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Yet another male perspective on women in free softwareYet another male perspective on women in free softwarePosted Oct 11, 2007 6:59 UTC (Thu) by yeti-dn (guest, #46560)Parent article: Yet another male perspective on women in free software
Women are red herring, it's just one group of people that are, in general, not attracted. Anyway, the primary question is:
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What is the common basis? Is extending the group at the expense of losing what originally formed it really a rational behaviour?
I don't care whether people are male, female, yellow, German, christian, aliens -- who can tell it just from the name anyway. If you don't try to pretend you are different than you are, it sorts people to those that have something common with you and those that don't. And this sorting has occurred here. What's the problem?
Forcing people into political correctness, hypocrisy and treating (for instance) women specially will hardly do any good. And don't be mistaken, a covert attempt to make certain people treated specially is what this is all about -- not differentiating and judging people only based on merit of their contribution was one of the foundation of our community. Long time ago.
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Yet another male perspective on women in free software Posted Oct 11, 2007 22:18 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Yeah, right. A general guideline `don't be horrible to people' is allabout *discrimination*.
I guess that if we wanted to be less discriminatory we could say `don't be
You're a loony.
Yet another male perspective on women in free software Posted Oct 16, 2007 17:50 UTC (Tue) by einhverfr (guest, #44407) [Link] Just as a quick point. I think the issue of a lack of women is a symptom, not an illness. The question is how we encourage contribution from the community. If we encourage it well, then we will have a wider demographic of contributors. If not, then we are stuck with mostly lonely males suffering from a form of OCD ;-) (I am male, not entirely lonely, but probably do suffer from the issue of obsessing about technical issues.) The common basis is quite simple. We all want to have software that does what we need it to do. This is the basis for the larger community. You say: "I don't care whether people are male, female, yellow, German, christian, aliens -- who can tell it just from the name anyway." My name (Greek for "Christ Bearer") aside, I am no longer Christian :-) Something that would help, however, would be for a group to start interviewing women in open source projects to ask how satisfied they are with various aspects of the project, get specific feedback, and then rank projects based on how well the community supports their contributions. From there, it might be good to develop wider-range community management best practices which help *everyone* contribute more.
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