Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nemothekid | Hacker News Reader

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It's less about goals of the technical project, and more about goals of the organization. Rust the language is written by people, The Rust Team, most of whom I'd imagine are volunteers. In order to guarantee the life of the project, its important for potential contributors to not only feel comfortable using the language and writing code, but also feel comfortable in discussing the future potential features and use cases for the language.

It is important for projects, now, to state their goals upfront and be clear, especially when you could have 1000s of contributors from all over the world. This is something that's new for software projects, but as open source becomes larger and more diverse its becoming more necessary. The alternative has been a community based loosely around some invisible set of rules that alienates or drives away potential contributors or sparks some drama that ends up on the top of Reddit/HN/etc.

Lifetime checks will stop working if the project gets abandoned over political issues.

I see, but this is still a political issue. Maybe a lot of minorities people just voted "no" in that survey question.

Because.. why excluding people based on their skin color is discriminatory, but including people based on their skin color is not discriminatory?

There is a difference between "including" and "not excluding" people based on color or whatever. It's (officially, anyway) about removing barriers, not roping people in. I'll grant in practice it's a blurry line.

So, yeah, it's a political issue, but an open source project is necessarily a political entity by virtue of being made of people. You can't escape making political decisions, and since "inclusivity" mostly just means being nice to people, I can't complain much.

I completely agree, and I'd like to add that if one is "not excluding", asking for color skin should be forbidden. Because knowing color skin cannot possibly help one to "not exclude".

In other words, "not excluding" implies not asking for color skins.

Eh, depending on the circumstances it might help you measure how well your anti-exclusion efforts are going. You'd definitely prefer it to be anonymous, and unlinked to any kind of entry process, including informal ones.

This is correct. I mistakenly assumed that if they wanted to know about it, then they wanted to change something according to it, which may not be the case.

They have talks, documentation is awesome, examples may even run online, ide stuff is cool, In my opinion, it hard to be more welcoming than that, and special treatment based on any individual traits (except for "what OS you're using" and stuff) would not only be unneeded, but also should be repelled ([subjective] personal value).

You’ve described something that isn’t happening and won’t happen.

Discrimination, noun:

> the unjust or prejudicial treatment of different categories of people, especially on the grounds of race, age, or sex.

Is it unjust to make sure people from a minority do not feel alienated?

then this brings a discussion on what "just" is. Does just implies impartiality? if so, different treatment by color would not be just, from what I can understand.

Secondly, one can't be sure that others won't feel alienated. You just put them in a different classification. I would definitely tend to feel alienated..

Is it just to alienate the majority to encourage the minority? A lot of companies promoting "diversity" certainly think so.

The rust team isn't alienating anyone

Yes, you should instead make sure everyone doesn't feel alienated, not only the people from a minority regarding their race, age or sex.

That... does seem to be the goal.

No no no, you see, by making minorities safer we must then be making the majority feel less safe! Safety is a zero sum game after all.

> Safety is a zero sum game after all.

That's what we thought before Rust came, that you could only have safety if you sacrificied speed. But now we know it was wrong ;)

It upsets me that the reason this joke plays so well is because we can see how this kind of thinking has become common in the world. Take your upvote, but know you've also made me sad. :/

exactly. I also gave them my sad upvote for a really spot on commentary on the diversity and inclusion issues. :(

In this minefield, I really miss the irony tag here.

I do, really do, belive this should just boil down to: - don't be a jerk - don't discriminate

I wasn't talking about Rust, but wanted to give a direct answer to "Is it unjust to make sure people from a minority do not feel alienated?".

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