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One Of LLVM's Top Contributors Quits Development Over Code of Conduct, Outreach Program (phoronix.com)
Rafael Avila de Espindola is the fifth most active contributor to LLVM with more than 4,300 commits since 2006, but now he has decided to part ways with the project. From a report: Rafael posted a rather lengthy mailing list message to fellow LLVM developers today entitled I am leaving llvm. He says the reason for abandoning LLVM development after 12 years is due to changes in the community. In particular, the "social injustice" brought on the organization's new LLVM Code of Conduct and its decision to participate in this year's Outreachy program to encourage women and other minority groups to get involved with free software development. "I am definitely sad to lose Rafael from the LLVM project, but it is critical to the long term health of the project that we preserve an inclusive community. I applaud Rafael for standing by his personal principles, this must have been a hard decision," Chris Lattner, tweeted Thursday.
The requirements to be able to contributed to a project should be based on merit alone.
be friendly and patient,
be welcoming,
be considerate,
be respectful,
be careful in the words that you choose and be kind to others, and
when we disagree, try to understand why.
the only part of this that I can possibly think he might object to is the fifth one, which some people might consider suppressing free speech, but this is elaborated in the next paragraph as meaning:
Harassment and other exclusionary behavior aren’t acceptable. This includes, but is not limited to: Violent threats or language directed against another person. Discriminatory jokes and language. Posting sexually explicit or violent material. Posting (or threatening to post) other people’s personally identifying information (“doxing”). Personal insults, especially those using racist or sexist terms. Unwelcome sexual attention. Advocating for, or encouraging, any of the above behavior.
all of which seem reasonable. If he wants to violate what seems to be pretty bare-minimum standards of what should be considered acceptable behavior, I'd say that he should leave the community. And not join a different one.
I get it, and I agree with him. If I were the main creator of something, and suddenly instead of being all about code, working out logic facts and figures everything started to be about how people 'feel' then I'd get the hell away from that hot mess too.
We are looking to create, not to socialize. Placing socializing as a top priority on a logic problem over getting work done is insane.
The other thing is, we do not all want to be nice all the time. If I am just a volunteer contributor then I should be able to be racist, mysoginistic, all inclusive, homosexual, heterosexual, pansexual or any shade of human you prefer. What these directives are doing is attempting to tell us all how to think feel and act which has nothing to do with coding logic or creating. They want us to be someone we are not to fit a narrative of reality which we do not even really know is good or bad in the long run, we just know it's popular think at this moment in time.
At any rate, you can all demonize him all you like but the man volunteered for 12 solid years, did an amazing job and has decided to leave causing a gaping hole and potentially the death of the entire project. If they were looking to help the projects then they have failed by alienating the developers.
I don't know much about Outreachy. But a program that encourages participation by women and minorities requiring that funding candidates actually be women or minorities doesn't seem at all out of place for the purpose of the organization.
Bruce Perens.
If you don't like the code, comment on the PR, point out problems and weak points... but if you have to resort to anything that would violate those community standards in order to it then your points probably aren't that valid and perhaps you are not the great coder you believe yourself to be.
"In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women..." -H. Simpson
The last drop was llvm associating itself with an organization that
openly discriminates based on sex and ancestry (1,2). This goes
directly against my ethical views and I think I must leave the project
to not be associated with this.
[1] http://lists.llvm.org/pipermai...
[2] https://www.outreachy.org/appl...
What if the group was "white straight dudes under 30 only" would giving money to this group still be ok?
It's rather rich to preach tolerance of other tribes and at the same time actively promote and give money to clubs whose only requirement for belonging is tribal purity.
I don't see how it is possible to preach tolerance while actively supporting and funding tribalism while not becoming a hypocrite in the process.
If you want more diversity or whatever there are ways to get there that don't involve nurturing tribalism.
What ever happened to, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"? Diversity is irrelevant when you only know people by their email addresses! Just because I'm using the name of an old white philosopher doesn't mean I'm not a young black instagram model!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It upsets some people because you're assuming that the under-representation is due to some flaw which needs to be corrected. i.e. You're assuming correlation implies causation. Applying the scientific method, the under-representation merely suggests that discrimination may be to blame, but is not proof in itself. One would need to first prove that the under-representation is caused by discrimination, before corrective action is justified. But instead, the under-representation itself is incorrectly being used as "evidence" that corrective action is necessary.
Also your corrective action is blatant favoritism which would be decried as evil and discriminatory if it went the other way. i.e. You're trying to fight one type of discrimination by encouraging a different type of discrimination. This accomplishes the primary goal, e.g. getting people to realize it's wrong to discriminate against women. But it has the unfortunate side-effect of making some people conclude it's OK to discriminate against men. So you're not exactly reducing discrimination, you just replacing one type with another. And your corrective action will result in a long-term oscillation between different forms of discrimination, with no real reduction in the absolute total amount of discrimination. If you want to teach people that discrimination is wrong, you can't do it with programs which encourage different types of discrimination.
Oh, and they're participating in an outreach program to encourage under-represented demographics to participate in open source project.
No, the LLVM organization is choosing to align itself with a discriminatory group, while LLVM pretends to be non-discriminatory by creating a code of conduct to be used as a tool to persecute members who disagree with discriminatory behavior.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
The highest contributor is Chris Lattner. I'm willing to bet he's the founder/leader of llvm. I also willing bet it's his wife/girlfriend/sister/unspecified_relative Tanya Lattner who is responsible for this bullshit. It was her, after all, who wanted to partner up with that puke-inducing Outreachy organization that specifically discriminates against whites or cisgendered men. I don't see her name on that list of top contributors in TFA, so I suppose this is how she contributes to the project instead?
May this project crash, burn and rise from its ashes as a fork run by a meritocratically-minded group where the only property of your skin that matters is its thickness, your gender is only a problem if you make it one, and the only disability that gets you sympathy is RSI.
"Oh wow -- for once in your life, there's something you aren't entitled to! How does it feel?"
Is that what we've been striving for? Here i thought it was to be inclusive and more diverse; to give everyone the same opportunities white straight men have historically enjoyed. Was I wrong?
Because apparently you consider it progress, even a victory, if we just make life shit for straight white men too.
One would need to first prove that the under-representation is caused by discrimination, before corrective action is justified.
Yes, exactly.
Strangely enough, when people start treating you like you've done something horrible, and you haven't, people don't like that.
It's not an attempt to fight bigotry with worse bigotry, it's an attempt to fight intentional or unintentional discrimination with a small amount of discrimination in the other direction.
I don't know where you're getting "bigotry" from, and I can't imagine why you think a small effort to encourage underrepresented groups into a project is somehow worse than overwhelming systemic efforts to channel only a privileged minority into it.
I am not making a judgment here about whether it's a good idea, but it's absolutely not worse than the system it's trying to undo, and it has nothing to do with bigotry.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
You're looking at this wrong.
Under-representation is a problem because there are people that currently feel excluded from OSS, and they feel excluded partly because of the bad behaviour of some people in the OSS community, and also because after years of not being encouraged to be around, some people have decided that it would be nice to throw some encouragement to those under-represented groups. This isn't a matter of displacing people that are already here, or even stopping encouragement of white, straight, cis men, it's merely extending the circle of encouragement.
Indeed, YOU'RE the one drawing false causality here. Encouraging a woman to join an open source project DOES NOT implicitly discourage men from being there or encourage discrimination against men. Discrimination against women is a long-standing, structural issue in our society. Everyone does it, including women. Fighting against discrimination against women—i.e., feminism—is only encouraging discrimination against men if you're the most fragile of men, unable to distinguish between lifting someone up to achieve equality versus seeing the erosion of your own privilege as discrimination.
I'm a tall, athletic, white male with a university degree and all my hair. There is literally no axis upon which I'm discriminated against. I have no problem doing outreach programs where we encourage more women to enroll in computing science, or attract women to work in the games industry. I've done both those things personally during my life, and I hope to do more of it in the future. I'm not putting any men out of work, I assure you. I've had 2 female programmer colleagues in 16 years in the games industry.
Encouragement is not the same as discrimination, even if your encouragement is targeted. If you're afraid for your future (or the future of white men in general), that's on you. Try to figure out why you think me asking a woman to consider a career in this industry is such a threat.
Congratulations on missing my point.
Damore has been publicly castigated for being supposedly misogynist, despite at no point actually being sexist.
You can encourage more minorities to apply for a job, increasing their representation in the applicant pool, without discriminating against any other applicants.
However, if you explicitly exclude applicants based on being straight, white, and male, you're actively discriminating based on sex, sexual orientation, and gender.
Fighting discrimination with more discrimination is like fighting rape with more rape. Just stop raping.