From owner-freebsd-chat Mon Dec 17 0:55:23 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Received: from monorchid.lemis.com (monorchid.lemis.com [192.109.197.75]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7A72337B405 for ; Mon, 17 Dec 2001 00:55:19 -0800 (PST) Received: by monorchid.lemis.com (Postfix, from userid 1004) id 22181786E3; Mon, 17 Dec 2001 19:25:03 +1030 (CST) Date: Mon, 17 Dec 2001 19:25:03 +1030 From: Greg Lehey To: David Greenman Cc: "Jason C. Wells" , FreeBSD Chat Subject: Political Correctness on -chat (was: Why no Indians and Arabs?) Message-ID: <20011217192503.P14500@monorchid.lemis.com> References: <3C1CE49E.39FBBED2@mindspring.com> <20011216222651.A92038@nexus.root.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20011216222651.A92038@nexus.root.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.23i Organization: The FreeBSD Project Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ X-PGP-Fingerprint: 6B 7B C3 8C 61 CD 54 AF 13 24 52 F8 6D A4 95 EF Sender: owner-freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Sunday, 16 December 2001 at 22:26:51 -0800, David Greenman wrote: >> It seems no one has come close to adressing Greg's question, save the >> quick and common response that demographics have no bearing on >> anything. Somehow now we are talking of IE 5.0. >> >> I was actually looking forward to someone saying something like, there are >> few computers in Arab lands. Or perhaps, computers are eyed with suspicion >> in my home country. It would have been interesting. Something that would >> expose issues as to, "Why no Indians and Arabs?" It seems that I have completely misunderstood at least the US members of the FreeBSD project. FreeBSD represents a new social phenomenon, and we've already discussed the demography in terms of male/female (im)balance and age distribution. An obvious other one is cultural distribution. It seems that people in the USA have a hangup about this; sorry, guys, I didn't want to offend anybody. I don't think there's anything wrong in the question, though. As somebody else pointed out, there are times when you want to recognize people by their appearance or ethnic/cultural background. I don't agree with his criteria, but it's an obvious thing to do. I grew up with a large number of both Arabic and Indian friends (to the point where, at the age of 12, I spoke English with a Tamil accent), so you can hardly claim I was discriminating against them. I'm sure that most of my friends of this time would be as surprised about the reactions to my message as I am. > Umm, but the assumption was wrong - there are both Indian and > Arab developers working on FreeBSD. His question was based on false > assumptions, so I don't know that there is anything to really talk > about. :-) Why should that mean there's nothing to talk about? I now know of one representative each of the groups I'm talking about. Why so few? Greg -- See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message