Shuttleworth employee calls boss's remark sexist

Sam Varghese
Wednesday, 30 September 2009 07:23

Opinion and Analysis

The chief technology officer of Canonical, the company founded by open source entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, has come right out and termed a remark made by his boss at the recent LinuxCon in Portland, Oregon, sexist.
Canonical is the parent company of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution.

CTO Matt Zimmerman, in a post on his blog, said he had been there in person when Shuttleworth gave his keynote at LinuxCon and had briefly spoken to his boss about the comment shortly after his talk.

"The remark in question was sexist, and although it may seem small in itself, it is representative of an attitude which is harmful to the community," Zimmerman wrote, having earlier clarified that he was speaking mainly "for myself, and in part on behalf of the Ubuntu community (not Canonical)."

As with all such posts on private blogs, the usual point-scoring exercise has begun in the comments that follow his post.

There is the occasional insightful take; for example Martin Krafft, a senior Debian developer, writes, in part: "I repeat myself when I claim that I am all for making OSS more friendly a place. I prefer to look at it from an egalitarian perspective.

"The way feminists approach the matter these days makes me wonder whether they want women to be treated special, or not. Obviously a feminist will say 'not special' (cf. egalitarianism), but I am beginning to doubt that."

How exactly Zimmerman's remarks will go down with Shuttleworth is difficult to say though it is fair to assume that the former knows his boss much better than anyone outside the company.

At least one senior FOSS personality told me that he expects Shuttleworth to issue an apology in the coming days.

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