open source feminism
By Shiny on 30 June 2009
I've pondered for some days writing a post being an woman working with and contributing to open source software for the Down under feminists carnival - such a post would include how awesome it is to work in this great field.
Such a blog post would also include the seriously negative sexist incidents that happen from time to time. Especially the high profile ones. (They're not the norm, and they happen infrequently)
In the past when I've reported on such negative incidents on my blog (3 times) I've received email telling me to stop pointing it out. Usually it's from open source project leaders and people I do respect in the open source community. The form of the email is usually a very very long essay explaining that describing what has happened to me or my friends at a conference is going to damage the community, the project, and is going to drive women away from the field. Please be quiet.
They ask me why I want to do such a horrible thing to open source as to blog about the things that happen. Very clearly I'm part of the problem by reporting it. Often they'll throw in something about me not understanding how open source culture works.
So on that note, I'm not going to write the post after all - I don't have the energy.
Instead I encourage you to check out the Geek feminism wiki
By puck (not verified) on Tue, 30/06/2009 - 12:27
Hi Brenda,
I support airing what happens within our community.
Without people knowing what some of the down right disgusting behaviour that happens is, we can't tell people that it is completely unacceptable.
It seems that merely telling people to "be nice" and "don't be creepy" doesn't work.
Andrew
By Mary (not verified) on Tue, 30/06/2009 - 16:54
I'm actually hoping to have some content on the wiki that addresses the "discussing this is doing harm" or "discussing this disproportionately is doing harm" (where 'disproportionately' is very often equivalent to 'at all') argument.
By Mary (not verified) on Tue, 30/06/2009 - 16:58
Hrm, some thoughts towards that: I think it's like a lot of the arguments around discussions about various privileges. Learning to distinguish that people who are angry don't (at least usually, there are probably exceptions) hate open source or geeks or the goals of their community, often the reverse. But they're (we're) legitimately angry about some aspects and members of the community and insisting that anger be only of an approved mild hidden kind is missing the point.
By John A (not verified) on Wed, 01/07/2009 - 10:11
I fully support any attempt to discuss these issues, but I have seen in other communities the nonsense that it 'harms the movement'.
A community needs to be open to criticism and a right for people to challenge behaviour that negatively affects women. It's the people behaving in those ways that are the problem, not the messengers.
An open community is a healthy community.
By reader (not verified) on Thu, 02/07/2009 - 10:15
He aha te mea nui o te ao?
He tangata, he tangata, he tangata.
By Brenda (not verified) on Thu, 02/07/2009 - 12:00
He tangata? ka pai...
L'enfer, c'est les autres.
By Chris (not verified) on Fri, 03/07/2009 - 08:20
Hi Brenda
I came across your website via the DNC campagin - which I thought was great.
Anyway, that pride you feel in being a geek? It is damaged by people telling you to stay in the closet regarding sexist incidents. To shut up. To pretend it didn't happen.
Sexist incidents are not unique to the open source community, or any community; the more people report them and talk about them, the better it is for all people working in that field, and for society as a whole.
I support continuing to write about such incidents.
By charliegyrl (not verified) on Sun, 12/07/2009 - 15:28
Oh yeah Brenda u go gyrl!!! We continue to give power to those who would 'shut us up' when we shut up!!! Don't listen.
When we shut up we start dying quietly from the inside out. Hence the number of troubled self-medicating abused children and adults.
Feminist Fighter for Fifty Years.
By Rick (not verified) on Wed, 23/09/2009 - 18:48
Mary put together an excellent writeup of why it's important to report and keep track of problems:
http://geekfeminism.org/2009/08/19/why-we-document/
By Lefty (not verified) on Wed, 30/09/2009 - 01:41
Hi, Brenda, I found this page from the "Harming the Community" page on the geekfeminism wiki.
I was churlish enough to criticize Richard Stallman's "EMACS virgins" "joke" during the Gran Canaria desktop summit, and received a similar negative backlash, amounting to hundreds of comments and emails, almost all anonymous.
I learned that when someone asked about this incident at the most recent Software Freedom Day in Boston, Mr. Stallman replied that "The person who brought that up seems to be a troll-like enemy of the free software movement."
I guess that's the equation: "trying to support women in FLOSS" == "troll-like enemy of the free software movement".
Keen.
By Shiny on Wed, 30/09/2009 - 11:26
Hi Lefty - RMS was trying to question your motives...
The thing is, you can have some mono fed anti-RMS motives and still be right about RMS being incredibly out-a-line making rape jokes in a emacs talk.
Also, RMS needs to learn that FSM != RMS.
By Lefty (not verified) on Wed, 30/09/2009 - 12:39
Hi, Brenda--
As I've said repeatedly, I have no Mono-related motives whatsoever. I have friends who work on Mono, and I think the attacks on them are unfair ("Microsoft shill") at best and completely vile ("traitor to the free software community") at worst, but I've got no horse in that race, personally. I don't happen to view Mono as being extraordinarily risky from an intellectual property standpoint (and working with patents is one of the things I do); I use Tomboy and F-Spot, but if there were real alternatives that offered advantages, I'd switch to those without a second thought. Simply "doesn't use Mono" is not, in and of itself, a sufficient "advantage", however.
Mr. Stallman, if that's indeed what he's doing, would seem to be simply using Mono as an excuse to divert attention from his own bad behavior and inability to apologize for it. Too bad no one seems willing to call him on it.
The equation that he made, whether it was some sort of out-of-left-field way of "questioning my motives" or not, seems pretty dangerous to me, and is a lot more disturbing. And, coming at a time when the FSF is sponsoring a "Minisummit on Women in Free Software", it cuts the legs out from under that effort, pretty much destroying (in my eyes, anyway) any remaining credibility it might have had (since no one at the FSF seems to have any issue with the nonconsensual defloration of "EMACS virgins" as a "holy duty")...
By Shiny on Wed, 30/09/2009 - 13:09
sorry lefty - I have no idea what your motives are, they're a complete red herring the argument..
My point is, RMS defenders should quit using some alleged Lefty motives (mono crap) as a reason to excuse RMS's disgusting behaviour --- it's no excuse at all.
"Lefty likes mono therefore it's okay for RMS to make sexist remarks and rape jokes.."... just wtf?
p.s. (and I do take you are your word, there's nothing i can see that makes you an enemy of the FSM.)
By Lefty (not verified) on Thu, 01/10/2009 - 06:22
Your right: my motivations, whether pure, pure evil, world domination, or whatever, have nothing to do with anything, and it's simply one of a million efforts to divert discussion to anything other than the actual issue. Sadly, at least in RMS' case, he mostly seems to get away with it (thanks to support from "fanboys", having a pretty unassailable position at the FSF, etc.)
I'm coming to realize that the general understanding of these kind of issues in the community at large is around where things were in the corporate world in, charitably, 1972 or so. People talk about "freedom" while in the same breath they say things that suggest they're unable to envision that a woman might be their equal, or better, on a technical level, while standing in front of a number (a dismally low one, of course) of just such women.
Stuff that would mean a lawsuit if it happened in a corporate environment in California, Massachusetts or New York, at the very least, seems to happen in the community on a monthly basis--looking at the "Incidents Timeline" on the Geek Feminism wiki is pretty depressing.
And people scratch their heads and wonder why there are so few women in the community. And they have "mini-summits". Let's think about it some. Then, let's think about it some more.
As closed and proprietary as Apple is (and they make Microsoft look like "the Summer of Code"), they have a nice way of dealing with folks who make sexist remarks and rape jokes as a way of injecting a bit of "harmless fun" into their technical presentations: it's called "immediate dismissal, with cause".
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