
Why Isn't Open Source A Gateway For Coders Of Color? - peter-fogg
http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/12/05/248791579/why-isnt-open-source-a-gateway-for-coders-of-color?sc=tw&cc=share
======
dasil003
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
> _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.

~~~
michalu
I am white, but my father watched TV most of his time and never worked on
anything and growing up in such environment so did I. If you grow up in an
short-term gratification environment it's much harder to stay with problems
long enough to solve them and thus you end up giving up on many hobbies
sooner. My father was probably just lazy or resigned due to constant worrying
about economic situation but I can imagine that as an immigrant parent with
lower job opportunities, language skills and no existing parents to support
you, you're less likely to end up with a job you love and you worry about
other things than hobbies in spare time. This affects the environment your
kids grow up. I am not from US but I can imagine the parents of majority of
those kids were in much different situation to others, because (I live abroad)
I know that when I was in my home country I would aways had a place to go (my
parents) and a support from them and thus more time to look out for a job I
like and more support with the kids from them so I could raise kids in much
different environment.

~~~
knowitall
That may be so, but then it wouldn't be the fault of discrimination.

~~~
michalu
Sure, nor am I saying it is.

------
knackernews
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
>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
Earlier in the thread knowtheory describes a specific situation that happens
over and over and over again.

~~~
sergiotapia
Are you talking about: "It's a sad joke Rubyconf attendees yearly confuse
@bryanl and @daksis with each other, but it's happened at every Rubyconf i've
been too (which is granted 3 but it's there)."?

I don't think there's anything racist about that if it's an honest mistake the
audience makes. Or did you mean to say the actual presenters announce them by
the wrong name?

~~~
steveklabnik
I'm curious, why would it be bad if the organizers of a conference made that
mistake, but it's not bad if the attendees do?

And yes, he means that people walk up to Randall and say "oh hey, Brian!" and
vice versa. Really, really often. Sometimes repeatedly. They're different
heights, they don't even look like each other at all. They're just usually the
only two black guys there. It happens at more than just Ruby conferences...

~~~
sergiotapia
Because:

a) They have never met the speaker personally.

b)
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_perception](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Face_perception)

It has --nothing-- to do with being racist.

~~~
steveklabnik
> a) They have never met the speaker personally.

Yes, this is "We met earlier in the day, I'm saying hello again." Or, like I
said, a waiter that over the course of a multi-hour dinner and drinks,
continually confuses the two. (EDIT: Whoops, when revising, I apparently
deleted that story. I've seen this too.)

Furthermore, it doesn't happen with other people, at least not to the same
degree. People even say "whoops, I confused you with the other black guy."

~~~
knowitall
Still, it's not racism, just the way the human visual system works. What do
you think is racist about it? "People don't even care enough to remember the
name"? That is not what is going on at all. If they wouldn't care, why would
they talk to them at all?

Who knows, perhaps they even have an advantage because people actually
remember them. They only get their names mixed up sometimes - other people are
simply forgotten completely. How often do you forget the name of people you
have just been introduced to?

------
theorique
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
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.

~~~
pmorici
Are any of them open source projects that anyone has ever heard of? I don't
see any.

Edit: why did you delete the links to the searches? It looked like literally
99% bad word lists, and a couple of random repos that probably only the
comiter cared about. One of them was a dump of metadata from pirated files off
The Pirate Bay.

~~~
steveklabnik
I deleted them because occasionally I've seen accounts get hellbanned for
using slurs, even when simply discussing the words. Figured I'd play it safe.

------
paul_f
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?

------
lmartel
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
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.

------
mariusz79
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.

~~~
NAFV_P
_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._

When it comes to _teaching yourself_ to code, two to three hours per week is
lame, what you learnt in one week is likely to have been forgotten by the
next.

~~~
mariusz79
So yes, let's not do anything and blame stuff on some lame stuff like lack of
time.

~~~
NAFV_P
_So yes, let 's not do anything and blame stuff on some lame stuff like lack
of time._

Hmm, no... let's not do anything until we can rationalise the problem. On
average I spend around four to five hours a day teaching myself programming,
that amount of time is the main reason I can learn it effectively. Along with
the commitment of two part time jobs (one of them being voluntary), an
accountancy course, searching for new jobs and the fact that I can't afford a
car, I get about 4 - 5 hours sleep per day. No, that ain't no balance. If I
had children to look after, I doubt I would be able to do it.

~~~
mariusz79
So you admit that somehow you're able to find few hours a day volunteer. While
you may not have enough time to contribute to os projects at this moment, it's
simply because you have different priorities,and prefer to spend that time
doing other activities. "Lack of time" excuse is simply that - an excuse.
Instead of saying "I lack time to contribute to do X", people should be saying
- "I want to spend my time doing Y instead of X".

We all have a limited amount of time to spend on our hobbies, work and the
family. We will never have enough time to do all that we would like to do -
that is obvious.. B

~~~
NAFV_P
_So you admit that somehow you 're able to find few hours a day volunteer._
This is a necessity, otherwise a potential employer will assume I'm lazy and
apathetic.

 _While you may not have enough time to contribute to os projects at this
moment, it 's simply because you have different priorities,and prefer to spend
that time doing other activities._ It's not the time I lack, it is the
expertise, which should improve with more practise. Preferences are different
from priorities, my preference would be to write C code (and other languages)
for most of the day. My priorities are to get a full time minimum wage job,
since that is basically a realistic goal for me. One of the reasons I am doing
an accountancy course is that I couldn't get sufficient funding for a course
in computing, and this is because I cannot get a full time minimum wage job to
pay for said computing course. Sound familiar? In CS this is related to
bootstrapping.

Also, my paid job is working as a tree surgeon. One of the most dangerous jobs
in the UK, as well as back breaking. I'm amazed I have enough energy to code
when I get home.

------
Theodores
...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
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.

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

~~~
MaulingMonkey
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.

------
jere
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
"marginalized" implies discrimination

------
noja
In case anyone is wondering:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person_of_color)

~~~
theorique
Not to be confused with code of color

[http://www.colorforth.com/](http://www.colorforth.com/)

------
salemh
_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.

~~~
knowitall
I've read somewhere that most open source contributors started their own
projects, rather than joining existing ones.

~~~
NAFV_P
Makes sense, reading someone else's code is generally harder than reading your
own.

------
V-2
"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?

------
goggles99
> _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
> 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)

~~~
gaius
Coloured is a normal saying in South Africa and isn't an absurd politically
correct euphemism for black. Before accusing others of racism, check your
cultural imperialism.

~~~
steveklabnik
I specifically did not accuse them of racism, I said that it sends a certain
signal, which is obviously scoped to cultures. HN is largely about California
culture, so many readers will have a US-centric reading. Understanding what
effect the words you use has on your audience is important.

You'll also note that the South Africa bit is specifically mentioned in the
"people of color" link.

~~~
jbdurruti
> I specifically did not accuse them of racism

You're sure you didn't do exactly that to an audience of about 12K followers
on Twitter?
[https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/409697629321195520](https://twitter.com/steveklabnik/status/409697629321195520)

~~~
steveklabnik
I do not think they are racist. I think they said something that sounds like
they're racist.

~~~
sergiotapia
That is just so low and slimy of you. Yikes.

------
knowitall
"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
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)

