I understand if you're taking issue with the term as a pejorative, but how is purposefully placing barriers for those that don't conform to the "specifically-defined approach" not definitionally gatekeeping?
I think of "gatekeeping" as blocking access, especially for something that doesn't have a defined membership, like a fandom. e.g. "you're not a real star wars fan if..."
whereas anyone is welcome to contribute to debian, they just have to follow the rules. there's kind of no meaning to the term "gatekeeping" if any organization that has rules to follow counts.
gatekeeping is used as pejorative in those cases, where no gate ought to be. for example in at least one email Linus claims that forbidding C++ in the kernel was also to exclude C++ developers, whether he was right or wrong that is another case of gatekeeping
> It comes from an even older gatekeeping around "the Unix way".
That's not gatekeeping, that's a very specifically-defined approach to operating systems.