LinuxToday editor calls Shuttleworth 'sexist twit'

Sam Varghese
Tuesday, 10 November 2009 03:01

Opinion and Analysis

LinuxToday managing editor Carla Schroder has described Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth as a "sexist twit" over some answers he gave at a Q and A held during an open week for the latest Ubuntu release.
The answers were posted on the Geek Feminism blog which is run by Perl developer Kirrily Robert. The post was contributed by a guest named Rick Scott. (The full Q and A is here.)

Canonical is the parent company of the popular Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution and employs a number of women as this photo attests.

LinuxToday is a popular website which posts links to articles about free and open source software and also about other aspects of technology.

Allegations of sexism in the free and open source software community have been a hot topic of discussion recently, following keynotes by Free Software Founder Richard Stallman at the GNOME Desktop summit in Gran Canaria, Spain, and Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth at LinuxCon in Portland Oregon, both of which were alleged to contain sexist references.

It may be recalled that a few weeks back, Robert had latched on to some part of Shuttleworth's keynote at LinuxCon - before she heard the full speech herself - and demanded that he apologise for words that she deemed to be sexist.

Shuttleworth later privately indicated to Robert that he would not be apologising.

In what appear to be questions designed to elicit answers that can be used to criticise him, Shuttleworth was asked "how important is having a diverse group of contributors (women & minority folks) to solving Bug #1?"

Bug #1 in the Launchpad bug tracking system, where bugs in Ubuntu are listed, is "Microsoft has a majority market share" - not really a bug in Ubuntu but a statement about the intention to grab more market share for Ubuntu.

Shuttleworth's response to this query - one of more than 30 questions which he answered over an hour - was "not especially, but it makes the project more interesting."

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