Two terrible tastes that go great together?
There's a weird consistency with which the most publicly vocal partisans of the position that Microsoft is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hell also seem to regularly express the opinion that there's really no problem, or at least no problem worth talking about, with women in the open source software community.
2009 has been a pretty hair-raising year from the standpoint of women's involvement in open source development. Coming in, we knew that the level of participation by women in our projects is around 1.5%, versus a level close to twenty times that in the proprietary software world. And we've seen
- A heavily sexualized presentation by Matt Aimonetti at the Golden Gate Ruby Conference
- An even more heavily sexualized presentation (NSFW) by Hoss Gifford at Flashbelt
- A bit of "harmless fun" from Richard Stallman at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit involving his "holy duty" to "relieve" specifically female "EMACS virgins" of their "virginity"
- Most recently, a keynote from Mark Shuttleworth at LinuxCon, containing, in the space of less than an hour, a hooker joke, a comment about how difficult printing is to explain to "your mom or your grandmom", and another on how much trouble "we" have explaining what "we" do to "girls"
What's interesting here is to note who's taking the position that there really isn't an issue worth talking about here. In Carla Schroder's recent columns on "Sexism in the FOSS Community", among the voices wondering what all the fuss is about are anonymo-nauts such as "GreyGeek", "twitter" and "Jose_X", all Boycott Novell regulars.
During the fracas over GCDS, Roy Schestowitz was one of the first to attempt the moronic diversion of claiming that it was "really all about Mono". As though even if it were, somehow, "about Mono" (which it's not, don't get excited), that makes it okay, in some way, for the president of the FSF to make clearly sexist jokes about nonconsensually deflowering the female members of the audience, in a context where they're outnumbered at a ratio of about thirty-to-one. Schestowitz found himself obliged to issue an apology and a full retraction. Schestowitz was equally quick to blow off Shuttleworth's poor idea of humor: "Instead of 'Mark Shuttleworth', that remark which rubbed Susan the wrong way could just as well come from 'Steve Ballmer' or 'Steve Jobs'." Except that it didn't. It's difficult to know whether Schestowitz finds these inanities persuasive; if so, that's rather sad. It's no surprise that nowhere in his equivocations does Schestowitz display any familiarity with the concept of an "apology".
I found this picture, from the Boycott Novell site (at http://boycottnovell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/mark-on-back.jpg), quite interesting in this regard:
We see a similar pattern with Sam Varghese around Mark Shuttleworth's recent unfortunate statements and Richard Stallman's earlier ones. Varghese (who once devoted four full pages to brutalizing and bullying a 20-year-old college student over a blog posting) likes to remind everyone that he reported on the DebianChix fracas a while back as credentials, but he seems pretty content to rest on his laurels now.
Varghese's usual tactic is to claim that no one who's not there knows what was said (even after people who were there tell him what was said), people are "innocent until proven guilty" (is something on trial, other than Sam's credibility, I mean...?) and in any case, if it wasn't specifically intended to be hurtful, hey! No harm, no foul! Of course, now that the video's out and it's clear that the "geek feminist" in question didn't "jump the gun" in the slightest, Sam doesn't seem to have much to say.
Rather than address the obvious sexism of Shuttleworth's comments, Varghese, who is a shockingly shoddy excuse for a "journalist", attempts to divert the conversation into a discussion of whether Shuttleworth "is a sexist", something no one is claiming. Back in July, Varghese was equally quick to accuse people at "attacking" Stallman, as opposed to Stallman's poor idea of "harmless fun"; Varghese gets bonus points for playing the "race card", and claiming that a suggestion that he fact-check his article was equivalent to demands that he be "enslaved".
Hans Bezemer, who for some inexplicable reason wants people to refer to him as "The Beez", is another example of a regular anti-Mono commentator who's also happy to tell us that there's no problem here, or at least no problem that anyone can do anything about (what if none of us really have free will, huh? what then?), and he suspects women are just like that, in any case. Bruce Byfield has done an excellent job of deconstructing both Varghese and "the Beez". It's worth noting that "the Beez" also took a similar tack of diversion on Richard Stallman.
Why is it that the anti-Mono crowd (who are contributing nothing to the community except "commentary" and "advocacy", i.e. heat and obfuscation) is so uniformly keen to maintain the status quo here? Sadly, the level of awareness of women's issues within the community is dismal, on a par with the way things were in the corporate world back in the early 70s.
Why is a closed, proprietary corporation like Apple (and don't kid yourself, Apple makes Microsoft look like "The Summer of Code" as far as that goes) so much better at treating women decently than the "free software community"? And why do the most strident voices we hear want to keep things that way?
One reason that seems clear is the utter and complete failure of community leadership on these issues. Clearly, Stallman isn't doing much to help—at the recent Software Freedom Day in Boston, he lent support to both the anti-Mono and anti-feminist positions, calling Miguel de Icaza a "traitor" and myself an "enemy" with regard to the "free software movement". Mark Shuttleworth has yet to rethink his refusal to apologize, although I continue to hope that he well. In the words of the old Yiddish proverb, a fish rots from the head down.
