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Comment by jolux | Hacker News Reader

GitHub is a corporation. The Opal open source project is not. The maintainers in that thread who side against the "SJWs" still readily acknowledge that corporations have different obligations to political correctness than open source projects do. Lest we forget that even if you disagree with this, the maintainers also agree that somebody's personal beliefs are not relevant to whether their contributions are acceptable. So, why should it matter that they hired Coraline, exactly? Either they have an obligation to be politically correct as a VC-funded startup that needs to ensure its public face is immaculate, or Coraline is a fantastic Ruby developer who is good at building community management tools and her politics are irrelevant.

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> the maintainers also agree that somebody's personal beliefs are not relevant to whether their contributions are acceptable. So, why should it matter that they hired Coraline, exactly?

I think you argued the wrong way. The maintainer states it's skill not political views that give merit. If github hired Coraline for her political views, then github stated it's political views not skills that give merit.

> Either they have an obligation to be politically correct as a VC-funded startup that needs to ensure its public face is immaculate

Immaculate? There's no black and white here.

> or Coraline is a fantastic Ruby developer who is good at building community management tools and her politics are irrelevant.

Yes but Coraline will never be satisfied with just being a fantastic ruby developer. It was pretty clear from her comments she cares more (or at least as much) about people than software.

I thought it was accepted wisdom at this point that software is people. Caring about people doesn't strike me as incompatible with caring about software --- indeed, for projects which demand collaboration between individuals (i.e. non-trivial complexity), I'd think it would be essential.

It's not a radical departure at all. It's right there in the Agile Manifesto, for chrissakes.

That's not what they meant in the Agile manifesto. They just meant they don't want to get bogged down by process instead of publishing something useful to users.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools? That sounds pretty people-first to me.

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