@newt @matrix

Why do they need to hire a consultant, they should just do some research as to what diversity means.

@zleap @newt @matrix is FreeBSD incorporated? ESG scores are important to companies and they demand divershitty.

@lichelordgodfrey @zleap @matrix no, they are a nonprofit. But they’ve been losing developers over the increased wokeness, so they apparently decided to fill some roles through increased virtue signaling.

Needless to say, this didn’t exactly work out for them. I remember that year OpenBSD gathering more donations than FreeBSD, until Netflix dropped their cash bomb.

@newt @matrix @zleap
>non-profit
I don't know enough to know whether they're subject to the same problem, but if they have big donors they probably subscribe to the same wokeness that blackrock and their ilk have pushed.

@lichelordgodfrey @matrix @zleap could be that, but I have a different theory.

Debian people mentioned that they too have issues with finding developers, especially since it's purely volunteer work and neither Debian nor FreeBSD actually pay their developers. And also because Debian is crap and their tooling is crap and the entire workflow for developing Debian packages is total utter crap. So, Debian lads basically want to tap into the diversity market to find free workforce, untainted by expectations or wanting to do something cool.

From https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/10/debian_project_address/:

"One possibility would be increased diversity. Carter is from South Africa and would particularly welcome more African developers, as well as more women, to work on the code. He also proposed increasing the number of local Debian events, such as mini conferences or user groups, which “lower the barrier of entry to the project.”

@newt @matrix @zleap problem with that is if they already wanted to do that kind of work they'd already be there, if there are any at all. Since he repeats "African" and not "South", he likely means Black African. Not that there aren't the odd Black who can do this work, it's just so much more unlikely. Same problem with women.

They're digging into something whose primary benefit, for corporations, easier access to the infinite money cheats in the form of loans and investment, not really skill.

I don't think it's about wanting to "do something cool", it's that we've had a generation of people whose brains have been rotted by excessively accessible computer technologies on the clientside who have no idea how most of this stuff works and no motive to figure it out either.

Your pool of people who would be both capable, and willing, to do that is smaller now and the industry has grown.

The 60-80+ years of propaganda throughout education hasn't helped any either, as it continues to reach new heights of silliness.

@newt @matrix @zleap However, your theory has merit because desperation will make anyone reach out anywhere, but I doubt its success. It's not like they were refusing anyone's work for their race, nationality, or sex before. Lowering barriers of entry hasn't usually resulted in a supply of.. good workers.

@lichelordgodfrey @matrix @zleap one peculiar thing to note here, Debian has brought this on themselves.

The entry barrier in Debian is artificially high, needlessly so. Their in-house tooling is ancient and terrifyingly hard to use. Being a maintainer in Debian is a lot harder than say maintaining packages in Arch, precisely because of that and because of their tumor-like bureaucracy. Furthermore, if you pick up a package to maintain, you are going to have to maintain essentially three different versions of it, for stable, testing, and unstable branches. This applies even to things like music or video players, where it doesn't make any sense at all to have any other than the latest version.

So, when combining ancient arcane tooling with lacking documentation, the megafreeze model that forces a lot of extra work, and amount of bureaucracy that would horrify even german people (although Ian Murdock was german, so this explains some things), you get the nightmare nobody would want to touch even if it's paid for, much less for free.

@newt @matrix @lichelordgodfrey

I agree with this, there just seems to be barriers up at every turn to help new people in to contributing to free and open source software projects (or at least some)

Couple this with an elitist mentality and they are not doing their projects any favours.