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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.

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Our community and the people in it, are under attack. We are being disrupted, we are being defamed, we are being lied to, and, in some instances, we are even having our lives invaded.

More importantly, there is a consistent thread running through these attacks, invasions and disruptions. This attack comes not from Microsoft, but from a parasitical pseudo-"community" that attempts to pretend it's actually our community.

We are a community of not just coders, but localizers, artists, writers, marketers, conference volunteers, web designers, legal experts, photographers, experience and interface designers, and users who file bugs, make suggestions of provide feedback. This is the community that accomplishes and supports the work on the software we use and love.

We are seeing people making a pretense of involvement in FLOSS and in our community, people who we don't actually know, people who never join us at conferences, don't work in projects, and only participate in mailing lists to instigate flame wars. We are seeing people who seem to be making a sort of religion out of "free software" and issuing their demands to the rest of us to do things their way. These are people who will excoriate you as something less than a "true GNU/Linux user" if you should touch a Macintosh or (heaven forbid!) a Windows box. These are folks who will berate you for buying a piece of software or owning an iPod. These are people who will classify you as a "freedom hater" if you express reservations about the GPL v3.

Our community thrives on disagreement, and we (mostly) deal with it in healthy ways. We reject uniformity of opinion and we always have. In stark contrast, this pretense of "community" insists that their way is the One True Way, and we should all just shut up, learn the catechism, and do their bidding.

Our community is founded on reputation, we value people based on their contributions: this is the "rough meritocracy" within which we operate. When the imposters of true community engage in defamation, invasions of personal privacy, taking mailing list disagreements into real life by contacting people's employers, they create a chilling effect—people fear to express themselves as themselves, and reputation is lost.

These people are the "Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists". They are disrupting and dividing our community with their demands that we do things the way they say, and their tactics of anonymous comment-bombing, mailing list trolling and defaming members of the community.

We say enough is enough. We are putting our collective feet down as far as strident demands from complete non-participants in the community go. We are saying "no" to Faux FLOSS Fundamentalism, and people like Roy Schestowitz, Sam Varghese, "Penguin Pete", "Jason" of mono-nono, and the like, as well as the assortment of associated and sympathetic trolls who post endless anonymous comments to blog postings they dislike and start up flame wars on development lists.

The Faux FLOSS Fundamentalists have nothing to offer the community but their propaganda, their dogma, and their misplaced sense of entitlement. We need to reject those who demand that we all sign up for "Freedom the Way We Tell You To" and we need to make it clear to them that they need to either actually start participating in a meaningful way or simply stop "advocating" at us.

Plain old "freedom" is good enough for us.

Faux FLOSS Fundamentalism "In the Wild"

By way of a concrete example, I offer this email thread, from the ubuntu-devel list around the beginning of June.
It shows "Mark Fink" (a regular anti-Mono "advocate" who, as you will see, constantly points back to Boycott Novell and praises Roy Schestowitz, and who you may remember from that previous posting), asserting (without particular evidence) that there is "shameful censoring of mono [sic] opposition" going on, demanding that Mono (and consequently F-Stop and Tomboy) be removed from the Ubuntu default install, and further demanding that Jo Shields be removed from his involvement in Ubuntu and David Siegel be fired from Canonical, with much vituperation and insult directed at list members who attempt to help him see reason along the way.
"Mark Fink" and "Remco"--who comes in a bit later in the thread, and starts off seeming semi-reasonable, only to go progressively deeper off the deep end as things proceed--represent the "faux FLOSS fundamentalists" here.
Everybody else on the thread represents the "real FLOSS community", as do the vast majority of the hundreds, if not thousands, of subscribers to that list who didn't comment. Most of us on the thread know, or are at least aware, of one another; none of us has much of a clue who Remco and Mr. Fink are.

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