What puts women off FOSS? [LWN.net]

What puts women off FOSS?

Posted Sep 29, 2007 21:16 UTC (Sat) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
In reply to: What puts women off FOSS? by tuxchick
Parent article: To Sir, with Love: How To Get More Women Involved in Open Source (O'ReillyNet)

I would like more people to admit that there are problems, instead of denying it or expecting us to tolerate them as the price of participating in FOSS.

I admit that there are problems like sick people who send death threats to Darl McBride or to females as general, and I think these people should be dealt by the police or mental institues (so I don´t tolerate them) - but what does it have to do with the community in general? Is there anyone in the FOSS community who tolerates these people?

Bye,NAR

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Unfortunatelly yes...

Posted Sep 29, 2007 21:26 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

How can you know if someone from LKML or even LWN threatened Darl or someone from Debian-Women group ? You'll probably never know. And since there are so few women in "normal" mailing lists it's hard to catch such guys...

So yes, they are tolerated - not because anyone likes them but because
1. People don't know.
2. People don't care - sometimes actively don't care (we care here only about technical superiority - don't ring any bells?).
If someone if antisocial in general and hates linuxchix in particular but does good technical work - will he be tolerated ? Sadly quite often the answer is "yes" - and it affects not just women.

Unfortunatelly yes...

Posted Sep 30, 2007 13:05 UTC (Sun) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (1 responses)

1. How on earth can one tolerate someone, if one doesn't even know him or what he does? Without an object this action cannot be carried out, so a statement like "they are tolerated because people don't know" ha no meaning at all.

2. That someone is antisocial in general or hates linuxchix in particular does not mean that one has to shut him out and ignore his technical contributions. That's his personal views and he is entitled to that, even if I'd personally think he's a dork. Now if he actively offends someone else (e.g. a woman), not even to mention death threats, that's a whole different issue. That's exactly where toleration has to end.

Unfortunatelly yes...

Posted Sep 30, 2007 13:41 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

I think khim meant that the specific people who made the death threats or
whatever are tolerated in the community because nobody knows that those
specific people made the threats, and that if it was widely known, those
people would (one hopes) be ostracised or in some other way receive
negative social reinforcement. (Being nasty to people who send death
threats seems fine to me. Such people have shown themselves to not be
shrinking violets already.)