What's up with all the petty drama in the Rust community.. is it uniquely problematic?
I don't at all mean that the people involved then are at fault, instead: It created structure where Rust community expects Rust leadership to be coherent, close-knit and well connected with the community. It also expects pretty top heavy governance.
I think that is fragile and prone to personality drama when the project grows and the connection with community becomes impossible. A more loose organization would be better. Leaders at the top then don't expect they can steer the project much, teams are independent, the whole thing chugs on with loose governance.
Modern corporate culture expects control, "control of the message" and control of everything. Here we have to release control, it's contrary to other goals of the open source project.
Rust has no leader - and as far as I can tell, it never had a leader. Rust is a motley crew of people who disagree about what rust is and what it’s trying to be fighting it out in unreadable GitHub issue comments.
Who is responsible for the decisions that led to this drama? It sounds like it’s some nameless committee that made bad choices here. But committees of people with mixed political skills don’t average out to being an effective organisation.
Perhaps they should consider a model where the entity has a single logical owner and requests to change its state are made by passing messages to that owner…
In many ways its sort of incredible and impressive how well rust functions. There's probably hundreds of people involved, from core compiler tooling, language design, cargo, crates.io, things like rustconf, steering and governing everything else. The fact that for the most part, it all works to make the language and ecosystem improve constantly is a pretty impressive feat.
I think the bigger reason is that Rust tends to go to great lengths to avoid drama and overemphasises kindness a bit too much, which somewhat paradoxical seems to invite drama like this. Things that should be said are left unsaid, pressure builds up, resentment and suspicions linger.
The entire Rust moderation team resigned a year ago, without offering a reason. Who knows what happened, but if three people all resign on principle then it sure gives off a certain smell, and it's not a good one. Being more open would have invited drama, yes, but now the lingering vibe remains "there is something fishy with the core team, but we don't know what". This sort of "there is something but we don't know what" seems to be a recurring theme in RustEnders. I'm all in favour of the goals as such, but I'm a lot less sure that the methods actually achieve that.
In addition: kindness also means being forgiving of the unkindness of others (within reason, of course). People sometimes seem to forget that. Everyone is an asshole sometimes.
Other communities either try to actively hide problems, or handwave them as "boys will be boys shrug".
In short: gates are there for a reason.
I think it's a confluence of factors:
1) Open source is more about interpersonal collaboration than it ever has been. The lone hacker throwing tarballs -- or patches -- over the fence is dead. Open source projects now more closely resemble "real world" software projects: a team of engineers using collaborative tools, working toward a defined shared vision with management and oversight. Major projects no longer follow the BDFL model, instead using incorporated entities like the Linux Foundation to direct development replete with boards and committees, leading to more "office politics" in how major decisions get made. A tradeoff for the greater continuity and community input a foundation provides.
2) Open source is more diverse than ever before, and becoming more so. More diversity means more perspectives coming to the table.
3) Fully 25% of Gen Z identify as LGBTQ. Among hackers that number is higher; it's likely a majority of late Gen Y or Gen Z hackers are queer. And a significant fraction -- again, perhaps even larger than previous generations -- are neurodiverse. With these identities comes greater awareness of intersectional issues, and greater awareness of oneself as a member of certain classes. Pretending that this is irrelevant to software work -- hsistorically, predominantly a white male dominated pursuit -- is a fool's game. There are going to be struggles and clashes as members of different classes assert their grievances and call each other out.
In short, this kind of "drama" is a growing pain of open source becoming a real movement that invites and incorporates diverse voices. We'll muddle through it and move on.
A promotion of someone else quickly becomes favoritism, and a demotion or reassignment (or rescheduling) quickly becomes discrimination, even if those decisions were made on a different basis.
A lot of these kinds of public outcries are people of a minority group misunderstanding why some decision was made. Of course there is discrimination, but not as much as some people believe. Most people, in my experience, just dont think too much about skin color, religion, sexuality, or anything, of their employees, speakers, and so on.
As you said, a huge amount of the population, especially in tech, are LGBTQ+ or similar. Its incredibly difficult to do anything that really discriminates, because its not a minority group anymore. Even a very large number of "white male" tech people are LGBT, they just may not care to tell you.
It's easy to miss the discrimination when you're not a member of the affected group.
For example, LGBTQ are in a war with a government party who want to put laws in place which directly threaten them. Not giving a shit about them makes it easier for said government party to eradicate them from their country. Sounds hyperbolic but some folks are on a hell-bent ideological mission against non-straight/non-cis/non-conforming people.
So no, it is still easy to discriminate against non-white males in tech groups. It is also easy to discriminate against, but in less proportion, against white males in tech groups. Real life is messy.
The figure is 20%, from on Gallup poll in the US and is unlikely to be a global figure.
Jumping from that to a "majority of hackers" is quite a statement to throw out offhand with nothing to back it up. Kind of undermines the rest of your argument which was otherwise interesting.
> a growing pain of open source becoming a real movement
Oh wait, and there goes the rest of it. Diversity issues aside, open source has always been a real and important movement. It doesn't take having a diverse membership to make a movement important, and making that a requirement before you'll take something seriously is quite problematic, frankly. I say this as someone who is generally delighted by diversity and the growing numbers of people who feel safe to identify as LGBTQ.
What the actual f*ck does all of that have anything to do with the topic being discussed?? Unbelievable! This is about a person being demoted by the Rust Project, going against the actual vote of "The Rust Project Leadership", with a slight reference to the race of the person in question being a potential factor - but without any convincing evidence, so it's hard to keep focus on that only - the main thing being already plenty bad enough (the lack of consideration for a person, the lack of respect for the democratic vote...). But going from this to what you're saying seems absolutely ridiculous and makes me question the sanity of anyone making such sort of connection.
What does typing on a computer keyboard have to do with where you put your genitals? No one cares and most importantly, no one should care. Keep your sexual and romantic life to yourself in a programming community.
>There are going to be struggles and clashes as members of different classes assert their grievances and call each other out.
Thats a bad thing that must be nipped in the bud.
>In short, this kind of "drama" is a growing pain of open source becoming a real movement that invites and incorporates diverse voices.
More like its death convulsions.
It's normal for people to mention their romantic partners in casual conversation. Straight people do this all the time. So it's really really hard to interpret this request as anything other than a request for LGBTQ people specifically to hide the fact that they're LGBTQ from their coworkers.
Examples of straight people doing this:
> I have to leave early today to pick up my kids from school.
> I'm taking pat/maternity leave because we're having a baby.
> Can I bring my husband/wife to the team social?
- Gay people can have children as well - Gay people will also take paternity/maternal leave? Refer to the above point for this one - This one is the one where people usually just substitute the word "wife/husband" with "partner"
Again, none of this has anything to do with software engineering or programming languages in the slightest, so why bring it up?
As for why people bring this stuff up, I think that reduces to the question of why people make small talk. I don't know, but they do.