The Story Behind Why You Should Care
Way back in the before time of 2012, a software project of mine called Aris was accepted into the GNU project. Briefly, the GNU project is a collection of software packages claiming to respect the freedom of users and developers. Such software packages publish their source code and allow modification for any purpose.
I was excited about this at the time. I still look at the free software movement and see it as a positive. In my mind, free software respects its users by making a promise that it will favor users over money. As a professional developer, there’s a lot I can learn by studying other developers’ code. Releasing source code – human-readable code, vs. the binary files you run that are machine-readable – allows information to flow freely.
In 2018, and again in 2019, the developers of the GNU project broke into an argument. The same argument both times: should we do more to include other developers? In particular, women. This went around in circles for months. As a developer, I will tell you that before making a huge change, ensure you know it’s a problem. Many of the developers share that mindset, but in this case, some were asking for numbers on how many women have left or shied away because of the way they saw people acting. Others protested having to do anything beyond their normal development duties. Others still asked “what, are we supposed to accept bad code because a woman submitted it?”
I stayed out of this argument because I lacked the emotional stamina to argue with them. Any argument would be subjected to scrutiny. Any statements that were poorly phrased would be crumpled up and ignored. When I saw another email come up, depending on who sent it, I could predict what they were going to say. There was a clear divide among the developers, with most of us staying out of it. But some of what they said stuck with me. Like “why do we need to help women at all?” Those aren’t exact words, but that was the idea.
Jump ahead to 2020. Protests over police brutality and mistreatment of black communities has broken out. And like any parent who’s gotten fed up with their children not listening the first hundred times, they’ve raised their voices. Once again, other people are saying “that’s not my problem” and “police lives matter too”.
I know. All lives matter. But our society was designed to oppress certain people. What the black community is asking for is equality. It’s easy for me to sit and speculate about this, because I’m white, but I see the same things happening in this conversation as I did two years ago within the GNU project. People in power are asking “why should I care?”
Why You Should Care is my response to the arguments I’ve seen. The line “We should judge them solely on their merits” comes from that argument from the GNU developers. Now I keep hearing people say “All lives matter”, as if we should ignore the voices of the oppressed, but we shouldn’t. Everyone suffers in some way, but that doesn’t make it any less real, nor does knowing that ease the pain. It just means we’ve got a lot more work than we realized.
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