Slashdot Mirror
The Social Structure of Open Source Development
HulkProtector1 writes "NewsForge has published an interview Tom Chance conducted with Andreas Brand, a sociologist who is studying the free software world. Read the full interview to learn more about Andreas' views on KDE's development model, volunteer recruitment and retention, motivation, work distribution and more. "
Both Interesting and Informative
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
The open source movement works the same way as capitalism, grab the source code and run.
Seriously, how many legal car repair shops do you think there are? A million is most likely a conservative figure. The car computer legislation is happening because there are a lot of people in the car repair business, and have been in the car repair business for generations. But, suddenly (last few years) they've been unable to fix cars because they don't know the secret codes for the cars' computers.
This isn't "I want everything, like MP3s and DVDs, for free". This is "I want to fsck-ing survive here. ius
You think that's bad? Try working at an isp and have people yelling at you and blaming you for breaking hotmail ;).
ahh the joys of the internet. ww
Not intended to be flamebait, and from a quick readthrough, the article did not seem to address this inequality. We do hear a bevy of jokes about no females reading /....but what really is the reason?
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
FREMONT, CA (TECHNEWS) - After a heated debate at Slashdot executive offices, editor Michael Sims was locked out of the building and departed in a tirade of lisping insults, vowing revenge immediately. This morning, industry sources revealed that Sims has joined the infamous trolling organization Gay Nigger Association of America with the intent of trolling Slashdot fulltime.
In a short phone interview with Technews, Sims asserted that he was calm but resolved on his course of action. "The Slashdot editors and I had a disagreement," he explained. "I did it all for the users, but they..." he drew the syllable out painfully, resting on a case full of Little League trophies and certificates of participation from transgendered dating services, "They just couldn't take my truth. They were -- babies, just babies, oh, the horror, the abomination," he said, before being led away by three white-clad male nurses.
According to Harvard Psychology Professor Arnold Rothstahlberg, "trolling" is an internet phenomenon where dissenting users disrupt a site by flooding it with absurd or paradoxical information. "It satisfies the primal id," he said, chewing on a large, bulbous, phallic black cigar. "To justify themselves by forcing their enemies into hysterics. It's a compensatory mechanism much like getting back at the kids who beat you up in high school by installing Linux and using it to pingflood their XP boxes and Macs."
Slashdot editor CmdrTaco was reticent to comment. At an interview conducted in the crap-filled Ann Arbor bungalow he shares with his wife, to whom he proposed over Slashdot, he said, "Well, you know, Slashdot is just a web site. Michael should calm down about this. But if he doesn't, our corporate sponsors will sue him until he's giving $4 blowjobs on Haight Street."
From the GNAA corporate headquarters, a mysterious floating island off the coast of Newfoundland that few reporters have seen and even fewer have returned from with their sexual identities intact, GNAA "Head Programmer" timecop said he was glad to have Sims on hand. "From what I've seen of his postings on Slashdot," said timecop, "he's a total fag. Which is convenient as all our halfops need anal, and I can't handle the drama. That's what's worst about the net: the drama."
Sims has been involved in previous internet firefights, most notably the controversy over the censorware.org website in 2001. While Sims alleges that the site was his creation that was sabotaged by others, his coworkers disagree. Bennett Haselton, security consultant for the "Anarchy Anal" and "Chaos Cumshot" websites, said of Sims, "We set up this website, and left him the password. We have a disagreement, bam, the website goes down and someone raped my two-week-old Labrador puppy with an iPod."
Slashdot Editor CowboyNeal, who was entangled in a whale net after attempting to swim the English channel, spoke fondly of his former coworker. "Michael always brought a certain passion to the work, a passion that was easily ignited and led to many sweaty sessions in the corporate washroom," he said. "I'm not at all surprised he joined an organization of gay niggers. He always like something different and unique in his pasta salads."
Programmer Seth Finkelstein alleges that Sims is "totally unstable" and agreed readily to this interview. "Of course, I'm a disinterested observer," he said. "But anytime I see that closet psychopath and monkey nut-muncher stealing the spotlight from hardworking programmers like myself, I have to speak up, for the benefit of the people, of course," he said. Technews reporters were permitted to leave the premises only after making a PayPal donation to Finkelstein.
Mike Godwin of the EFF, who balances a career as privacy advocate with his hobby of making videos of teen swingers blowing goats, agreed. "I've never met another editor like Michael," he said. "And, since my regimen of retrovirals is already costing me an arm and
Obviously, boys are smarter than girls. /. ... I know you're out there baby, and I love you!)
(This *is* meant to be flamebait -- and posted anonymously, so I don't ruin my chances with the girl who reads
But I'd personally like to see a reflection on more open source projects than just 1 or 2.
There are a million+1 projects now. Some with only 2 people, some with hundreds. I'd like to see what the research shows in a larger sampling.
I'm guessing some of the smaller projects (1-10 people) will have different motivational and organizational factors than a larger project. Simply because of the group dynamics.
Maybe it's safe to draw an analogy to Family Guy:
Lois: I guarantee you a man made that commercial.
Peter: Of course a man made it. It's a commercial Lois, not a delicious thanksgiving dinner.
I think you may have messed up your copy and paste, seems you were on the DSPAM site, what you wanted was just a few posts up.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
Obviously you're just the president of Harvard.
Don't be stupid. SQL Server is a product name, much as the same as "Internet Explorer". Every time someone omits the Microsoft from the beginning of that, do you cry about the fact that the name implies it is the only program that explores the internet?
Idiot.
Why do most Open Source developers, hackers and software hobbyists appear to be male?
Dunno - perhaps it has something to do with a generally barrel-like physique and likelihood of facial hair. Careful, though - appearances can be deceiving.
No really, think about it. You have a core set of guys who are -really- in touch with the new movement (RMS and ESR come to mind), but who tend to upset a lot of "normal" people. Following in their footsteps, you have a slightly larger, more polished set of people; religions call these "disciples" but we tend to call them "maintainers." They decide where the needs of the real world intersect with the tenets of the ideology.
Then there's you and me. Honestly, most of us have no idea about the gory details of the whole thing. We gladly use free and libre and EULA'd software to get along in our daily lives. Some of us are more dedicated than others, and we only run Debian. Or Catholix. Or whatever. No matter which one we choose, it's "The Best One" and all others are inferior in some way.
LUG's as churches, LiveCD's as evangelism... the list goes on and on and on of why Libre and Open Source software are more like a social / religious organization, and less like a goods and services production group.
-theGreater Zealot.
The GPL and other open source licenses are anticompetitive.
... ummm ... "look" into in?
OK, so "viral" is no longer effective - we all saw how MS can happily thrieve among viruses. Let's bring anticompetitive on, maybe we can then "persuade" the DoJ to
Expect this new GPL opinion to make it into MS's unofficial arguments soon.
Well, I can speak from experience that myself and my other male engineer peers do not do anything to make women avoid engineering or computers in general. Maybe it's time we stop looking for some outside source or plan to keep women out of engineering roles and first look to your own for an answer. The women I know in engineering are intelligent, driven, and very much my peers in all respects. There just aren't many of them. Get women more interested in engineering first, then check to see if programs/professors are intentially driving women away. If you want so see more women's name in the credits for Linux, submit a few patches yourself and get some of your female computer friends to do the same. There's no reason they can't get in, they just aren't trying.
Space for rent, inquire within
It is especially interesting, considering that you can't blame the men for not hiring the women...because there's no real hiring involved. Although I guess the feminist argument there would be that women were prevented from the education necessary to begin with; however, from my limited perspective, that's not the case. I wouldn't say that its because women are less capable than men at developing software, but I would say that women are less interested in doing so...just as I would say men are not less capable as nurses, just less interested. The question then becomes...is this nature or nurture? I tend towards saying a combination of both...a natural tendency for men and a natural disinterest for women reinforced by the already uneven ratio...but I don't really have any idea.
The article touches on recruitment and how in open source developers come and go. So might as well ask /.
If you are working on an open source project, what has caused you to join an open source project?
-Benjamin Meyer
Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
Because most developers are male, nothing special about the open source ones (in this regard)
OK, who broke slashdot? The comments are messed up big time for me: all AC and from random stories. It's even weirder than Slashdot normally, which is pretty scary.
Because no work would get done if females came in!
I don't know, but when I was going through CS classes we started with about a 50:50 ratio of boys to girls. Okay, maybe 60:40. I only know of 3 girls out of maybe 30 that finished.
/. number is 760290, does that mean /. has 76,290 female users? Wow!
Just guessing, I would guess 30 boys finished. So 30:3? Seeing as how my
WTF are you talking about? What does this have to do with KDE?
Uhmmm, Huh?
Austrailian code breaking criminals? What article are you reading, 'cause it seems a tad more interesting that the article that I'm reading....
maybe attitudes like this are the reason there aren't that many women in programming.
my girlfriend spent four years at school and three years in the industry going from one software shop before she finally quit the whole biz because of attitudes like that. she works at a homeless shelter now and says that her mentally ill and drug addicted clients are easier to work with than the average alpha geek.
2 1337 4 u!
Did anyone here actually listen to or personally hear that speech or some of the followup interviews? The president of Harvard said something to the effect of, "There's different numbers of men and women in the sciences, and research should be done to see why: is it nature or nurture?"
Now, I don't know about you, but that sounds like a relatively innocent thing to say to me. I could see where you could misinterpret it... but it has sunk into the world's consciousness as a proven fact that the president of Harvard is a bigoted sexist jerk. This one incident simply doesn't seem to support that fact.
-theGreater Anti-PC.
Yale Daily News
"mentally ill and drug addicted clients"
vs.
"average alpha geek"
How many average alpha geeks land up as a mentally ill and drug addicted client? Does she server food to any of her former coworkers? A female friend of mine left CS for a similar reason.
maybe attitudes like this are the reason there aren't that many women in programming.
:-)
Maybe humor is a difficult concept.
Seriously, I'm about as ardently anti-sexist as they come, and even I understood the humor (that BTW was clearly intended as much as a tongue-in-cheek criticism of sexism in the technical fields as anything else)
So chill.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Damn... life as a female slashdot-reader sure sounds alot more interesting than the male counterpart. Jugding from your post, and my own short slashdot experience, that is.
Heh...
I am a speak english. Do you not? - Saroto
On a serious note, I don't think the president of Harvard said anything wrong. Observing trends and tencencies backed up by actual numbers isn't sexism, it is reality. Men and women are different, especially women. I don't fricken understand them, and am insulted when people say we are equal! I am married, and she doesn't understand me either. We just look at the world quite differently.
What about theta g33k5?
If this is the way professors treat the freaking President of Harvard freaking University, is it a surprise that undergrads feel inhibited from speaking freely in class?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Determine the person at the center of the open source society, using a Erdos-style numbering scheme. e.g. Joe Blow worked on sendmail with Jane Smith who worked on zlib with RMS gives Joe Blow a RMS Number of 2.
Then just find the lowest average number, and that person is the center of the open source social structure.
I am officially gone from
Maybe there are a few more women among you than you realize. This is the first time I've posted, but a read quite a bit. But we're out here...I'm just not a contributor to open source development. HI GUYS!!! *waving*
You see the look on my face, and yet you keep talking.
Uh, because most computer geeks are male.
Next!
Looking for a Python IRC bot?
Ha!
From all that I can tell females are less interested in engineering then men. Concider the situation at the science/engineering college I went to. There were more males then females, but that could be caused by all sorts of things, and is not the point I want to make. Instead look at what majors the females who were there chose. From my observation the departments with the highest percentage of females were biology, chemistry, psycology, then physics, geology, with the fewest in CS, EE, and mechanical. Now (nearly) all of those girls were very smart, and most were capable of getting any of the majors offered at the school. But they chose the majors the did because they found them more interesting, because it fit their mindset better. So statistically speaking far more females enjoy and life sciences / pure sciences than engineering.
Now why is this the case? Maybe we are just wired differently. Concider what happens when people encounter a problem. The stereotypical guys just wants to do something to fix it and get it over with. The girl wants to talk about it, to understand it better, and to them comming to an understanding is often the solution in and of itself. Of course this is talking in generalitys. There are definately girls with engineering mindsets, as there are guys with more diplomatic mindsets, but there does seem to be a very real tendancy behind that stereotype.
It was just a joke and because someone else modded me up incorrectly as "Insightful" it is supposed to be something other than was originally intended?
Lighten up.
Sure, it was humorous. But it's because it reflects actual attitudes that makes it funny. So what's wrong with debating the issues that a joke brings up?
A joke can do two things when dealing with serious issues. It can be used to smooth over the issue and allows us to dismiss the issue. Or it can highlight the issue, and open it up for debate.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
Chick programmer speaking from experience... all through college I was discouraged from pursuing my career as opposed to encouraged by approximately a 2:1 ratio, by parents, peers, friends, mentors, etc. The concern was that I would find the work too "difficult" (even though I won math awards in high school) and time consuming and the social environment creatively stifling and possibly annoying due to a perceived lack of social skills among the sort of people who typically work in technology. Most of the people who said discouraging things had little or no direct experience to draw on and had no idea what they were talking about. I make it a point to tell people how interesting, challenging, and stimulating my work is to try and reverse this stereotype. Just my 2 cents.
The title suggests the possibility of this new book: Opensource Society And Its Enemies. Instead of Plato, Hegel and Marx, who will be criticized in this new book?
We do this for fun.
Does she server food to any of her former coworkers?
:D
Oh if I could only remember how many times I've made that typo
Perhaps you should ask the project lead for Mozilla, who is I believe, female. At the 2004 OsCON they had a panel about FOSS volunteers. The Apache lead mentioned that there were two groups of people who tended to drop out early: women, and Japanese. In his opinion, they were driven away by the flame wars on the mailing lists. Women, and Japanese, were just not comfortable with the level of 'discussion'. The Apache head was not happy about this, but there doesn't seem much he can do.
Obviously, they are not neurologists, but each has an interesting take.
I know the guy's role is sociological, not technical, but I get worried about how much confusion reigns in free software.
One can reuse code in any language. It is source code availability that enables that, not C++; even OO in general seems to conduce to reuse but frequently leads to problems such as the weak base objects.
C++, with its huge complexity, is a handicap -- Java and C# are still complex but at least they try to be a little bit simpler, not to mention definetly better things such as functional programming.
Now if KDE wants to keep using an arcane language, it is their choice, just as they insisted for how long in a confusing licensing and now keep insisting in a confusing interface. But don't spread technical misinformation, please.
Leandro Guimarães Faria Corcete DUTRA
DA, DBA, SysAdmin, Data Modeller
GNU Project, Debian GNU/Lin
Sorry, the vagueness of plain text and all... but I stand by my assertion that this one-liner should be retired as it is both factually and functionally incorrect.
-theGreater.
religion - a strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny;
open source - A method and philosophy for software licensing
philosophy - any personal belief about how to live or how to deal with a situation
You seem to have religion and philosophy confused. Unfortunately this isnt unusual because for most people religion has hijacked their philosophy and ethics.
(source = hyperdictionary.com)
From what I hear from girls who know computer-type people, we are the reason they're are not many girls in computing.
Maybe the many scientific studies that show that men and women are not the same help too.
You know, that the average woman and the average man think differently? There's a reason my wife who got into Computer Engineering at 16 yrs old and studied VAX assembly language still asks me to change the settings on our home machine -- she couldn't be bothered to do it herself. She's more than capable, but the itch isn't there.
I meet guy after guy doing OSS work and they're "scratching an itch", and when we discuss our work with the ladies we know, often very bright and computer-minded, they don't have those itches. Theirs are different (on *AVERAGE*).
Good for us, good for them, I don't care -- its not sexual discrimination or something, its called natural bias. Get over it.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
We do hear a bevy of jokes about no females reading /....but what really is the reason?
:P )
Women tend to be more social than men? Men have a greater enjoyment of technical problems than women? Boys play with dump trucks and military characters and Legos and Erector sets (more individual, technically-creative toys), while girls play with Barbies and lipstick and new clothes (more social, more fashionably-creative items)?
Some would say it's because men ostracize women in the workplace, but that ignores the fact that men go into Computer Science schools in a ratio of about 20:1, and engineering schools (what I've seen of them, anyway) in ratio of like 10:1 or 5:1. Perhaps this stems from earlier-childhood ostracization from letting girls play with dump trucks and BB guns and Legos and other activities which might turn them into a "tomboy"?
Or perhaps it's simply a product of genetic evolution which tells men to take technical problems in greater proportion than women (evolutionary history summed up as follows -- man: hunt for food and fend off predators and other men using innovative killing tools; woman: cook food, wash clothes, take care of kids)?
We may all be equal under the law (as we should be), but let's not kid ourselves - men and women *are* different, and that fact is as bluntly-obvious as the fact that we have different sex organs. And the difference, IMO, probably manifests itself in other factors of "manhood" or "womanhood" as well.
(Disclaimer: these are all vague sociological generalizations which will not apply in specific scenarios. But isn't that what sociology is about - vague over-generalization?
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
What a surprise. Losers who totally fucked up in everything they tried are less arrogant than people who stand at the top of a successful, well paid, career?
Your girlfriend seems to be have a rather intolerant personality. She needs to work with people that are clearly inferior to her, because she can't stand the sugestion that anyone could be superior to herself. If she can't stand the occasional banter from colleagues with good humor she surely isn't fit to work with geeks. Or do you think it's easy, from a human point of view, to be called a "geek" or a "nerd", both pejorative terms, just because you can understand the finer concepts in computer science that eludes the majority of humans?
I suspect that the current state has a lot to do with the image of computers in the 80s, which is when a lot of the current developers got interested. Back then, computers in general were viewed as somewhat obscure and especially difficult to program, and they would only be given to kids who were expected to be interested in science and technology. At the time, girls were not commonly seen as potentially interested in technology, so they were unlikely to have computers to be interested by. Women have become more involved since, but people coming to computers later in life, I think, are less likely to write code as a hobby, and more likely to only write code for work.
So I think the 20-year time delay between when people start forming their life-long interests and when they tend to feel fully prepared to begin working on major public projects means that we're now seeing, in the OSS community, the results of Reagan-era attitudes towards gender and towards computers.
Beyond that, girls are still discouraged from getting involved in computers and scientific and technical fields in general, primarily, at this point, by their peers who aren't interested in there fields. While it is generally considered uncouth for people in technical fields to discourage girls from joining them, it is still acceptable for people in non-technical fields to encourage girls to join them (in preference to technical fields).
In my CS classes, it's more like a 10:1 ration of guys to gals, but that's a fairly small private university.
So, I'm female. I love computers, programming, linux, gentoo... hopefully in the future there will be more and more people like me.
I mean, there's got to be some females to help pass on geekiness to their kids. But I just don't think my mom would understand an e-mail that said something to the effect of "emerging package baby, nine month compilation time!"
By the way, geeky pick-up lines are the best. And I find all you guys very amusing.
PS, no you can't have my e-mail address. :)
are you implying that people who are mentally ill are to blame for their condition?
Your girlfriend seems to be have a rather intolerant personality. She needs to work with people that are clearly inferior to her, because she can't stand the sugestion that anyone could be superior to herself.
very insightful! by this "logic" we can assume that programmers have an even bigger inferiority complex because they work with computers: machines that can't do anything without being told to do so.
If she can't stand the occasional banter from colleagues with good humor she surely isn't fit to work with geeks
uh, no: sexist, misogynist and emotionally stunted trolls aren't fit to work with her.
Or do you think it's easy, from a human point of view, to be called a "geek" or a "nerd"
er, don't you know when people call you those "pejorative" terms they're just engaging in "occasional banter from colleagues with good humour"? nice double standard, bud. thanks for helping make my point!
2 1337 4 u!
It seems like everytime I read an article it's another social comentary on the structure of F/OSS, what's up with that?
;)
/. as the jibes about Will Wheaton in the story above.
It's strange how at one time the F/OSS community is a marginalized group under attack from every large company who thinks it's destroying their market share and now it's so important that everybody and their dog is writing about how wonderful the development structure is.
I'm not saying it's not wonderful, but I'm not saying it is either. Then again it seems that everybody and their dog is saying that too.
Oh, and on the comment: "I think that a democratic election is better than a dictatorship."
Is that a dig at Bush or a dig at Linus? Personally, and some research back me up on this, I think that dictatorships are sometimes needed to get the ball rolling. Then once the dictator gets too big for their boots and there's a revolt. In the case of Linus he elected deputies to help him with the leadership role.
Here's a quote I borrowed under the GFDL, from Wikipedia:
Edmund Burke:
"I cannot help concurring [e.g., with Aristotle, inter alios] that an absolute democracy, no more than an absolute monarchy, is not to be reckoned among the legitimate forms of government. They think it rather the corruption and degeneracy than the sound constitution of a republic."
See now I'm a F/OSS social commentary writer too...
BTW, the original confusion, see subject, came from the fact that I didn't see the obligatory OSTG warning in the message, it's almost as important and as much a part of
'I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds'
"There's different numbers of negroes and whites in the sciences and in prison, and research should be done to see why: is it nature or nurture?"
Does that sound lika a valid question to you?
If you really have issues with being referred to as a "geek" or a "nerd," why do you read Slashdot: News for Nerds?
You see the look on my face, and yet you keep talking.
When my son plays with dolls, they [the dolls, under his control] fight and build things. When my daughter plays with trucks, the mommy truck takes care of the baby trucks. The boy builds guns and forts with legos, the girl builds houses for the mommy truck and the baby trucks.
In our family, at least, different play styles lead to different choices in toys. It's not different toys leading to different play styles!
One fact that no liberal and no feminist seems to want to accept is that boys and girls are different.
See what I've been reading.
PS, no you can't have my e-mail address. :)
MOD PARENT DOWN!
I enjoy programming. It's more fun and rewarding when you do it with other people.
Simple as that.
One fact that no liberal and no feminist seems to want to accept is that boys and girls are different
As a liberal (well actually NDP, but that's even further left) feminist I have to butt in.
I accept that men and women are different, not merely in their reproductive capabilities. Yes, males tend to dominate mathematical fields, Females language-based fields. I would argue that this is in part due to innate predispositions and in part due to societal reinforcement. Exactly how much of which is open for debate, but there do seem to be differences.
Yet even if we accept that men *tend* to be better at some skills and women at others it is pretty clear that individuals regularly rise above these tendancies. There are several very good male writers, although writing relies upon language skills, traditionally associated with women. (People always remark on the women who succeed in male-dominated fields, but what about the inverse? No one considers Tolstoy to have been overcoming the burden of his sex when he set pen to paper.)
Moreover, it is strange to assume that far more men are involved in open source developments because they are "better at math" given that the open source community is not just people sitting in cubicles doing math. It is, first, a *community* ergo a social network -- which is one of those things women are alleged to be so interested in. And does software not rely upon language? Should it not have a good user interface? If we accept that men and women tend to be interested in different intellectual challenges, why assume that there is only one kind of challenge in a given problem? Surely the strength open source is that different people are free to tackle the problems they see, the problems that interest them, and that by having a wide variety of people contributing the final product benefits from the variety of the people who worked on it. No?
Surely in open source development, variety and difference in the developers is a good thing, no? So it is worth asking why more women aren't involved, not because of a desire to be pc but because their involvement might produce a more robust product. And isn't that the whole point?
People get all tied up thinking that gender difference is oppressive and bad. I think gender difference is often exaggerated, but that any difference, gender or otherwise, is a survival trait for society. It's no good having everyone think the same way all the time. We need variety, in life as well as software development.
Just my 2 cents.
Well, this is an interesting question, and I can only speak from my own experience, but I personally feel it's more nurture than nature.
Next time you go shopping, go to the toy section of the store and look how boys' toys and girls' toys treat the subject of electricity. Last time I went, the boy's section had a toy that showed boys how to make a circuit, and the only toy in the girls' section that had anything to do with electricity was a magic genie lamp that required batteries to "magically" glow. And this was a Wal-Mart in a major American city. I also saw a lot of cool boys' toys that showed how to build complex structures. There was no equivalent in the girls' section. So, here we have boys' toys that encourage logic and engineering, while girls' toys equate science to "magic." Interesting.
Another problem is schools and school teachers. I remember in elementary and middle school when I expressed an interest in science and math, while my teachers would say, "But you're such a good writer." So, I was receiving explicit messages that writing was my strength and I should put those other things aside.
Then, there was college. I tried to major in computer science for a while, and then I realized that I had never taken the classes required for me to think logically. That was partially my fault. And while the computer science professors were helpful, the young men in the department who were my peers brushed me aside and treated me like I didn't exist. Eventually I started to wonder if I had the wrong genitalia to major in computer science. This attitude of mine led me to eventually switch to a major my high school teachers had prepared me for: English.
Now, I'm in the process of getting my Master's of Library Science. I'm taking a course required for my Master's degree, a class in basic computer applications (the Microsoft Office 2003 suite, basically). The class is a breeze, and it's being taught by a woman who knows how to program in various languages, including COBOL. She is encouraging me to go back to school to get a BS in some sort of science like I originally wanted. I'm thinking of majoring in physics with a minor in computer science. Maybe, I could get a Master's degree in Physics and be qualified to be a science librarian and help with research. I feel that if I had met my teacher earlier, I would have graduated with a computer science degree instead of an English degree. So, having strong role models for women in the sciences (real live ones, not just Ana Lovelace and Dr. Grace Hopper) is another major step for more women to be in the sciences.
The geek culture is one that I feel that women can adapt to, because I am a member of a Slackware online group that is mostly male, but I can flame and write jokes like the best of them. They treat me differently, it's true, but they treat me with a lot of respect because I am a woman that can hold on her own. So, IMHO, I do not feel that geek culture is a major impediment to women working on or with OSS, it's more of the major culture that discourages women from even being in OSS in the first place.
are you implying that people who are mentally ill are to blame for their condition?
I would blame drug addicts for their condition. Drug addiction can cause mental illness, so in that case I would blame them for their condition. (There are many causes of mental illness, drug addiction a rare one, and also the only one I can blame on the sufferer)
Public interest groups have all these traits also, but feed a more "material" needs.
Religions tend to have mutually-exclusive licenses whereas interest groups do not.
According to this Press Release from University of California Irvine (also covered by many news media), men's and women's brains are more different than almost anybody thought. The difference may explain why women are generally better at tasks requiring so-called "relational intelligence" and men are generally better at tasks requiring single topic focus (math, engineering, etc.) Computer programming in general falls into the topical domain.
From the press release:
"In general, men have approximately 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence than women, and women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence than men. Gray matter represents information processing centers in the brain, and white matter represents the networking of - or connections between - these processing centers.
This, according to Rex Jung, a UNM neuropsychologist and co-author of the study, may help to explain why men tend to excel in tasks requiring more local processing (like mathematics), while women tend to excel at integrating and assimilating information from distributed gray-matter regions in the brain, such as required for language facility. These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests."
The press release also notes that these two processing models have similar intellectual performance. This is very interesting to me:
"These two very different neurological pathways and activity centers, however, result in equivalent overall performance on broad measures of cognitive ability, such as those found on intelligence tests."
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Ask Harvard University President Lawrence Summers
Then again, maybe you better not"I worked hard for it. I deserve it. And I have it," Campbell said. "It's all mine."
"PS, no you can't have my e-mail address. :)"
Street address would be fine.
In all seriousness though, while your parents don't understand your field of choice, they surely call you every time they need help. I hate getting calls that start with "Hi, you don't know me, but I am your moms friends hamsters former-owners uncles sons 2nd best friend, would you fix my computer? It doesn't work good."
And maybe you're full of shit.
While working for a DoD contractor we had many bright, smart, female software engineers at the start of the project. Most of them didn't have CS/CE degrees, but did have degrees in applied math, physics, and electrical engineering. The fact of the matter is that over the year I was there most of them VOLUNTARILY migrated to testing or technical writing. Guess what? They didn't change cubicles, teams, or coworkers. They simply started filling a job position which appealed to them more.
And my wife, who is ex-military AND a masters degreed engineer would tell her to cowboy the hell up and deal with it. She's a senior systems engineer on a team with seventeen men and has no problem coping.. nor has she at the three previous engineering positions she's held over the last eleven years.
Both in the computing field and in the military I've encountered a FEW female employees who seem to think that us geeky engineers should bend over backwards to be "sociable" and "include them in the group". They believe that lack of doing so is a knock against them.
Well tough shit. I will give them all of the support a professional engineer of their position should need. I will expect from them the code as specced so that I may interface my code to it. In the event of a problem I will efficiently and amicably as possible work to resolve the issue. BUT.. I don't have to like her.. and for that matter I don't even have to be particularly nice.
Meet engineer Joe Friday.. just the facts ma'am.
The Apache head was not happy about this, but there doesn't seem much he can do.
This is a complete copout. Here's a story.
I had two professors in college. One of them would lead class discussions, in which the sizable number of female students would tend to be quieter, and at some quiet point, he would kind of chuckle embarrasedly and say, "you know, it would be great if we heard some more from the women." And right afterwards, maybe a woman would say something out of obligation, but then things would pretty much go the way they were going before.
The other one led a discussion on the very first meeting of the class, and at the end of class, he stood in front of his desk and said this: "Okay, this public service message is for the women in the class. The message is: this was done to you. You were not born like this. When you were little babies in the nursery, you were blabbering and yelling just as much as the little boy babies were. But somewhere in between, something happened. What happened, or why, is not my department exactly. I'm just saying this because, the next time we talk over something in class, I want you to remember it. That's all." Then he gave us our reading assignments.
The moral of the story is: there is something you can do. The thing to do is: something. Something other than a shrug. Talk about the problem, from the beginning, and make it known how you feel and what you expect. Do not be rolled over by the freight train of social convention.
If you don't pretend to be anyone, are you?
So how does this affect women in the technical workplace? A lot of your "alpha geeks" are snotty, condescending jerks. Men brush it off as a personality annoyance and accept it as part of the cost of interacting with those people. Some women would perceive the same behavior as a stream constant personal attacks.
Put another way, through an average guy into a situation with a bunch of arrogant geeks and he'll likely respond in kind without ever thinking a thing of it, while the average woman will wonder why everyone hates her and her work.
That doesn't make it right. That doesn't make it OK. That does, however, make it understandable that a lot of women hate working around technical men.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
He didn't talk about a very interesting question: How many of the KDE contibutors work on KDE as their day job? Or more importantly: how much of the KDE codebase is a work of people as their day job?
In the case of Linux, I think currently all of the most important contributors (who, on the whole, are responsible for almost all of the incoming core code) are now getting paid for their work on Linux (at OSDL, Red Hat, SUSE, IBM etc.). The same is true for Mozilla (Mozilla Foundation, Oracle, IBM, and now, famously, Google). Of course, this wasn't always so. Anyway, what's the case with KDE?
In Absentia
I wonder if this can be linked to speech as well? Men talk to solve problems, women talk to share them. Could explain why more men are technically minded (mechanics, computers, etc) and more women are in caring professions (nurses, teachers, etc).
Just a thought.
--Muzz
Most programmers are male, whether doing open source work or otherwise. Most engineers are male. Most mechanics are male. So are most carpenters. Guys like to make stuff. The sexes are different. Get over it.
There's a difference in being called a geek by a geek (that's a compliment) and being called a nerd by a "normal" guy anytime it show's you're a bit different (that's an insult - at least to me).
Maybe you're just passing the buck onto genetics when in fact there's a sociological phenomenon occurring. Of course, you couldn't know that, since your genetics prevented you from studying sociology.
Who the hell is a stereotypical guy? We're all just people with unique perspectives. Thinking about "stereotypical people" is the sort of mindset that allows you to apply vague, ill-defined, and yet negative stereotypes to individuals.
I'm a mathematician -- geeky to the point of chic -- but I understand people well enough to know you're full of shit.
After all, I am strangely colored.
yes. Absolutely.
and the response isn't "I disagree!", it isn't "You're wrong!", it's "You must never say such a thing! It is forbidden! Now grovel for forgiveness!".
Wow, it's amazing how much more sense things make when you exaggerate.
Did anyone really say "You must never say such a thing! It is forbidden! Now grovel for forgiveness!"..?
No, that's something that you made up. Keep trying.
Everyone wants to know how to mass produce Open Source Software projects, but they all want it in an "Starting Open Source Software Projects For Dummies" book.
No one's writing one of those, because understanding social organizations is something that's not best left to "social scientists. There's no mention in the article of mathematical modelling, or anything else that would mark him as a serious student, it's just an opinion puff-piece that happens to mention KDE.
There's a lot of work out there that's applicable to formal study, which can be leveraged for understanding how to create a maintainable Open Source Project, but it requires a formal understanding of constraint-based systems and games theory.
Recommended reading for social scientists who actually want the gig of studying OSS, rather than the gig of being trade journal pundits:
Nonlinear Dynamics, Mathematical Biology and Social Science (Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity Lecture Notes)
Joshua M. Epstein
ISBN: 0201419882
The Evolution of Cooperation
Robert Axelrod
ISBN: 0465021212
The Economy As an Evolving Complex System (Sante Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, Vol 5)
Philip W. Anderson
ISBN: 0201156857
Can we maybe see something about a study of OSS projects that isn't just another puff-piece?
-- Terry
The interesting thing that all you "alpha geeks are mean" girls should notice is that the parent poster's attitude, despite the fact that he's a troll, is rather common among boardroom executives. It's always the squeaky wheel's fault. Alpha anythings are hard to get along with, because they became alpha by fighting to destroy the competition.
No matter what business you're in, you'll only avoid coworkers who are out to get you if you're in a non-threatening, "helper" position rather than a promotion track "producer" position. Guys are used to this because we get called "pussies" if we don't compete like a bunch of deranged sociopaths at everything. The only difference between women in business in general and women in CS is that CS's historical male dominance makes you stand out as an exception, and slapping down the exceptions is easier than competing on merit, if your goal is winning at office politics.
maybe attitudes like this are the reason there aren't that many women in programming.
/. ... I know you're out there baby, and I love you!)
Did you read the second line? It was meant as a joke...
(This *is* meant to be flamebait -- and posted anonymously, so I don't ruin my chances with the girl who reads
Why must everything be taken as an insult?
Not all girls are like that! When I was little, I played with construction tools and toy swords, and I never had any interest at all in taking care of babies, dolls, trucks, or anything else, and I still don't. I'm also more antisocial than most guys I know.