Geek feminist jumps the gun on Shuttleworth speech

Sam Varghese
Friday, 25 September 2009 06:56

Opinion and Analysis

I'm sure I'll be shouted down too - but it doesn't bother me one whit simply because this whole argument is never rational, it's overly emotional.

In fact, I've been dubbed anti-feminist by one of the self-appointed defenders of women's rights, computer journalist Bruce Byfield, for questioning the conclusions he reached in an article about the FSF mini-summit on women's participation in open source.

Byfield is something of a coward - he raises things like this on his private blog, even though the article which I quoted was on a public site.

My name is there on a geek feminism wiki too - because I questioned the motivation of some other self-appointed defenders of women when FSF founder Richard Stallman was accused of making sexist remarks at a summit.

So, gentle reader, remember you're reading something written by a person who's akin to Rosemary's Baby aka the spawn of Satan.

Ironically, the only mainstream tech media publication to put its feet into really dangerous waters, and highlight an alleged instance of sexism in the biggest open source project of them all, Debian, has been iTWire. Nobody else even went there.

Women offended by the remarks came out and were quoted as well. This wasn't some shadowy post in the recesses of the internet.

Byfield was silent on this issue. Lots of other people were too. It was discussed at length on the Debian mailing lists.

But I'm used to the hypocrisy which is rampant in the open source community so I should not be surprised, I guess.

Shuttleworth has many faults, I'm sure, but one has to always assume that a person is innocent until proven guilty. If someone violates that basic rule, which should extend to every human on the planet, then that person is in the wrong.

It doesn't matter what cause he or she champions.