geekosophical.net— As a Woman and an Open Source contributor, I see a number of behaviours within the Open Source community that are quite counterproductive to the community.
May 21, 2007View in Crawl 4
Inaccurate population estimates aside, this is an important and pressing matter. Open source is all about the community, compared to the proprietary software industry, ours needs expanding.
There's very few in IT in general... Unless what she's talking about also includes the users in general... I think there's more females using linux than what she mentions.
Personally, I've hardly ever met free software people from the internet. I don't really care if they're female, male, British, American, politically different to me, even if they're under 18 - the only thing that matters to me is if they care about the project and they're willing to support it through code or advocacy.In the prop. software world, you're seen - and any preconceived ideas on gender, age etc are spent there. In free software projects, they're generally not supported by companies - so that's less of an issue.If anything, I don't think the problem is anything to do with less females being interested in free software, I think it's to do with not enough females learning about the IT industry - just look at CompSci courses, there are barely 5 girls on a course of over 100 at my University!So, I'd prefer if the "female" element didn't come into play - the best thing to do is to ignore the issue, and to encourage girls to study computing, rather than convert prop -> open source based on gender.That's just my take on it.
I agree. I also think that anyone who discourages involvement by women should be tossed out. I see certain developers who take pleasue in being misogynists. They hurt everyone.
If you don't know wtf this is about, try using a obviously female nick on freenode for a bit.join a few random channels and see the cr@p women get, not only in PMs but blantantly in project channels.In some channels/mailing lists, if you post anything technical then expect a few marriage proposals, some rape threats, and a fight be be taken seriously..
ron1n541May 21, 2007
Inaccurate population estimates aside, this is an important and pressing matter. Open source is all about the community, compared to the proprietary software industry, ours needs expanding.
xilonMay 21, 2007
There's very few in IT in general... Unless what she's talking about also includes the users in general... I think there's more females using linux than what she mentions.
dotwaffleMay 21, 2007
Personally, I've hardly ever met free software people from the internet. I don't really care if they're female, male, British, American, politically different to me, even if they're under 18 - the only thing that matters to me is if they care about the project and they're willing to support it through code or advocacy.In the prop. software world, you're seen - and any preconceived ideas on gender, age etc are spent there. In free software projects, they're generally not supported by companies - so that's less of an issue.If anything, I don't think the problem is anything to do with less females being interested in free software, I think it's to do with not enough females learning about the IT industry - just look at CompSci courses, there are barely 5 girls on a course of over 100 at my University!So, I'd prefer if the "female" element didn't come into play - the best thing to do is to ignore the issue, and to encourage girls to study computing, rather than convert prop -> open source based on gender.That's just my take on it.
schestowitzMay 21, 2007
I agree. I also think that anyone who discourages involvement by women should be tossed out. I see certain developers who take pleasue in being misogynists. They hurt everyone.
tanifaMay 22, 2007
If you don't know wtf this is about, try using a obviously female nick on freenode for a bit.join a few random channels and see the cr@p women get, not only in PMs but blantantly in project channels.In some channels/mailing lists, if you post anything technical then expect a few marriage proposals, some rape threats, and a fight be be taken seriously..