On Friday, 18 October 2019 17:09, pelzflorian (Florian Pelz) <pelzflor...@pelzflorian.de> wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 18, 2019 at 11:29:35AM +0000, Todor Kondić wrote: > > > You know, there is a big IT department within our institution and telling > > them I will base some serious work on technologies such as GNU Guile and > > Guix did raise a few eyebrows (those not raised are probably the cause of > > their proprietors not being informed enough). > > […] > > Couple of notes: > > > > 1. Are there any ladies on these lists? I am dying to hear from them > > 2. Related to (1) ... a brief look at the maintainers who signed the > > Joined Statement gives an impression that it leans heavily to the > > politically Western hemisphere; just a comment, maybe food for thought > > 3. The RMS scandal was brought to my attention by a female coder colleague > > who previously knew nothing of RMS's, or FSF's or GNU's work in the "Open > > Source Community"; another nibble for thought > > There have been few contributions from women, > e.g. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2017-03/msg00042.html > (I do not know what its status is), but I believe bringing GNU Guile > to professional use could help diversify. Thank you for that! > > Regards, > Florian Hi Florian, Thanks for the kind words. The problem of diversification goes way beyond the eccentric, or repugnant (choose at your leasure) views of certain prominent members of our "community". I've set up my workflows around Guix, git(lab) and a customised Emacs installation (instead of R Studio). My small team of science students (majority female, various cultural backgrounds), never previously exposed to a GNU system to such an extent, managed to get a handle on it quite impressively. But, I doubt any of them would find it natural to take a step further and participate in GNU itself (ugh, now I sound like a preacher of a new age religion). To my knowledge, interaction within GNU communities is still mostly mailing lists and IRC. This _not_ my students' natural digital habitat. I am probably not saying anything new, though ...