same schools and in the same socioeconomic status as their White, Asian and Indian counter parts become coders at the same rates. Why do journalists always try to make everything about race unfairness? There is no story here. Blacks and Hispanics aren't coders very often because they don't have ambition to do that. Wither it be cultural or genetic is not exactly known but it is not because they are disadvantaged. what is all this crap about them contributing to open source? Would we ever see an article about how Indians and Persians are overrepresented in gas station and liquor store ownership (a very lucrative career) and how white people should do x to catch up? White people don't aspire to do that, end of (non) story.

steveklabnik 13y ago
> colored people Just for your own sake, in case you're not a native speaker: you shouldn't ever, ever say this. The words you use send social signals to others, and 'colored people' sounds really, really, really racist. This is distinct from 'person of color,' which is not. Use it instead. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colored vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color

noja 13y ago

In case anyone is wondering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color

theorique 13y ago
Not to be confused with code of color http://www.colorforth.com/ http://www.colorforth.com/

knackernews 13y ago

I disagree with racism being an issue keeping blacks & latinos from open source / free software development and I don't understand why people keep talking about barriers to software development. These days computers are ubiquitous (in the developed world at least). You can be poor but still afford a computer, and all the knowledge and tools you need are available for free. The only potential barriers I see is having the skills required to make useful contributions to an established project (something at the level of the existing developers) and free time. About myself: I didn't go to a great school; Didn't have friends or classmates who were interested in computers or programming; Didn't have a role model to inspire or guide me; Never went to a workshop or joined a user group; Never attended a computer science class until I was in college. I got fascinated by computers by reading about them in a newspaper when I was a kid, and had to go on a hunger strike every night until my father caved in and bought one for the house. By the time I was 15 I worked together with 4 guys to build a popular website and we developed a file editor together. We collaborated over IRC and what's interesting is that we knew nothing about each other except our nicknames and where we lived (This was before social networks became popular). Nothing else mattered except our mutual interest and skill. Oh, and I'm not white.

sergiotapia 13y ago
>I don't understand why people keep talking about barriers to software development. Because 'white guilt', and people need _something_ to post about in their tumblr blogs. ;) I'd like to see some specific cases of racism in open source. I've been working professionally for 7 years, and I haven't seen a single case of racism anywhere in open source. I just can't imagine it; who would put themselves out there like that doing something terrible, and what community would allow that?
- steveklabnik 13y ago
  Earlier in the thread knowtheory describes a specific situation that happens over and over and over again.
  - sergiotapia 13y ago

salemh 13y ago

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.

etanazir 13y ago
Ever make a pull request and get some feedback on why not? Ever publish a package and respond to issues?
knowitall 13y ago
I've read somewhere that most open source contributors started their own projects, rather than joining existing ones.
- NAFV_P 13y ago
  Makes sense, reading someone else's code is generally harder than reading your own.

paul_f 13y ago

How do you know what color other people on an open source project are? Is this a feature of GIT that I am not familiar with?

knowitall 13y ago

"more than 8 in 10 open source developers are white" 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").

theorique 13y ago
While OSS is not 'just' a US thing, it is probably heavily weighted toward US participation. Although India and China have huge populations of technically educated people, the language barrier is probably a factor there. I would imagine that the region with next highest contribution is Europe, which comprehensive English teaching. (also: mostly white)

theorique 13y ago

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, assuming that I might share their racist attitudes.) 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).

steveklabnik 13y ago
If you type slurs into GitHub code search, you'll get over 10,000 results for many of them. Some of these are bad word filters, of course, but many are not.
- theorique 13y ago
  This is definitely a concern. What does it tell us, I wonder? I'm certainly not saying that there are no individual bigots in the OSS world. With thousands (millions?) of people you'll get all points of view, beneficial and toxic. A simple 'grep' of GitHub reveals a lot of crap, but are these influential projects? Do these projects have multiple committers who have signed off with pride that "my project contains 'n-----' in the code comments"? Do these projects have lots of users? It would be interesting to plot the occurrence of racial slurs against the number of participants in a project (controlling for offensive term filters or corpuses of 'real' language). My hunch is that the vast majority of these terms occur in one-time undergraduate projects or forgotten hobbyist repos.
  - steveklabnik 13y ago
    You're moving the goalposts. At first you wanted specific instances, now you want specific instances in major projects.

jere 13y ago

I love all the commenters in uproar: this can't be racism!!! Notice that the word "racism" was used in the article 0 times. >[Open source software] contribution takes time; I don't think anyone would contest that. Getting familiar with a project, finding out where you can fit into it, reading and responding to issues, testing and submitting patches, writing documentation. All of that requires a good deal of time. >Marginalized people in tech — women, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, and others — have less free time for a few major reasons: dependent care, domestic work and errands, and pay inequity.

knowitall 13y ago
"marginalized" implies discrimination

funkdat 13y ago

"We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias . . . My crime is that of judging people by what they say and think, not what they look like. My crime is that of outsmarting you, something that you will never forgive me for." "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."

V-2 13y ago

"Marginalized people in tech — women, people of color, people with disabilities, LGBTQ people, and others — have less free time for a few major reasons: dependent care, domestic work and errands, and pay inequity." Why do LGTBQ people spend more time on domestic work and errands?