Will FSF's summit on women in FOSS achieve anything?

By Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 15 September 2009 08:06

Opinion and Analysis

What a movement achieves depends greatly on the motivations behind it; when one is pushed to do something, then much less is achieved than if the movement arises spontaneously.
Given this, it would probably be best not to expect anything earth-shaking to happen when the Free Software Foundation holds a mini-summit later this week to discuss the participation of women in free and open source software.

The summit, or conference, or talk-fest, call it what you will, has come about after people attacked FSF founder Richard Stallman, admittedly an easy target because he never fires back, after they deemed a keynote he made to the GNOME Foundation's annual summit in August sexist.

This appears to be the FSF's way of defusing the situation, of that there is little doubt. It is a pity that this is the case; had the mini-summit come about due to other circumstances, it would probably have more chances of becoming something of a long-term project.

For some time now, there has often been a talk here or there, a presentation now and then, at some conference or the other, on the topic of women's participation in FOSS.

Depending on the climate prevailing in the FOSS atmosphere at the time - who decides to wheel the same barrow - the sundry talks may or may not catch fire and provoke discussion. Most of the time, however, when discussion begins, what emerges at the end is generally a point-scoring exercise - the old mine-is-better-than-yours syndrome.

In discussion threads which concern themselves with such issues, many members of the FOSS community stand revealed for the bigots they are - but nobody calls them on it, for fear of being labelled as being against the cause (sexism) and not the bigotry.