Bruce Byfield: Sexism in the FOSS Community?
Vancouver Linux Users Group
http://www.vanlug.bc.ca
Mon, 18 January 2010 7:30 - 9:30 pm
** BCIT, Building SW1 Room 1025 **
Bruce Byfield: Sexism in the FOSS Community?
2009 was the year that feminism came to the FOSS community. Suddenly,
people started noticing the lack of women, and the systemic sexism in
the community. What happened? How justified is the reaction? Why
does it matter? Come prepared for a lively and open discussion.
About the Speaker:
Bruce is a freelance writer, editor and computer journalist
specializing in free and open source software (FOSS). He has published
over 700 articles, mostly online on such sites as Datamation, IT
Manager's Journal, Linux.com, Linux Developer Network, Linux Journal,
LinuxPlanet, LWN, NewsForge, and Techwr-l. Currently Bruce is doing a
column about the GNU/Linux command line for Linux Pro Magazine and
contributing regularly to Ubuntu User.
Comments
On September 19th, the GNOME
On September 19th, the GNOME Foundation php hosting and the Free Software Foundation will host a mini-summit on how to increase women's participation in the free and open source java hosting software (FOSS) communities. The summit is probably an effort to repair relationships between the two foundations after Richard Stallman was pilloried for sexism after his keynote in Gran Canaria a couple of months ago.
However, regardless of its image hosting reasons, the summit represents one of the first official recognitions of an open secret: sexism is systemic in FOSS, and has been for years.
Of course managed hosting, that is not what the official mythology says. Officially, the FOSS community is a meritocracy, where characteristics like gender don't matter, and everybody is judged only on their contributions.