31–40 of 168 posts
I have mixed feelings about this anniversary. RMS is both the reason that the free software movement is where it is today, and the reason that it has so few women involved. If we could turn back the clock, I wish we could keep the good parts but leave out the bad parts.
I have mixed feelings about this anniversary. RMS is both the reason that the free software movement is where it is today, and the reason that it has so few women involved. If we could turn back the clock, I wish we could keep the good parts but leave out the bad parts.
> and the reason that it has so few women involved It is repeated and repeated again that because there aren't as many women as men in IT, there must be some kind of badness going on. I offer a more charitable explanation: Women don't want to, the same way Men don't want to go to yoga courses. No badness involved, just people making their decisions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and the reason that it has so few women involved It is repeated and repeated again that because there aren't as many women as men in IT, there must be some kind of badness going on. I offer a more charitable explanation: Women don't want to, the same way Men don't want to go to yoga courses. No badness involved, just people making their decisions.
The problem with that explanation is that in the past, there were a lot more women in computing. First as operators and programmer/mathematicians, later the gender mix was following the same upward trend as other sciences. I've seen two explanations for the dearth of women in computing: engineering culture becoming dominant in the '60s (where it was more the domain of mathematics before) and the rise of personal comp…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and the reason that it has so few women involved It is repeated and repeated again that because there aren't as many women as men in IT, there must be some kind of badness going on. I offer a more charitable explanation: Women don't want to, the same way Men don't want to go to yoga courses. No badness involved, just people making their decisions.
Have you spoken to women who have joined open source groups (I’m thinking GNU / FSF led projects, not just programs that happen to be open source)? I have, and without exception the ones I know well personally have had awful experiences, and the ones who complained were just told “Oh, that’s just how person X is”. (There is not a single X here I am hiding, it’s a pattern).
My earliest exposure to free software was via. GCC and Emacs. The early debates on Gnu/Linux, OSS vs. Free Software etc. were all things I imbibed back then. The ideological stand of the FSF was appealing to me when I was younger and really affected my outlook. Over the years, I can't help but feeling that while the FSF's core message is still relevant and true, their tactics have more or less pushed them outside of…
There is free as in apache/BSD/MIT, and free as in GPL. In many parts of industry, going the "purist" route and putting your library under GPL is a sure way to make sure no-one will use it (the LGPL doesn't completely solve this problem either). Whereas more pragmatic approaches to free software have absolutely taken off. Big names like React, Angular etc. are MIT licensed, for example. It's like the FSF invented "fr…
There are certainly issues with GPL software, either from the "you can't run modified software on your hardware" or "saas isn't distribution" get-out, or from the "small company X develop free software and charge for support/hosting/etc, so large company Y take that free software and charge for support/hosting/etc without giving back"
The former has attempts to tackle things with gplv3 and agpl, but the latter is a problem. A bunch of people make something cool like elsastic, or terraform, or which is free software, funded from hosting and support, then large beomouth with a near-monopoly on computing offers it with a different label as part of their provision. Companies prefer to buy from amazon/google/microsoft than random small company, and that seems somewhat wrong, but I don't see the FSF approach to marrying
1) how to keep software free 2) how to keep developers fed
When you have parasitical cloud companies
There's so much they _could_ be doing. Where's the grant program for startups working on free software? Where's their shop reselling used computer hardware with free software preinstalled, with discounts for low-income communities or libraries? Where's their work with labor unions in tech[1]?
The FSF never adapted once thought leading and making free alternatives stopped being enough to support the ideals of their movement. They just kinda exist now.
[1] Workers' rights may seem orthogonal to user's rights for software, but the power imbalance between workers and the companies they work for is deeply tied in with why companies can demand their workers product software that doesn't respect user's rights, and there's interesting work that could be done here in the long term.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and the reason that it has so few women involved It is repeated and repeated again that because there aren't as many women as men in IT, there must be some kind of badness going on. I offer a more charitable explanation: Women don't want to, the same way Men don't want to go to yoga courses. No badness involved, just people making their decisions.
The problem with that explanation is that in the past, there were a lot more women in computing. First as operators and programmer/mathematicians, later the gender mix was following the same upward trend as other sciences. I've seen two explanations for the dearth of women in computing: engineering culture becoming dominant in the '60s (where it was more the domain of mathematics before) and the rise of personal comp…
Look at jobs like optician, where the reverse happened: It used to be a crafts job when glasses were hand-manufactured. Today glasses are produced automatically, so the consultation and sales part has taken over and it changed from a men-dominated domain into a women-dominated domain.
No badness involved, either.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is free as in apache/BSD/MIT, and free as in GPL. In many parts of industry, going the "purist" route and putting your library under GPL is a sure way to make sure no-one will use it (the LGPL doesn't completely solve this problem either). Whereas more pragmatic approaches to free software have absolutely taken off. Big names like React, Angular etc. are MIT licensed, for example. It's like the FSF invented "fr…
Let's see 20 years from now which of React, Angular and Linux is still around.
Not that many of us can then watch it fold, as we belong to the same generation, however that won't change the evolution of computing world.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you spoken to women who have joined open source groups (I’m thinking GNU / FSF led projects, not just programs that happen to be open source)? I have, and without exception the ones I know well personally have had awful experiences, and the ones who complained were just told “Oh, that’s just how person X is”. (There is not a single X here I am hiding, it’s a pattern).
Show that this is a gender-specific issue because i have the exact same reasoning. I love the coding and bug hunting, but i don't want to arrange myself with certain people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and the reason that it has so few women involved It is repeated and repeated again that because there aren't as many women as men in IT, there must be some kind of badness going on. I offer a more charitable explanation: Women don't want to, the same way Men don't want to go to yoga courses. No badness involved, just people making their decisions.
Have you spoken to women who have joined open source groups (I’m thinking GNU / FSF led projects, not just programs that happen to be open source)? I have, and without exception the ones I know well personally have had awful experiences, and the ones who complained were just told “Oh, that’s just how person X is”. (There is not a single X here I am hiding, it’s a pattern).
The underlying reason for the disparity can still be "group A people are somewhat less interested in that thing than group B people" and not "group B people actively drive out group A people." Everything else just follows because humans suck.