Hi, I understand that I generalized the Tomcat community to the entire FLOSS one, and that may be invalid. But I still don't think the article is that valid: most of us have fairly strong personalities, and I think a woman with one could (and have) joined in.
The situation might even be better than the amusing living-together comparison below, because no committer (to ASF or other communities) has to live with or even like others. They just have to make good contributions and respect the rules of the community. At least for the ASF, I don't see any sexist rules. As to the playboy.com mirror: yeah, I see how that could be offensive, and although I wasn't privy to the original mirrors discussion, I see we have a bunch of mirrors so removing just that one shouldn't have any major impact. Sites like linuxchix.org are great, and I would bet their numbers/membership are increasing. I doubt the percentage of women of the overall committers to FLOSS is increasing, but that's largely because the number of FLOSS projects/committers is exploding, and there's no way the rate can keep up. If the FLOSS community ever reaches a more steady state, I think the rate of women participants will have a chance to go up. There are at least two recent precedents for this, in both the online gaming arena (e.g. http://www.gamesfirst.com/articles/releases/women_gaming.htm) where women are now a majority, and in car maintenance/customization/aftermarket (e.g. http://doityourself.com/autobuysell/afterthought.htm). So the article might be interesting, but I still don't think it merits an official response. I wonder if it's a result of today's unfortunate public-or-perish academic culture, where lower-level or non-tenured academic professionals must continute to publish at a good pace, and the number of publications and references to publications by an author is a (sometimes the) key to his or her promotion. Yoav --- Niclas Hedhman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Saturday 09 October 2004 16:00, Stefano Mazzocchi wrote: > > > Imagine living in a house where teh ASF board members lived together. > > > > [mental image of stefano running out of the house screaming] > > > > Look at us. Yeah, us, alpha geeks! > > > > A little flowers on the table might not be enough to get the alpha > > geek-ness go away, but, know what?, it's not the result (which is going > > to be pathetic anyway, and they know that already), it's the effort! > > Amen!!! > > Lingo, attitude and 'geekness' is not the strong sides of this community to > attract, not only women, but people who are not entirely stereotype molded, > who are somewhat different and can add spice to our boring lives. > > Now, there ARE people in ASF who are different, but are they enough and given > > enough room here, and is the environment in any way hindering the process of > growing the social structure... Yes, the social structure! > > Cheers > Niclas > -- > +------//-------------------+ > / http://www.bali.ac / > / http://niclas.hedhman.org / > +------//-------------------+ > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
