ESR pressure made feminists host detractor's code

By Sam Varghese
Sunday, 01 November 2009 21:01

Opinion and Analysis

Pressure from open source luminary Eric S. Raymond led to geek feminists hosting code created by one of their detractors, which otherwise would have disappeared for good, a post on Raymond's blog reveals.
It may be recalled that open source developer Kirrily Robert had triumphantly announced that the geek feminism site, which she runs, would be hosting the code of a man who uses the handle mikeeUSA.

The code had been deleted from SourceForge after a complaint made by Beth Lynn Eicher, a director of the Ohio LinuxFest.

Eicher had announced this on her blog on October 13.

Robert also poked fun at the man, whose real name is Mikhail Kvaratskhelia, saying that he did not appear to have a copy of his code anymore, and was inept at simple jobs like making back-ups.

But neither Robert nor Eicher gave readers of either of their blogs any inkling that hosting the code came about only after intervention by Raymond - and both were fully aware of it.

A second blog entry by Eicher did not make mention of what had transpired either, saying, in part: "A troll, who had undermined contributors with terrorware has now been given his just deserts (sic) with the help of my dear friends from geekfeminist.org. I want to thank Eric S. Raymond for seeing the cleverness of the solution."

From this post, Eicher linked to another entry where she described what she referred to as "terrorware". Once again, there was no mention of Raymond or what had transpired.

She wrote, in part: "When I asked sourceforge to look into the mikeeusa account, I did not expect all of the copies of the removed projects to be gone. mikeeusa says he has lost about 3 years work which is a consequence that I did not anticipate. Aren’t there users who enjoy this content? I assumed wrongly that mikeeusa himself or one of his fans had a copy somewhere. Come on folks, it’s 2009 with the price per megabyte going for fractional pennies."