On 10 Jul 2020, at 5:12, hospice admin wrote:
$0.02 from a woman of colour ...
I personally find stuff like this just a little bit patronising ...
more of a matter of kicking the real problem into the weeds than
actually doing anything practical to 'fix' it.
Well, in the context of the Apache SpamAssassin Project, "The Real
Problem" that we have any capacity to work on is the low diversity of
our developer community. Eliminating terminology that may be off-putting
for even a minority of a minority of possible contributors is
worthwhile, particularly when the block/welcome terminology we are
replacing black/white with is explicitly descriptive rather than
metaphorical and connotative.
We have no way of knowing how many people have thought less of SA
because of terminology or whether any of those people might have
otherwise become involved enough in the project to be contributors. If
changing the terminology makes the Project look less like a bunch of
white guys trying to make rules for the world's email, that's a positive
step.
Right up there with Mercedes decision to paint their $100 Million F1
cars black.
This is a bit less symbolic. We're actually making the terminology
better.
I'm sure the intent was positive though ...
The intent is to do what we can to make involvement in the SpamAssassin
community less hostile to newcomers, even if elements of hostility that
we can address are not universally recognized as such. We cannot do much
for the bigger Real Problems that intersect with ours tangentially,
because unlike Daimler-Benz, we don't have $100 Million or even $1 to
spend. None of us has the time and skills to make a focused recruiting
effort to get a more diverse set of contributors or even just more
contributors. Changing a few labels in the code is something we CAN do.
--
Bill Cole
b...@scconsult.com or billc...@apache.org
(AKA @grumpybozo and many *@billmail.scconsult.com addresses)
Not For Hire (currently)
