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Comment by ronjouch | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, qualifying 75 k$/yr in the US as "not much money" is hyperbole for a developer with 20 years experience of multithreaded multiplatform C++.

As to funding from big OSS players, the problem is that Ardour is niche software, far away from the interests of those big OSS players. Regarding your examples,

- Mozilla has interest and invests into web/infrastructure tech (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11956234 ), Ardour doesn't fit in here.

- GNOME... can you name these dubious programs you are referring to? To my eyes, GNOME just tries to survive with limited funding.

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The GNOME program aims at getting more people involved in OSS projects:

https://www.gnome.org/outreachy/

Personally, I think it is awesome and appreciate the great contributors I've seen come in through the program.

> Currently, internships are open internationally to women (cis and trans), trans men, and genderqueer people. Additionally, they are open to residents and nationals of the United States of any gender who are Black/African American, Hispanic/Latin@, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander.

It's have been quicker to write, 'internships are open to everyone but white, heterosexual men,' but that would have been too honest.

How utterly despicable.

Perhaps Paul Davis could apply, and claim to be Pauline Davis for internship purposes.

> "It's have been quicker to write, 'internships are open to everyone but white, heterosexual men,' but that would have been too honest."

Agreed.

But I don't think it's despicable. Our field needs diversity, and in a dominated ecosystem you don't get diversity by just letting natural forces do their job, because the ecosystem is already dominated/biased.

So to my eyes we need biased, opposed initiatives like this one, or PyLadies.

Does it remove available funding for Paul? (In other words, are the total available OSS funds the result of a zero-sum game)? I don't think so: some support the goals of Outreachy and contribute to it, some like Mozilla just contribute to what's in their field. These programs are about OSS fundings but I wouldn't categorize them as part of the same set.

> But I don't think it's despicable. Our field needs diversity, and in a dominated ecosystem you don't get diversity by just letting natural forces do their job, because the ecosystem is already dominated/biased.

Serious question: was this kind of stuff necessary for the huge increases over the decades in the percentage of lawyers and doctors who are women? If not, then it seems it's possible (if not necessarily desirable) to let "natural" forces do their work for achieving gender balance, and least for careers requiring well-educated individuals that provide high compensation and confer high status (those are both higher status than developers in most circles, by far). But maybe there were lots of women-only medical conferences or something at some point. Maybe there still are, I really don't know.

(I did a quick DDG search for this issue in law and medicine, but turned up nothing relevant aside from graphs demonstrating the shift)

I don't know either. Thoughts/questions:

- Can we compare the case of legal/medical to software? Especially, have the legal/medical fields been so unbalanced as software is right now? (Not implying it was, honestly asking). And if it was, as you ask yourself, what mechanisms helped bringing balance?

- Regarding the specific case of sexism in software, early research suggests that the unbalance may have emerged in the 1970s as "the idea that computers are for boys became a narrative", maybe due to ads: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-... . Admitting this idea, what about now? Yes, unlike in the 1970s, software is part of everyone's daily lives. However, the "computers (and STEM) are for boys" myth isn't dead.

The effect there was pretty rapid. Did it somehow take hold far more strongly than the earlier narrative (whatever that may have been)? It seems like the marketing has become quite a bit less dude-centric, yet the trend continues in spite of everything. One would hope a similarly sudden shift the other direction could be effected, but that doesn't appear to be happening.

Oddly enough, the two most obvious big drops on that graph appear to correspond pretty closely with drops in the total share of university students majoring in CS[1]. What significance that has, if any, I do not know.

[1] http://core0.staticworld.net/images/idge/imported/article/it...

I really don't know what I think about wtbob's comment, but it's awful that it got flagkilled.

Are the total available OSS funds the result of a zero-sum game?

I think at face-value it isn't zero-sum. I think this question can be restated as "If advocacy groups became convinced that this kind of discrimination is unproductive, would they spend their money on supporting open source, or on promoting minority groups in a different way?". I think it's pretty clear that the answer is the latter. But you can also step back and ask whether the advocacy groups would have less funding if these programs came to be considered ineffective, and I think they would, since people would lose trust in them. I'm sure a lot of that money would go toward some other kind of minority advocacy groups, but I'm also sure that many sources of funding are actually specifically interested in promoting open source (otherwise it would be more productive for them to support minorities in employment, not open source internships). I think it's reasonable to say some of that money might make its way to people like Paul.

This is terribly speculative, but it is to say that if you accept that discriminatory programs like outreachy are not productive, there's merit to the claim that they deprive heroes like Paul of funding.

> How utterly despicable.

> Perhaps Paul Davis could apply, and claim to be Pauline Davis for internship purposes.

How utterly reactionary.

Moreover, do you realize just how despicably transphobic or queerphobic this statement is? The irony in your comment is appalling. Your comment is a perfect example of precisely why we do need to support people who don't conform to heteronormative stereotypes.

This blatant encouragement that being a normal white male is not diversive enough is both anti-male and white-phobic. It conforms to that old age stereotype that white males are somehow superior to genders of other race.

Supporting such blatant discrimination against white males does nothing to encourage diversity. These kind of diversity out-reach programs operates under the assumption that diversity can only by achieve through discrimination against white males, which that is not true. Diversity can be achieved without discriminating against white males.

> how despicably transphobic or queerphobic this statement is

How so? Nobody is claiming everyone lies about it, only that it might be possible to do so (since outreachy has no recourse to an objective test).

Obviously getting way offtopic here, but I want to point out that from scanning that page it looks like that's a $5000 stipend for three months of 40-hour weeks. Not exactly the big bucks.

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