Re: [Tech-board-discuss] [PATCH] CodingStyle: Inclusive Terminology

[James Bottomley <James.Bottomley@HansenPartnership.com>]

On Sun, 2020-07-05 at 07:59 -0400, Laura Abbott wrote:
> On 7/4/20 6:19 PM, Linus Torvalds wrote:
[...]
> > At some point, maybe we should admit that we are inclusive, but
> > also just admit that we don't want to have the kinds of people who
> > instead of doing kernel development, waste everybody's time with
> > talking about the meaning of the word "black".
> 
> Part of being inclusive means listening to under represented groups.
> If those groups are saying that we have a language problem then I
> don't think we can say we're actually inclusive to those groups.
> And yes, there is no council we can go to say "we are inclusive"
> and there's always going to be disagreement among under
> representative groups. The kernel community works on trust and part
> of that trust is figuring out which voices in the community you need
> to listen to. Changing terms is arguably one of the least important
> parts of building an inclusive community but it is part of it.
> Community building is kernel development because if we don't have
> developers there is no kernel. Those mythical maintainers have to
> come from somewhere.

Community building also involves leadership and consensus.  One of the
things the open source movement has always done best is grow leaders
who understand how to build consensus and encourage contribution from
an incredibly divergent base.  The corporations would never have come
on-board with Open Source in the early days if we'd inquired deeply
into their motives or tried to force them to sign up to the four
freedoms.

To get back to the original point, some people will agree with the
change to inclusive language mainly because descriptively it is better,
some will do it because they do see it as addressing historical
injustice.  We get the widest consensus for the change by not making
pejorative statements about history (which also act as a magnet for
detractors) but instead simply making the statement about changing the
language and giving examples of better terms.

James