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Political correctness in open source doesn’t matter

See: http://www.itwire.com/content/view/22467/1090/.  To answer the sensationalist title, no.

I can’t believe people are trying to make this an issue.  I guess it was only a matter of time before the crap that we deal with in the rest of the world met up with open source.

I have seen several prominent developers on just the kernel that just happen to be women.  Many more on large projects like KDE.  Great, big deal.  They shouldn’t receive special privileges, recognition, or anything because of it.

“The strange thing about this episode is that it looks like the FOSS community seemingly doesn’t want to know about it.”
No shit.  This kind of crybaby attitude is why governments and large corporations can’t get anything done, too worried about offending people.  Most of us FOSS people are here for the goods, not to set up bureaucracy, politics, and political correctness.

This Gentoo developer is spot on: http://steveno.wordpress.com/2008/12/17/mad-gnu-women/.  The existence of women’s only groups like Debian women are wrong in the first place and harmful.  In the same category as Richard Stallman – well intentioned but counter-productive.

Isn’t the goal to write and use good software?  Gender has nothing to do with that.  Neither does race, color, or being the stereotypical guy that spends countless hours hacking away in the parent’s basement.  Yet we think nothing about laughing at the last.  The world would be a better place if people just grew thicker skin.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 25th, 2008 at 10:36 pm and is filed under Computing, Gentoo, Linux, kde. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

7 Responses to “Political correctness in open source doesn’t matter”

  1. Matija "hook" Šuklje Says:
    December 26th, 2008 at 4:31 am

    Hear hear!

    Political correctness is a rhetorical construct for not losing vote(r)s, has nothing to do with good manners and

  2. Matija "hook" Šuklje Says:
    December 26th, 2008 at 4:34 am

    (stupid ctrl S link)

    [... with good manners and] should IMHO be avoided in FOSS and even in normal interpersonal communication.

  3. kev009 Says:
    December 26th, 2008 at 5:06 am

    Yes, obviously good manors and personal skills will help you get respect and good reputation. That fits in with the bazaar model of development. Special interest groups are counter to this. If you get offended because someone _types something on the internet_, you have bigger problems IMHO :).

  4. Boycott Novell » IRC: #boycottnovell @ FreeNode: Boxing Day 2008 Says:
    December 27th, 2008 at 2:08 am

    [...] http://www.kev009.com/wp/2008/12/politica…; [...]

  5. Steven Oliver Says:
    January 1st, 2009 at 8:38 am

    I’m not a Gentoo developer, but thanks…

  6. kev009 Says:
    January 1st, 2009 at 10:13 am

    My mistake, I thought I saw the post on Planet Gentoo :-)

  7. Stuart Gathman Says:
    May 15th, 2009 at 7:22 pm

    There are different social dynamics in a women only developer group. It works like a sewing circle. To oversimplify with stereotypes: the guys spur each other on with “I can do better than that”. The girls encourage each other with “wow! That is really good!”.

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