My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet) [LWN.net]

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 26, 2007 6:03 UTC (Wed) by njs (subscriber, #40338)
In reply to: My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet) by linuxrocks123
Parent article: My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

>We just have different views of what should be on-topic for this site. I don't care at all about increasing the participation of underrepresented groups in free software unless there is clear and convincing evidence that something is being done specifically to exclude them.

Looking at just the current front page, I don't care at all about Xandros's appropriateness for former Windows users, or dyne:bolic's releases, or FOSS.IN (I'm on the wrong continent), or security updates to KDE, or changes to Fedora's default theme, or even Firefox releases. (I'm using epiphany on debian.) Nothing wrong with that; even those articles that are personally irrelevant are still vaguely interesting for the sense of community zeitgeist they give, and it is not, after all, called NjsWN.

Perhaps you use and are interested in every one of those projects, and having become accustomed to the LWN team's uncanny ability to post only articles that you do care about, were so shocked by this one that you felt the need to complain.

Or... maybe, despite your claims, you do care about this topic rather more than I care about learning that PHP is insecure (I mean seriously, for this I need a subscription?). If the presence or absence of women in FOSS is so irrelevant, why are you posting here at all, much less threatening not to subscribe, swearing, and cobbling together arguments that would make a Philosophy 10 professor weep?[1]

I can't read your mind, but to us out here, your behavior just doesn't look like that of someone who actually finds the article irrelevant; it looks like that of someone who has a real problem with giving women a fair shake, and tries to disguise it (maybe even to themselves) by pretending to find the article irrelevant. I could be wrong, but you might want to think about it anyway.

[1] Okay, I was trying to refrain, but this is too long regardless and seriously, that first paragraph... once you unwrap the last clause from the obfuscating rhetorical question, its argument is "empirically, women seem uninterested in participating in free software as it currently is practiced; therefore, the ideal form of free software going forward would preserve their disinterest". Huh? And somehow this is supposed to be related to "optimizing for the uncommon case"; yet it seems to me that currently about half of the people who might otherwise participate in free software development are choosing not to. Doubling our contributor base would be a 100% increase, not the ordinary meaning of "uncommon". But, you argue, even losing half our contributors for stupid reasons is actually okay -- it would only be a problem if there was "clear and convincing evidence that something is being done specifically to exclude them". I would like to live in a world where harm is only ever caused by specific intent, and what harm does occur is universally accompanied by clear and convincing evidence of its source... but I'm still looking.

(Log in to post comments)

My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

Posted Sep 26, 2007 10:00 UTC (Wed) by linuxrocks123 (guest, #34648) [Link]

> If the presence or absence of women in FOSS is so irrelevant, why are you posting here at all, much less threatening not to subscribe, swearing, and cobbling together arguments that would make a Philosophy 10 professor weep?[1]

I think you meant "101" there, but whatever. I think the presence or absence of women in FOSS is irrelevant to this site, not to the world. Clearly, I'm not disinterested in these articles. They actively tick me off. I'm not trying to disguise that.

> [1] Okay, I was trying to refrain, but this is too long regardless and seriously, that first paragraph... once you unwrap the last clause from the obfuscating rhetorical question, its argument is "empirically, women seem uninterested in participating in free software as it currently is practiced; therefore, the ideal form of free software going forward would preserve their disinterest". Huh?

No. However, it would be a bad idea to change free software in ways that make it less efficient or less desirable by current contributors in the unfounded hope that others who have not joined us in the past may decide to do so.

> And somehow this is supposed to be related to "optimizing for the uncommon case"; yet it seems to me that currently about half of the people who might otherwise participate in free software development are choosing not to. Doubling our contributor base would be a 100% increase, not the ordinary meaning of "uncommon".

I don't think we stand such a chance of doubling our contributor base. You seriously think that if we all standardize on Python and tone down the flame level on LKML to "slow cook" that all of a sudden 2 million (an approximation of the number of current male FLOSS contributors, pulled directly from my posterior) women worldwide will decide they love Linux and start hacking? Really?

> But, you argue, even losing half our contributors for stupid reasons is actually okay -- it would only be a problem if there was "clear and convincing evidence that something is being done specifically to exclude them". I would like to live in a world where harm is only ever caused by specific intent, and what harm does occur is universally accompanied by clear and convincing evidence of its source... but I'm still looking.

Well, if you don't have evidence of its source, you don't know its source, so you should go look for it rather than try to fix the problem without knowing its cause. I don't find the lack of women in FLOSS a problem in itself, but it could be a symptom of a problem if they are actually being excluded.

I don't think women should be excluded. That wouldn't be ethically right, it would be tactically stupid, and if I thought it were the case, I'd be first in line shouting that they not be. But, I don't think that's what's going on, and unless I see clear and convincing evidence that it is, I remain unconvinced. No FLOSS project I know of has a policy of excluding women or is actively hostile in any way towards women contributing.

For many contributors, this is a hobby or is otherwise a labor of love. And men and women tend to have different hobbies sometimes: I'm sure there's a pretty bad gender skew among amateur crotchet artists. Why do men and women like different things and have different hobbies? Well, there's still research into it, and there's a lot of politics and bias, and no one really knows for sure yet. But, we do know that they do.

I don't make judgments about how people spend their free time unless they're doing something that hurts themselves or others. I like computers, and especially Linux and free software, and I'll talk about it and promote it to anyone who wants to listen. Personally, I find that men are statistically more likely to care to listen. That's okay with me. People like different things, and not everyone has to be into computers. There are exceptions to everything, and when I find a woman who does want to hear about Linux, that's great, too. It just doesn't happen very often.