OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering [LWN.net]

OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering

Posted Aug 25, 2009 15:46 UTC (Tue) by jordanb (subscriber, #45668)
In reply to: OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering by paulj
Parent article: FSF to host a mini-summit on Women in Free Software

> I wonder if we need some kind of "How to communicate and generally discuss
> things productively 101" manual for the free software world. I.e. some
> kind of positive effort to help improve our communication, rather than a
> debate about who is and is not sexist (which will inevitably become very
> heated).

I think a lot of the problem with this community is that many of us are willing to devote epic amounts of energy to really lame, petty arguments in order to bolster our fragile egos. I've certainly been of this persuasion myself, but lately I've been getting quite sick of it -- to the point where I'm spending more and more time with 'real people' who want to just sit back and have a beer rather than have geek-wars about silly things.

Anyway, my point is that I'm not at all convinced that most of the people here (or in computers in general) *want* to learn or follow etiquette. We want to be intellectual bullies duking it out to become the biggest jackass on the playground. Just look at this conversation.. or.. any topic the libertarians can turn into a dick-wagging free-for-all about their silly absolutist ideology. It's all a sport. A game's being played here -- and a particularly insipid and pointless one at that.

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OK, I'll bite. Sides of this issue you might not be considering

Posted Aug 26, 2009 1:13 UTC (Wed) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

I see your point about the arguments becoming tiresome (it must be that, like me, you've gotten older? :) ).

That said, I enjoy free software. I want to still do so in X decades time, so it needs to be sustainable. There seems to be a very definite problem of a gender imbalance in free software, relative to software engineering generally. That inherently hurts sustainability by greatly limiting the pool of expertise available to free software, in addition to harder to quantify social sustainability effects.

So yeah, it's annoying we have to spend energy on this, but it seems really important. It's good mjg59 spends energy on this (though, I think he still needs to fine-tune his approach a bit more). It's good the FSF are having a conference.

Course, seems we can't even discuss the issue with each other without getting worked up, so far..