Ubuntu chief responds to sexism allegations

Sam Varghese
Thursday, 12 November 2009 03:32

Opinion and Analysis

Mark Shuttleworth, the chief of Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu, has finally spoken out to counter charges of sexism which have been levelled against him recently.


Shuttleworth was accused of making sexist remarks during a keynote he gave at the LinuxCon conference in Portland, Oregon earlier this year.

More recently, he was asked leading questions during a Q and A held during an open week for the latest Ubuntu release; his answers were posted on the Geek Feminism website, which is run by Perl developer Kirrily Robert, as alleged evidence that he does not support diversity.

As iTWire reported (and no other mainstream technology outlet did - the silence was indeed deafening), Shuttleworth's answers led to LinuxToday managing editor Carla Schroder labelling him a "sexist twit."

Shuttleworth broke his silence on the same forum. He described himself as intrigued by Schroder's characterisation of him as a "sexist twit", pointing out that the four people who represented all the authority that he exercised in all the institutions for which he was responsible were women.

"...the COO of Canonical is a woman, appointed by me; the CEO of the Shuttleworth Foundation is a woman, appointed by me; the CEO of Hip2BeSquare, a South African educational campaign, appointed by me, is a woman; the CEO of HBD Venture Capital, also appointed by me, is a woman," he wrote.

"If anything, there’s a case to be made that I harbor (sic) some deep mistrust of male competence, since apart from my own role in Canonical, the above four women represent all the authority I exercise in all the institutions for which I’m responsible. On my executive team, as it were, there’s a very healthy gender balance."

Shuttleworth said he was no fundamentalist when it came to software freedom. "Because Ubuntu is such a visible part of the push for software freedom, people sometimes assume that Ubuntu is fundamentalist about that. And we aren’t," he wrote.

"We think it’s a better way to produce software, but we also think it’s important that people can use their proprietary software with Ubuntu if that’s important to them. We even went as far as including proprietary drivers for some hardware, if that was the best way to get free software up and running on the computer."

He said the questions that been put to him during the open week by a person using the handle MarkDude were plainly fundamentalist. "The first tried to draw a link between diversity and an arbitrary goal. The second put words in my mouth – 'did you just say that primarily white dudes are able to…'.

"I saw no reason to pander to the questioner with vacuous reassurances – the practice of the Ubuntu community speaks for itself, we are an open and tolerant community that defends participation by all subject to the code of conduct.

"As someone said in this thread, it’s all too easy to claim a commitment to diversity while doing nothing of the sort – our actions speak louder than any words."

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