Why Matt Zimmerman should quit Canonical

Sam Varghese
Friday, 02 October 2009 06:11

Opinion and Analysis

The chief technology officer of Canonical, Matt Zimmerman, has put himself in an untenable position after he took a public stance that a remark made by his boss in a keynote was sexist.


It is difficult to see how Zimmerman can continue to stay at the company and work under Mark Shuttleworth. Canonical is the parent company of the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution.

Shuttleworth initially came under fire from open source consultant Kirrily Robert who, having heard about his talk from other sources, decided that she should issue an open letter, asking him to apologise. In this post, Robert made reference to one remark which she claimed was sexist.

The letter drew the usual point-scoring replies, with more sound than sense emerging.

Zimmerman, who had been present for the keynote at the LinuxCon conference in Portland, Oregon, added his voice to the debate, with a post on his blog where he said the remark in question was sexist.

The remark that Zimmerman referred to came towards the end of Shuttleworth's discourse; at that point he was talking about how various Linux subsystems could be made to work seamlessly.

He made reference to Till Kampeter's sterling work in getting any kind of printer to work with Linux, and then added that if people could get subsystems like USB and Wi-Fi to work in the same way "we would have less trouble explaining to girls what we do."

When Zimmerman made his post there was an expectation that Shuttleworth would make an apology to douse the flames; this was fed by the fact that Zimmerman said he had spoken to his boss shortly after the keynote before making his blog post.

But that seems unlikely, if one goes by a second post from Robert who writes that Shuttleworth has indicated to her in private that he will not be issuing any apology. This second post cites three cases of what Robert interprets as sexism in the keynote.

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