Open Source Software: Male Nerds Contributing To The Common Good For Free–So Feminists Ask “Where Are The Women?!”

bakedpotato486 · 2015-05-25T08:33:14+00:00

Shit. Since this bothered her enough to write this blog post, I have only one thing to say in return; get on your ass and program something yourself! Could you possibly admit to yourself that women just aren't interested? Why not write something inspiring to get women into it, instead of complain about all the men that already are? Otherwise, STFU.

niczar · 2015-05-25T11:21:31+00:00

I'd also like to point out that nobody needs to know your gender when contributing to an open-source project. No mention of my gender on my github page, because I'm not a fucking narcissist.

rottingchrist · 2015-05-25T18:23:11+00:00

Also, when it comes to tech, almost all the people working in their spare time and giving away their high quality work for free are men. It is one of very few industries where sharing and openness is valued so highly.

While most whining about copyright and restrictions upon use of work within the tech community comes from the digital art types, who constantly complain about people using some image they doodled, without permission.

You can look up and compare the gender ratio among programmers to that among digital artists.

BetterBadIdeas · 2015-05-26T15:49:38+00:00

Feminists: "where are the wyminz?!"

Nerds: "yeah. Where are they? We've been waiting for decades"

synn89 · 2015-05-25T14:20:34+00:00

I think the criticism of the original blog post is pretty off. It's not a complaint that women aren't in open source, so much a question on whether there have been prominent open source contributors that are women that most people don't know about.

The other aspect of the article talks about the way most modern OSS projects feel driven to be commercially successful and highly competitive. But you have to keep in mind that the free software movement is NOT about a widely used end product, or commercial success, so much as it's about freedom, ownership, and sharing.

So from an OSS standard having projects with a different type of drive and purpose behind them isn't counter to the ideals of OSS. In fact if those projects did bring in new programmers who otherwise wouldn't have been comfortable in a standard meritocracy, it'd be a benefit to OSS as a whole.

rg57 · 2015-05-25T14:10:40+00:00

If it's not in C+=, does it really exist at all?

Piroko · 2015-05-25T20:37:35+00:00

Where are the women.

"Believe me professor, I've been asking myself the same question for 6 years."

Title	Open Source Software: Male Nerds Contributing To The Common Good For Free–So Feminists Ask “Where Are The Women?!”
Author	wiseprogressivethink
Upvotes	16
Comments	21
Date	May 25, 2015 6:04 AM UTC (11 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/376ami/open_source_software_male_nerds_contributing_to/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/open-source-software-male-nerds-contributing-to.979372 https://theredarchive.com/post/979372

Comments