Then how come in Finland and Malaysia over 60% of the IT industry (form the most technical to the most senior) are women? The fact is that in many societies women don't participate much in It and it is _cultural_, not genetic or whatever else people try to rationalise. If some people want to try to change the culture to give all people equal access to opportunity, then please go ahead.
After all, the very spirit of FOSS is about an environment where great people can _be_ great. Regardless of any biases they may have to deal with in their home culture.
Try reading this, look at some of the crap thrown at women in FOSS (specifically just for being women) and then realise that the opportunities are not even. Women groups in FOSS is needed now to address certain imbalances. I certainly think that our culture can evolve past needing it, but right now they are a good idea.
Hi, this is the original poster again, forgot to login last time.
The open source community simply does not have the money or time to play this game, plus we will simply never win. Some of these companies hire teams and teams of people to deal with patents, and they pay developers an incentive bonus to give the company lawyers juice to work with. If we play that game, we would need to play it completely, and we simply can't. The best way to play this is to change the rules. Software patents make no sense. Patenting an idea in software is just as stupid as patenting the method of applying paint to a canvas in art. We need to change the precedent otherwise we will continually be spending our time putting out flames, and spending less time creating the kick ass software as we've been doing. Software patents threaten competition and those who have unique and good ideas, but, and here is some food for thought, many companies value their public image much more than revenue from something misunderstood like patents. I guess that a big call out to anyone being threatened by patents to be as public about them as possible is another defense. If a big company sued a large open source project for patent infringement, it would more likely backfire on them now than say a year ago. Thanks to the issues inherent in the FTA in Aus, we now have some seriously well educated legislators, who may be able to avert the kinds of disasters seen in the US. One of our biggest strengths in the open source community is our openness and our ability to work together right around the world. Lets band together to bring this out into the light and see it burn when the sunlight of public scrutiny hits it.
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Then how come in Finland and Malaysia over 60% of the IT industry (form the most technical to the most senior) are women? The fact is that in many societies women don't participate much in It and it is _cultural_, not genetic or whatever else people try to rationalise. If some people want to try to change the culture to give all people equal access to opportunity, then please go ahead.
After all, the very spirit of FOSS is about an environment where great people can _be_ great. Regardless of any biases they may have to deal with in their home culture.
Try reading this, look at some of the crap thrown at women in FOSS (specifically just for being women) and then realise that the opportunities are not even. Women groups in FOSS is needed now to address certain imbalances. I certainly think that our culture can evolve past needing it, but right now they are a good idea.
Hi, this is the original poster again, forgot to login last time. The open source community simply does not have the money or time to play this game, plus we will simply never win. Some of these companies hire teams and teams of people to deal with patents, and they pay developers an incentive bonus to give the company lawyers juice to work with. If we play that game, we would need to play it completely, and we simply can't. The best way to play this is to change the rules. Software patents make no sense. Patenting an idea in software is just as stupid as patenting the method of applying paint to a canvas in art. We need to change the precedent otherwise we will continually be spending our time putting out flames, and spending less time creating the kick ass software as we've been doing. Software patents threaten competition and those who have unique and good ideas, but, and here is some food for thought, many companies value their public image much more than revenue from something misunderstood like patents. I guess that a big call out to anyone being threatened by patents to be as public about them as possible is another defense. If a big company sued a large open source project for patent infringement, it would more likely backfire on them now than say a year ago. Thanks to the issues inherent in the FTA in Aus, we now have some seriously well educated legislators, who may be able to avert the kinds of disasters seen in the US. One of our biggest strengths in the open source community is our openness and our ability to work together right around the world. Lets band together to bring this out into the light and see it burn when the sunlight of public scrutiny hits it.