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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.
His loss is of great benefit, in the long run. Anyone who would get mad like this is unfit for software development in the modern world. LLVM needs more hugs and less time and focus spent on boring old dry compiler code.
The requirements to be able to contributed to a project should be based on merit alone.
As usual, SJW-ism has an effect of demonetization and loss of trust from the normal majority consumers, leading to loss.
- Hasbro for example managed to bankrupt the GI Joe brand by employing SJW writers into their comic, ruining the brand value.
- Marvel keeps losing money over the new female "muh womyn power" Captain Marvel, who keeps being rehashed and forced in apparent desperation yet keeps failing and not making returns.
- Disney's Star Wars has now lost trust among prop sellers, a first in the brand's history. Shelves are filled with unsold TLJ "womyn powa" toys which are going to be written off as a major financial loss for both the sellers and Disney. Now sellers have no alternative but to scrutinize all future Disney's Bolshevik marketing projections and force increased costs on Disney as a risk tax. Disney even lost a potential market of 1.3 billion people in China which cites "Baizuo" and "Low IQ (SJW) writing" as critiques.
- Video Game developers appealing to a vocal minority of SJW's who don't even pay for games but rather gather around a single "representative" professional critic/influencer via bubbled social contacts to engage in mob criticism/coercion, who are merely there to support that one career critic against products they don't even care about; resulting in a loss of the core majority of consumers and a net loss in revenue due to appeal to vocal minority over majority.
It's like the religious preachers who exist to preach against products they don't use with fellow church member mobs, yet who are mistaken in ignorance by the object of criticism as consumers.
- FreeBSD suddenly forcibly coercing/demanding from users to become political "ambassadors" by a Code of Conduct copy pasted from some feminist wiki, completely unrelated to the object of the community or their initial interests in becoming part of it. Result? Skilled staff loss.
- SJW publications such as Salon forced into adwall.
- The GNOME foundation running short on money because they wasted it on "The Outreach Program for Women" and such social (in)justice investments.
Examples keep on appearing exponentially with each day.
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.
This paraphrase deliberately attempts to mislead the reader into thinking he is anti-woman and anti-minority.
http://lists.llvm.org/pipermai...
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.
He is in fact against discrimination and Outreachy's exclusionary nature.
Well what outreach does is nothing but discrimination... and is somehow as bad as other discriminating behaviour...
and Outreach can backfire... The one hired thanks to Outreach may be felt as inferior who needed to put their "diversity" in front to get a job because he is lacking true skills...
Outreach is a bad idea...
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.
Link and excerpt:
See that "Preview" button?
Obviously you are not a Linux kernel developer.
Average Intelligence is a Scary Thing
I have recently seen a high-profile community project where a key engineer believed (among other things) women should be shielded and kept at home. This engineer, obviously, had conflicts with people in the organization. Actually maybe about 30 people. Eventually, the membership walked off en mass and founded their own project. The new project has essentially the same code of conduct we're discussing here.
You need rules on paper for when stuff like this happens. It helps make slippery stuff like who offended who and whether such offense is out of scope for the project a lot easier to decide.
Bruce Perens.
Wrong. He's leaving because of crap like this.
From the LLVM COC:
Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. We will not act on complaints regarding:
‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you”
Refusal to explain or debate social justice concepts
Communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial
Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions
Quit being a tool.
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
Why would you treat someone as an equal or with respect just because they have boobs or have a certain skin color? Very odd. People should be treated as equals and/or with respect if they deserve to be based on their behavior. I wouldn't treat Donald Trump with respect, because he doesn't deserve it. It doesn't matter if he has boobs or if his skin color was different.
They actually have this in their CoC:
"Our open source community prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. "
They follow by saying they condone "reversism's". In other words if you are white male or female you can be openly harassed within the community because you are considered privileged. What the hell has happened to these projects?!
From https://www.outreachy.org/appl...
"Outreachy Eligibility Rules
You must meet one of the following criteria:
You live any where in the world and you identify as a woman (cis or trans), trans man, or genderqueer person (including genderfluid or genderfree).
You live in the United States or you are a U.S. national or permanent resident living aboard, AND you are a person of any gender who is Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, Native American/American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander"
So, there you go. If your skin color isn't acceptable, no internship for you.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
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.
So, basically, it sounds like he's taking issue with the fact that they expect him to treat dark skinned people and people with boobs as equals and with respect. We all know that's crazy talk and the work of the evil SJW conspiracy. (If you can't tell that I'm speaking sarcastically, you need help.)
No.
"The last drop was llvm associating itself with an organization that openly discriminates based on sex and ancestry".
In other words, he's the one who is against discriminating on sex and ancestry, and the project has officially taken leave of that.
For a while we've seen attempts like this in the open source world.
Want to muscle your way into an OSS project, despite lacking the talent or skill (or willingness) to contribute anything other than drama, identity politics, and an insatiable urge control others (or remove them if they don't fall in line)? Force a Code of Conduct (which is often explicitly racist and/or sexist, dismissive of merit, and vague enough to be selectively enforced) down its throat! It even works on the largest, most influential projects, and lets you dictate developers' behavior on unrelated corners of the web!
http://archive.is/4vV8z
https://www.reddit.com/r/Kotak...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Kotak...
http://todogroup.org/opencodeo...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Kotak...
http://contributor-covenant.or...
http://developers.slashdot.org...
https://www.reddit.com/r/freeb...
His actual words from the mail list:
"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."
http://lists.llvm.org/pipermai...
The code of conduct doesn't just land from Mars. It's the result of various people in the team agitating for change. The CoC might well be being promoted to give people who have a political agenda, not a coding agenda, the opportunity to gain more control.
Software rewards a high degree of discipline, a coherent technical approach. It's sometimes necessary to prune code contributions that are rubbish in spite of the fact that this might hurt someone's feelings of self-worth. When this happens its easier to blame another's bias than your own incompetence.
It would be interesting to know the level of code contribution, and its quality, from the promoters of the CoC.
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.
I think you're missing the point - it's not about treating women and minorities with respect because of their differences - it's about NOT treating them with disrespect because of them. i.e., treating them at least as respectfully as you would if they were white men, and perhaps slightly more so in deference to the fact that you're interacting across a cultural divide, and it's thus easier to inflict unintentional hard feelings, on both sides.
If you can't effectively call out someone's idiocy without mentioning their their race or gender, perhaps you need to consider that your real problem with them has nothing to do with idiocy.
In addition, if you can't call someone's idiocy in a social setting without being unnecessarily cruel and disrespectful, perhaps you need to work on basic social skills a bit more before trying to join a collaborative project.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
These are the official requirements for the program he objects to, copy/pasted from their web page:
--
You must meet one of the following criteria:
You live any where in the world and you identify as a woman (cis or trans), trans man, or genderqueer person (including genderfluid or genderfree).
You live in the United States or you are a U.S. national or permanent resident living aboard, AND you are a person of any gender who is Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, Native American/American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander
--
They have decided to explicitly NOT treat people the same. You MUST be transgender or something in order to participate in the program and get the benefits.
Most of the people I work with in open source, I don't know anything about their sexuality and I don't care. Not one bit. I care about the code - does it work, and has it been tested to be be sure that it works. Requiring me t inquire into someone's sexual preferences in order to determine how to process their code submissions would turn me off greatly as well.
If that is "the point" then why doesn't it say that in the CoC? I do love your addition about "slightly more so" though. We are all equal, but some people are more equal than others I guess. Truly Orwellian.
"If you can't effectively call out someone's idiocy without mentioning their their race or gender"
Huh? Who said anything about doing that?
"In addition, if you can't call someone's idiocy in a social setting without being unnecessarily cruel and disrespectful"
Huh? Who said anything about that? You SJW types are really truly scary.
No he said that what clinched his decision to leave was
The last drop was llvm associating itself with an organization that openly discriminates based on sex and ancestry (1,2).
which comes from Outreachy's possibly illegal discriminator eligibility requirements here: https://www.outreachy.org/appl...
Outreachy is explicitly discriminating based on skin color and ethnic heritage, as well as gender identity, excluding white cis-men.
I think what people react to is some fairly infamous mis-applications. For example, when David Howard was fired for using the word 'nigardly', or a couple guys getting fired because they had a brief snicker over the word 'dongle' that was overheard. In general, it's a bad situation where such a tempest can be raised when offense is taken even when it was not given.
Things like that have given the term "code of conduct" a bad reputation even where there is no intention of such behavior. It's like an organization that wants to give candy and flowers to people having a bad day names itself "the fourth reich".
Let's be clear. That organization practices reverse discrimination in order to bring more women and minorities into the industry.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
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.
The problem is that "disrespect" is based on the perception, rather than the intent, and there's an inherent conflict of interest in a review setting (like in any quality-control process or collaborative effort).
I'm very passionate about what I do. It's part of what makes me good at what I do, because I actually care about doing a good job, rather than just hitting the magic "40" on my time card and getting a paycheck. I will not hesitate to call out anyone's stupid failures. Mistakes or lack-of-training issues are fine, and we will accept those and move on, but failure due to being inattentive or simply lazy is not acceptable, and anyone failing in such a way needs to be aware that they're not performing up to the standards expected of my team. Frankly, I don't care what gender you are (or aren't), or how old you are, or your socioeconomic status, or really any other factor than whether you do the job. In my opinion, I'm perfectly in compliance with any nondiscrimination policy, because I don't discriminate.
To someone else's perspective, though, they think I'm complaining because they're black, or Jewish, or young, or blonde, or whatever particular insecurity they want to call out, because they're too inattentive to understand that they were actually doing something wrong.
The moment discrimination is brought up, especially in an enterprise with a "Code of Conduct" that is venerated above producing quality results, it's no longer a discussion about the right way to actually do the job. It's a discussion about sensitivity, and framing discussion, and having nice polite conversations with 3 HR reps and two managers, at whatever time they can all fit a discussion into their schedules. By the time that discussion takes place, the same failures have been repeated three times, and now there's a quality-control issue that needs to be addressed. Of course, that actual process issue has now become "normal", and any further complaint about the failure is just more "harassment".
In the end, the person who noticed the original problem is punished, the problem persists, and weeks of effort are wasted on what could have been fixed in five minutes of candid discussion. There have been many cases where this process has itself been abused to attack anyone who dares to complain about someone who is more skilled at gaming the management than actually doing their job.
As an alternative to a flawed "Code of Conduct", I suggest simply an environment of open failures, along the following lines:
In short, if you want to say someone's wrong, it had better be something that's either not yet documented, or the document supports your opinion. It's very difficult to put discrimination into writing without making it obvious, especially when it's a document that anyone else can fix. At the same time, encouraging people to admit their own mistakes prevents hero worship and excessive egos. It's much easier to take a complaint when you know that your competency is not also under attack.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
So you are all for discrimination against disfavored groups, as long as they're the groups you disfavor?
http://lists.llvm.org/pipermai...
The community change I cannot take is how the social injustice movement has permeated it. When I joined llvm no one asked or cared about my religion or political view. We all seemed committed to just writing a good compiler framework. Somewhat recently a code of conduct was adopted. It says that the community tries to welcome people of all "political belief". Except those whose political belief mean that they don't agree with the code of conduct. Since agreement is required to take part in the conferences, I am no longer able to attend. 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...
The Outreachy link does say they do not accept males that are caucasian, European, Asian or Arabic. I think he's right for leaving, I would not want to be part of a group that actively discriminates either.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
"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.
"The problem is that "disrespect" is based on the perception"
The concept of "respect" is much different in the younger generations. It used to be that you earned respect through your actions and abilities. Now young people think that "respect" is a right, no matter what.
He isn't being asked to behave "reasonably well"; he's being asked to sanction discrimination. And you openly being happy to exclude people because they don't agree with you, when they BUILT the community, is pretty much his point of the problem... you haven't helped the community or committed code, but you come in and apply SJW (his term) values.
Of the two of you, one is behaving as an intolerant bigoted bully... and it isn't him.
The problem is that the sentence reads exactly the same whether you use the word 'reverse' in it or not.
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.
This is bullshit, and you know it. First of all, having to explicitly agree to this to attend a conference is like having to pledge allegiance every time to get food in a mess hall (as mocked so brilliantly in Catch-22 — great read).
How would like you like a daily popup on /. asking you to promise not to molest children today? Your probably would not... But, if you can't agree to that (much lower!) minimum standard of behavior, why should you be allowed to have Internet?
Seriously, like most corporations, LLVM has no separation of powers. The same people writing the Code of Conduct, are the ones enforcing it... Having it simply gives them a weapon to enforce their point of view.
And we know — from their choosing to associate with the trash like Outreachy — what that point of view is...
"Common sense is not too common" goes the saying. The code asks you to be "respectful" — what does it mean? If one were to show up to a conference in a T-shirt with a picture of AR-15, or a portrait of President Trump, would that be Ok? I've worked with people IRL, who'd file a complaint with Human Resources over such a thing — because they'd "feel unsafe". And it could get worse!
Likewise, what if a woman encounters an obvious man in a female bathroom — because he is "genderfluid" and felt feminine at the moment the nature called? Would the woman's negative reaction be "disrespectful"? By the standards of the Social Justice assholes, who'd consider yoga practice to be racist, it certainly would be...
We've been slowly boiled by these asshole for years. This man is a hero for raising awareness of this growing threat to our freedom.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
But this CoC goes much further than just prohibiting insults. It's a direct assault on certain political, religious, philosophical beliefs and attitudes that one may hold and espouse outside of the project.
For instance, the welcoming clause mentions supporting everyone regardless of their "immigration status". I assume that means if your status is considered to be illegal (or undocumented if you prefer) you are still welcome in the project. But suppose there is an LLVM developer who is politically opposed to DACA (in the US) and supports a moratorium on taking in refugees from certain countries with majority Muslim populations. And suppose that LLVM developer has contributed money to PAC's and political campaigns in support of his position on those issues. And also suppose that - using his real name on the internet - he posts messages on various social media platforms that espouse said political positions. And also suppose that he's never once made a statement about immigration at any LLVM conference, or on any LLVM mailing list, or irc channel, or any other LLVM community venue. IOW, he's completely separated his political view on immigration from his work and communications with others in the LLVM community. He kept it separate until that one time when he was asked about his views by another developer at a LLVM conference who happened to be involved in immigration activism and truthfully explained his position.
My question: Did the LLVM developer commit a CoC violation?
There's no such thing as "reverse discrimination".
You either discriminate or you don't.
The law says "you should not discriminate", no exceptions.
So they want to bring more women and minorities into the industry using illegal methods, period.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Congratulations on missing my point.
Damore has been publicly castigated for being supposedly misogynist, despite at no point actually being sexist.