5 ms·

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 wom

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.

emilsedgh 3y ago
the reason that it has so few women involved Citation needed here. Free Software movement at this point is much, much larger than FSF, GNU and rms. Many of those communities (Like KDE which I've been involved with) have been very very welcoming and inclusive to woman. However, woman have always been under-represented there just like many other areas in Tech. Not saying rms has not made GNU/FSF difficult for woman though. Just saying the reasons woman are under-represented go deeper than rms.
- red_admiral 3y ago
  > Citation needed FLOSSPOLS 2004-05 found that "proprietary software" was around 28% female, whereas "free software" was around 1.5% female. A presentatation of the results can be found at [1]. I agree with you that FOSS is much larger than GNU/FSF, and that many places are actively welcoming to women - the linked slides reference Debian's efforts; the python community also seems to be fairly good at this. [1] https://people.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/talks/flosspols.pdf https://people.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/talks/flosspols.pdf
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    Do you really think all those women in proprietary software jobs aren't doing free software because of one man? They probably haven't even heard of him. There are many more obvious reasons for the disparity that don't involve anything malicious let alone singling out one person and attaching the blame. Anybody can make meaningful contributions to free software. Nobody has to interact with RMS or anybody else. I've made many anonymous and pseudonymous contributions just fine. Given that there are essentially no barriers to entry to developing free software but there are significant barriers to being paid for it, I wonder why proprietary software is only 72% male when free software is 98.5% male. Are there any other fields that exhibit this disparity? Are there more/less paid male/female car mechanics versus car enthusiasts/hobbyists, for example?
- lost_tourist 3y ago
  I've always wondered, say we have 10-15% of women in open source advocation/programming, why would you expect to see a higher number than that at FSF? At any organization? If you advocate for getting more women into STEM wouldn't you start in grad school/high school/college? Why would you expect it to be higher after the collegiate level when people have very very likely chosen a career path?
blueflow 3y ago
> 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.
- yvdriess 3y ago
  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 computers that were advertised and marketed to young boys in the '80s. The latter is very noticeable in CS enrollment numbers.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - blueflow 3y ago
    Back when people bought their punched tapes to the computers, being that computers operator was a social job, comparable to a secretary. 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.
    - stjohnswarts 3y ago
      It was also much easier to "get into" it without a degree, unlike now when they want 5 years experience in CS as soon as you leave college.
  - pgeorgi 3y ago
    > in computing: engineering culture becoming dominant in the '60s (where it was more the domain of mathematics before) That would suggest that countries in which that transition didn't happen (such as Germany: Informatik was and is a math-oriented field, the engineering side mostly ended up with electrical engineering) should see different trends. At least for Germany: no.
safety1st 3y ago
RMS has been subjected to a defamatory smear campaign which has falsely accused him of being transphobic, sympathetic to pedophiles and hostile to women. The attacks targeting him have largely come from people who aren't involved in free software and in some cases not even involved in the tech industry. While his behavior has been awkward at times he is absolutely none of these things and he deserves respect for his contributions to our field. Please read: https://stallmansupport.org/richard-stallman-is-not-transphobic-says-leah-rowe.html https://stallmansupport.org/richard-stallman-is-not-transpho... - Leah Rowe, who accused the FSF of being transphobic, defending Richard Stallman as not transphobic. https://stallmansupport.org/nadine-strossen-hannah-wolfman-rebut-accusations-against-stallman.html https://stallmansupport.org/nadine-strossen-hannah-wolfman-r... - Nadine Strossen, former President of the ACLU and a feminist icon, affirming Richard Stallman's support for women and her support for many of his positions.
- red_admiral 3y ago
  I'm not sure about transphobic, as that allegation did not come up when the original "package" that led to RMS' resignation was published. It could be that new evidence has come to light since, or it could be that the allegation of transphobia is unfounded. Some of the original allegations that I think are proven correct are that RMS: - defended Marvin Minsky on a mailing list when Minsky was accused of sex with an underage woman, and made similar comments in defense of Cody Wilson. I believe Stallman's quote on the MIT listserv was that "[it is] normal for adults to be physically attracted to adolescents" when referring specifically to an allegation concerning someone under the legal age of consent. I think "sympathetic to paedophiles" is a defensible interpretation of such comments. - The accusations of sexism are also supported by evidence, such as the "EMACS virgins" incident in July 2009 which RMS himself admitted the basic facts of (while claiming it was meant to have been a joke). One version of the lines involved reads "The virgin of emacs is any female who has not yet learned how to use emacs. And in the church of emacs we believe that taking her emacs virginity away is a blessed act." @daringfireball (John Gruber) also quotes a Wired article claiming RMS had a card on his door at MIT saying "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)". I think "hostile to women" is a defensible interpretation of these facts, especially as there is testimony from women in tech who say they find this sort of thing hostile. On the basis of the evidence I have seen, some of which I have quoted above, I rebut the allegation that the accusations against RMS are a smear campaign, though I make no comment on the allegations specifically of transphobia as I have not fact-checked that part myself.
tannhaeuser 3y ago
Another interpretation in pre-classic critical gender theory might be that only men have reason to strive for compensating their lack of ability to give birth by a F/OSS magnus opus. Or idk Freudian or even pre-Freudian suppression of sex drive, possibly for later, more intense pleasure? Oh, and we don't say "women" anymore, preferring gender-neutral language. Meanwhile, F/OSS zealots are busy subliming (^1) on github, bringing their tickets and clicks and those of their users, as generative and advanced AI takes over CompSci (what has been left by the attention economy anyway). Seriously, today's problem is more that F/OSS is being used to exploit users and form monopolies. "Cloud providers" and other capital-intense approaches only exist as a direct reaction to F/OSS abundance. ^1: in memoriam of Iain Banks who died ten years ago
BrotherBisquick 3y ago
[dead]
shrubble 3y ago
Many women don't want to be around nerds. It's really that simple.
- sbuk 3y ago
  And what is the reason for that?
  - red_admiral 3y ago
    There is a theory by Simon Baron-Cohen that autistic people have "extremely male brains". I dislike this formulation myself - I think he's confusing the proxy for the root cause, which is that autistic people have extremely _systematising_ brains. (And yes, "autistic" and "nerd" are not synonyms, I know.) But psychology does acknowledge that an interest in people vs systems/things is one of the most pronounced measurable and replicable sex differences; depending on who you ask this might apply to babies from the day they were born, as measured by the time they spend looking at a photo of a face vs. one of some building blocks. (Note, the research is about _interests_, not _abilities_. Big difference.) If you plot people on a people/things interests scale, you might see a male cluster, a female cluster, and if you zoomed in, a "nerd cluster" a bit beyond the normal male cluster. Female nerds and women with autism do exist, and as far as I can tell, they fit in just fine into any "nerdspace" that does not single them out based on their sex/gender or act too sexist. (Personally, I find the label "extremely male brain" particularly uncharitable for women with autism.) But they are numerically a minority.
  - User23 3y ago
    While it may be entertaining to feign hypotheses, really who cares? It's an observable fact and thus it has to be incorporated into any rational phenomenology. But the glib answer is many women find nerds annoying. In particular, because of their desire to explain and even worse correct perceived errors without any regard for social niceties. As for why many women ultimately find those behavior patterns annoying, well that's where speculation takes over.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]

emilsedgh 3y ago

the reason that it has so few women involved Citation needed here. Free Software movement at this point is much, much larger than FSF, GNU and rms. Many of those communities (Like KDE which I've been involved with) have been very very welcoming and inclusive to woman. However, woman have always been under-represented there just like many other areas in Tech. Not saying rms has not made GNU/FSF difficult for woman though. Just saying the reasons woman are under-represented go deeper than rms.

red_admiral 3y ago
> Citation needed FLOSSPOLS 2004-05 found that "proprietary software" was around 28% female, whereas "free software" was around 1.5% female. A presentatation of the results can be found at [1]. I agree with you that FOSS is much larger than GNU/FSF, and that many places are actively welcoming to women - the linked slides reference Debian's efforts; the python community also seems to be fairly good at this. [1] https://people.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/talks/flosspols.pdf https://people.cs.umass.edu/~wallach/talks/flosspols.pdf
- globular-toast 3y ago
  Do you really think all those women in proprietary software jobs aren't doing free software because of one man? They probably haven't even heard of him. There are many more obvious reasons for the disparity that don't involve anything malicious let alone singling out one person and attaching the blame. Anybody can make meaningful contributions to free software. Nobody has to interact with RMS or anybody else. I've made many anonymous and pseudonymous contributions just fine. Given that there are essentially no barriers to entry to developing free software but there are significant barriers to being paid for it, I wonder why proprietary software is only 72% male when free software is 98.5% male. Are there any other fields that exhibit this disparity? Are there more/less paid male/female car mechanics versus car enthusiasts/hobbyists, for example?
lost_tourist 3y ago
I've always wondered, say we have 10-15% of women in open source advocation/programming, why would you expect to see a higher number than that at FSF? At any organization? If you advocate for getting more women into STEM wouldn't you start in grad school/high school/college? Why would you expect it to be higher after the collegiate level when people have very very likely chosen a career path?

blueflow 3y ago

> 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.

yvdriess 3y ago
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 computers that were advertised and marketed to young boys in the '80s. The latter is very noticeable in CS enrollment numbers.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- blueflow 3y ago
  Back when people bought their punched tapes to the computers, being that computers operator was a social job, comparable to a secretary. 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.
  - stjohnswarts 3y ago
    It was also much easier to "get into" it without a degree, unlike now when they want 5 years experience in CS as soon as you leave college.
- pgeorgi 3y ago
  > in computing: engineering culture becoming dominant in the '60s (where it was more the domain of mathematics before) That would suggest that countries in which that transition didn't happen (such as Germany: Informatik was and is a math-oriented field, the engineering side mostly ended up with electrical engineering) should see different trends. At least for Germany: no.

safety1st 3y ago

RMS has been subjected to a defamatory smear campaign which has falsely accused him of being transphobic, sympathetic to pedophiles and hostile to women. The attacks targeting him have largely come from people who aren't involved in free software and in some cases not even involved in the tech industry. While his behavior has been awkward at times he is absolutely none of these things and he deserves respect for his contributions to our field. Please read: https://stallmansupport.org/richard-stallman-is-not-transphobic-says-leah-rowe.html https://stallmansupport.org/richard-stallman-is-not-transpho... - Leah Rowe, who accused the FSF of being transphobic, defending Richard Stallman as not transphobic. https://stallmansupport.org/nadine-strossen-hannah-wolfman-rebut-accusations-against-stallman.html https://stallmansupport.org/nadine-strossen-hannah-wolfman-r... - Nadine Strossen, former President of the ACLU and a feminist icon, affirming Richard Stallman's support for women and her support for many of his positions.

red_admiral 3y ago
I'm not sure about transphobic, as that allegation did not come up when the original "package" that led to RMS' resignation was published. It could be that new evidence has come to light since, or it could be that the allegation of transphobia is unfounded. Some of the original allegations that I think are proven correct are that RMS: - defended Marvin Minsky on a mailing list when Minsky was accused of sex with an underage woman, and made similar comments in defense of Cody Wilson. I believe Stallman's quote on the MIT listserv was that "[it is] normal for adults to be physically attracted to adolescents" when referring specifically to an allegation concerning someone under the legal age of consent. I think "sympathetic to paedophiles" is a defensible interpretation of such comments. - The accusations of sexism are also supported by evidence, such as the "EMACS virgins" incident in July 2009 which RMS himself admitted the basic facts of (while claiming it was meant to have been a joke). One version of the lines involved reads "The virgin of emacs is any female who has not yet learned how to use emacs. And in the church of emacs we believe that taking her emacs virginity away is a blessed act." @daringfireball (John Gruber) also quotes a Wired article claiming RMS had a card on his door at MIT saying "Knight for Justice (Also: Hot Ladies)". I think "hostile to women" is a defensible interpretation of these facts, especially as there is testimony from women in tech who say they find this sort of thing hostile. On the basis of the evidence I have seen, some of which I have quoted above, I rebut the allegation that the accusations against RMS are a smear campaign, though I make no comment on the allegations specifically of transphobia as I have not fact-checked that part myself.

tannhaeuser 3y ago

Another interpretation in pre-classic critical gender theory might be that only men have reason to strive for compensating their lack of ability to give birth by a F/OSS magnus opus. Or idk Freudian or even pre-Freudian suppression of sex drive, possibly for later, more intense pleasure? Oh, and we don't say "women" anymore, preferring gender-neutral language. Meanwhile, F/OSS zealots are busy subliming (^1) on github, bringing their tickets and clicks and those of their users, as generative and advanced AI takes over CompSci (what has been left by the attention economy anyway). Seriously, today's problem is more that F/OSS is being used to exploit users and form monopolies. "Cloud providers" and other capital-intense approaches only exist as a direct reaction to F/OSS abundance. ^1: in memoriam of Iain Banks who died ten years ago

BrotherBisquick 3y ago

[dead]

shrubble 3y ago

Many women don't want to be around nerds. It's really that simple.

sbuk 3y ago
And what is the reason for that?
- red_admiral 3y ago
  There is a theory by Simon Baron-Cohen that autistic people have "extremely male brains". I dislike this formulation myself - I think he's confusing the proxy for the root cause, which is that autistic people have extremely _systematising_ brains. (And yes, "autistic" and "nerd" are not synonyms, I know.) But psychology does acknowledge that an interest in people vs systems/things is one of the most pronounced measurable and replicable sex differences; depending on who you ask this might apply to babies from the day they were born, as measured by the time they spend looking at a photo of a face vs. one of some building blocks. (Note, the research is about _interests_, not _abilities_. Big difference.) If you plot people on a people/things interests scale, you might see a male cluster, a female cluster, and if you zoomed in, a "nerd cluster" a bit beyond the normal male cluster. Female nerds and women with autism do exist, and as far as I can tell, they fit in just fine into any "nerdspace" that does not single them out based on their sex/gender or act too sexist. (Personally, I find the label "extremely male brain" particularly uncharitable for women with autism.) But they are numerically a minority.
- User23 3y ago
  While it may be entertaining to feign hypotheses, really who cares? It's an observable fact and thus it has to be incorporated into any rational phenomenology. But the glib answer is many women find nerds annoying. In particular, because of their desire to explain and even worse correct perceived errors without any regard for social niceties. As for why many women ultimately find those behavior patterns annoying, well that's where speculation takes over.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]