[notsony]

Over the next three years, the Linux Foundation will receive a combined total of $3.9 million from Google, Intel, Amazon and others to fund core infrastructure projects such as OpenSSL. Sounds good until you take a step back...

> Intel will invest "$300 million to help improve the pipeline for women and minorities, actively support the hiring and retention of diverse candidates, and fund programs that support the positive representation of women and minorities in technology and gaming industries."

http://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-diversity/

> "Google Gives $775,000 to Nonprofit for Tech Diversity CODE2040 said Monday it received $775,000 in grants from the tech giant to support the launch of free training programs for more than 5,000 black and Latino college engineering students over the next two years."

http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/02/02/google-gives-775000-t...

[jchrisa]

I bet they also spent crazy money on non-diversity related things like employee perks or lobbying.

[72deluxe]

It's interesting with the Outreach programme in GNOME (I think that's what it's called), because if you periodically look at planet.gnome.org, there are interesting things going on with developers within that outreach programme.

But there are also justified backlashes to the programme, given that there is a perceived priority given to the programme in some areas instead of writing software. The argument is that not everyone and their dog needs to be involved with writing software, so why should we encourage them to? You don't see such pushes in dentistry, the car industry or anything like that; "Are you a WOMAN? Then join the car industry!".

Strangely we do in IT though, where it is the belief that we should make EVERYONE code!

The "I will fight you and I will win" response from Emmanuelle Bassi is a particularly horrible/strange/passionate reaction from one of the guys involved with the programme: see http://blogs.gnome.org/tvb/2014/09/12/im-looking-at-you/comm...

[DanBC]

> You don't see such pushes in dentistry, the car industry or anything like that; "Are you a WOMAN? Then join the car industry!".

Yes you do. Every single fucking time this comes up someone says "you don't see this in construction". It's rebutted every time it comes up and it's really fucking easy to do a simple web search to find examples of programmes to get men into teaching or nursing or to get women or minorities into construction.

Example links have been posted to HN many times.

[72deluxe]

I wiped your profanity and spittle off my screen.

I haven't seen anything like this here in the UK. Is it a US thing?

BTW, I wasn't advocating for or against in this GNOME argument. I am entirely an observer and was highlighting the arguments made by both.

[72deluxe]

Replying to myself to mention that I am neither for or against the GNOME outreach programme!! - I am entirely an observer! I haven't used GNOME since GNOME2 due to disliking the new interface; I periodically check on there to see what's going on GNOME world and it is quite interesting, both for developments and also for what's going on internally with disagreements and discussions between people.

I thought I ought to add that because I suspect people are thinking that I dislike the programme? Either that or people like down voting with no reply.

With regard to the encouragement for everyone and their dog to take up coding, I see it a lot but in truth I do not see the same things in other professions - I have never seen a push to make youngsters take an interest in banking or journalism yet over here in the UK there is a push to make programming/coding a part of the national curriculum for youngsters, hence the introduction of the Raspberry Pi to encourage that.

[wooger]

Didn't GNOME almost go bust last year and hold an emergency donation drive, due entirely to granting too many paid internships (or similar) to people who aren't established GNOME developers, or even programmers?

[olau]

No. The GNOME foundation is managing the funds of the outreach program (which doesn't have anything to do with GNOME, really, except it started there), so when some of the sponsors (think big corps) of the outreach programme didn't pay their agreed upon share on time, the foundation ended up in trouble. It was simply a liquidity problem which was solved when they received the sponsorship money.

That's at least how I think it went, you can go look it up, the details are online.