Do women matter in FOSS projects?

Sam Varghese
Friday, 26 December 2008 04:40

Opinion and Analysis

When will women be taken seriously in the FOSS community? That's a question that needs to be asked after the Debian GNU/Linux project garnered headlines earlier this month over an offensive mailing list post that had at least two women considering whether they would continue their involvement in the project.

A brief bit of background, developer Josselin Mouette made some offensive comments on the debian-developer-announce mailing list in November. Messages from this list are not limited to developers and go out to many of the other Debian mailing lists.

Mouette followed this up with an even more offensive post on his own blog - and this, as is usual, was published by Planet Debian, which aggregates blog postings from developers.

The strange thing about this episode is that it looks like the FOSS community seemingly doesn't want to know about it.

Apart from iTWire , there wasn't a single story about it by any other site - though the yarn that ran here did gain plenty of traction on the web. And judging by the material that appears on other websites, the Debian mailing lists are pretty closely monitored.

In August 2006, when developer Matthew Garret quit Debian, citing a lack of civility among the reasons for doing so, his action gained a lot of publicity. Pundits like Bruce Byfield were quick to write long comment pieces , examining the issue.

That was the case of one male developer quitting.

This time, when women were treated like objects - and there are quite a few, including some outside the project, who felt offended by Mouette's post - Byfield is silent.

Sites like the American technology news collection website Slashdot have no time for such issues. After all, it's just some sundry women getting all hot and bothered about being objectified. Women are a little less than half the world's population but, hey, that doesn't make them important. Testosterone-charged males have more important issues to talk about.

In February this year, Debian developer Russell Coker wrote an inoffensive post titled "An obstacle for women in the IT industry." But he ended up attracting so many comments from people who were offended by it, that he took the entry off his blog.

A number of people gave Russell a roasting about his post. Self-styled open source advocate Pia Waugh made a number of patronising comments about the post which took as its starting point an entry in a Lenovo salesman's blog. Of course, when real women are offended and say so, people like Waugh go missing.