My Fabulous Geek Career (O'ReillyNet)

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.

It just so happens that men put up with this behavior more than women do.

I meant here that men are more likely to put up with boorish behavior...