Re: What does it mean to be inclusive

For me, inclusion means working with everyone to make Debian as useful an operating system as possible for as many people as possible. I love that Debian is one of the *only* Linux distributions that has a good accessibility wiki, plays the beep to allow me, a blind person, to press s then enter to start the installer with speech. I also love that Mate, pretty much the only really accessible desktop environment out there, is selectable in the installer. I do wish accessibility was more of a priority for more package maintainers, like Thunderbird, which is really slow to use with Orca when there are lots of emails in a folder, or Steam, KDE, Gnome, stuff like that. But that's not really up to Debian.

Devin Prater

r.d.t.prater@gmail.com

On Mon, Feb 21, 2022 at 3:12 PM Gerardo Ballabio <gerardo.ballabio@gmail.com> wrote:

Sam Hartman wrote:
> I agree that Debian has committed to being open and inclusive. However, for me that means something different than you say in your second sentence. To me that means we've committed to being open to as large a cross section of people--as diverse a cross section of people as possible.

> The difference in how we interpret things is whether we're focused on
the individual or the aggregate affect.

It seems indeed that we may have a different concept of inclusion. For
me, you aren't really being inclusive if you aren't welcoming all
people, not just those who increase a cross section. And you aren't
really welcoming a group if you aren't welcoming every individual
member of that group.

That doesn't mean that Debian should be forced to keep people who
misbehave (don't respect the CoC) or don't align with its core mission
(don't respect the Social Contract). As I see it, that is a completely
different issue.

But this is deviating from the point that I was trying to make, that
is, that Debian can't use the "we are a private group" argument as a
waiver from the (moral, if not legal) obligation to treat people
fairly (and I read your original message as acknowledging the need for
fair treatment, so I thought we were on the same side). So forgive me
if I don't want to go further on this subthread.

Gerardo