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Actions have consequences (or: why I'm not fixing Intel's bugs any more)
Edit: About two months after this was written, Intel committed to a large scale diversity initiative. Actions speak louder than words, and this was an effective repudiation of the behaviour described below. I've happily worked on Intel-related issues since then.
A lot of the kernel work I've ended up doing has involved dealing with bugs on Intel-based systems - figuring out interactions between their hardware and firmware, reverse engineering features that they refuse to document, improving their power management support, handling platform integration stuff for their GPUs and so on. Some of this I've been paid for, but a bunch has been unpaid work in my spare time[1].
Recently, as part of the anti-women #GamerGate campaign[2], a set of awful humans convinced Intel to terminate an advertising campaign because the site hosting the campaign had dared to suggest that the sexism present throughout the gaming industry might be a problem. Despite being awful humans, it is absolutely their right to request that a company choose to spend its money in a different way. And despite it being a dreadful decision, Intel is obviously entitled to spend their money as they wish. But I'm also free to spend my unpaid spare time as I wish, and I no longer wish to spend it doing unpaid work to enable an abhorrently-behaving company to sell more hardware. I won't be working on any Intel-specific bugs. I won't be reverse engineering any Intel-based features[3]. If the backlight on your laptop with an Intel GPU doesn't work, the number of fucks I'll be giving will fail to register on even the most sensitive measuring device.
On the plus side, this is probably going to significantly reduce my gin consumption.
[1] In the spirit of full disclosure: in some cases this has resulted in me being sent laptops in order to figure stuff out, and I was not always asked to return those laptops. My current laptop was purchased by me.
[2] I appreciate that there are some people involved in this campaign who earnestly believe that they are working to improve the state of professional ethics in games media. That is a worthy goal! But you're allying yourself to a cause that disproportionately attacks women while ignoring almost every other conflict of interest in the industry. If this is what you care about, find a new way to do it - and perhaps deal with the rather more obvious cases involving giant corporations, rather than obsessing over indie developers.
For avoidance of doubt, any comments arguing this point will be replaced with the phrase "Fart fart fart".
[3] Except for the purposes of finding entertaining security bugs
A lot of the kernel work I've ended up doing has involved dealing with bugs on Intel-based systems - figuring out interactions between their hardware and firmware, reverse engineering features that they refuse to document, improving their power management support, handling platform integration stuff for their GPUs and so on. Some of this I've been paid for, but a bunch has been unpaid work in my spare time[1].
Recently, as part of the anti-women #GamerGate campaign[2], a set of awful humans convinced Intel to terminate an advertising campaign because the site hosting the campaign had dared to suggest that the sexism present throughout the gaming industry might be a problem. Despite being awful humans, it is absolutely their right to request that a company choose to spend its money in a different way. And despite it being a dreadful decision, Intel is obviously entitled to spend their money as they wish. But I'm also free to spend my unpaid spare time as I wish, and I no longer wish to spend it doing unpaid work to enable an abhorrently-behaving company to sell more hardware. I won't be working on any Intel-specific bugs. I won't be reverse engineering any Intel-based features[3]. If the backlight on your laptop with an Intel GPU doesn't work, the number of fucks I'll be giving will fail to register on even the most sensitive measuring device.
On the plus side, this is probably going to significantly reduce my gin consumption.
[1] In the spirit of full disclosure: in some cases this has resulted in me being sent laptops in order to figure stuff out, and I was not always asked to return those laptops. My current laptop was purchased by me.
[2] I appreciate that there are some people involved in this campaign who earnestly believe that they are working to improve the state of professional ethics in games media. That is a worthy goal! But you're allying yourself to a cause that disproportionately attacks women while ignoring almost every other conflict of interest in the industry. If this is what you care about, find a new way to do it - and perhaps deal with the rather more obvious cases involving giant corporations, rather than obsessing over indie developers.
For avoidance of doubt, any comments arguing this point will be replaced with the phrase "Fart fart fart".
[3] Except for the purposes of finding entertaining security bugs
no subject
(Anonymous) 2014-10-02 09:59 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
(Anonymous) 2014-10-03 12:57 am (UTC)(link)The well has been poisoned. Find a new hashtag to rally behind and actually go after the corruption of big publishers and big gaming magazines and news sites instead of just harping on a few women and feminists who basically have zero social capital or control in the games industry to begin with who just wanted to point out that maybe some games weren't as inclusive as they could be.
The worst part about this whole thing is that Gamasutra, of all sites, is one that a lot of devs in the game industry legitimately use to share knowledge and discuss topics and find jobs. By hurting Gamasutra you are literally making *all* game devs jobs more difficult and worsening their professional discourse for no reason other than that you disagreed with *one* person who regularly posts to the site. This is literally a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face.