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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Much ado about "nothing" - Xe Iaso (==Goodbye NixOS) (xeiaso.net)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by lemmyreader@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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https://discourse.nixos.org/t/much-ado-about-nothing/44236

Not directly related to this blog post but from NixOS discourse forum, a tl;dr from another person about the NixOS drama here :

If you’re looking for a TL;DR of the situation, here it is:

    Nix community had a governance crisis for years. While there has been progress on building explicit teams to govern the project, it continued to fundamentally rely on implicit authority and soft power

    Eelco Dolstra, as one of the biggest holders of this implicit authority and soft power, has continuously abused this authority to push his decisions, and to block decisions that he doesn’t like

    Crucially, he also used his implicit authority to block any progress on solving this governance crisis and establishing systems with explicit authority

    This has led uncountably many people to burn out over the issue, and culminated in writing an open letter to have Eelco resign from all formal positions in the project and take a 6 month break from any involvement in the community

    Eelco wrote a response that largely dismisses the issues brought up, and advertises his company’s community as a substitute for Nix community

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[–] Kanedias@lemmy.ml 7 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (23 children)

Suppose I have 1000 people from community and 10 out of them are gender minorities. I then have 5 projects, each with 10 members on board committee, and I want a representative of gender minority in each of them. And I choose hard workers based on merit, the best of the best.

In such case I will be choosing 9*5 = 45 people out of 1000, and specifically I add 1*5 = 5 people out of those 10.

So the board committees will have 45 members each with (worst case) 955/1000 = 95.5% percentile performance, and additionally 5 members of gender minorities, each with mediocre 5/10 = 50% performance.

The gender minorities will perform worse, because we specifically singled them out of the crowd. This is not how you improve diversity.

[–] zerakith@lemmy.ml 12 points 6 months ago (11 children)

Others have replied pointing out this is a strawman and that merit doesn't make any sense as a metric if you have discrimination. In practice performance ('merit') is complex interaction between an individual's skills and talent and the environment and support they get to thrive. If you have an environment that structurally and openly discriminates against a certain subclass of people and then chose on "merit" you are just further entrenching that discrimination.

This is a project that seemed to be having specific problems on gender that was causing harm and leading to losing talent. In a voluntary role particularly this is a death spiral for the project as a whole. Without goodwill and passion open source projects of any meaningful size just wouldn't survive.

I'm glad you care enough about diversity and evidence to have worked out how to solve these problems without empowering and listening to those minorities. Please do share it.

[–] gian@lemmy.grys.it 1 points 6 months ago (10 children)

Others have replied pointing out this is a strawman and that merit doesn’t make any sense as a metric if you have discrimination.

So remove discrimination. Put in the CoC that any information about gender, race, religion and so on must not be disclosed since it is not relevant to the quality of the code/work you submit. Then you have merit only.

I really find stupid that someone really think that his contribution must be accepted just because he is from a minority, irregardless the quality.

[–] Kanedias@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 months ago

I think you are right here. By cherry-picking gender minorities we sow a dissent and we underline their "otherness" from everyone else.

I am from an ethnic minority myself, and somehow people perceive us as maniacs and killers, try to burn our houses and fire us from work. Often it's the same people who preach equality and diversity. Somehow in my case they don't care about "empowerment" or "representation" at all. And somehow, the only place I feel comfortable is 4chan, where no one gives a damn who you are, and everyone's racist and sexist. To everyone else. Equally.

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