Where are the women in the history of open source?

Well, if you’re going beyond the high priests and ideologists of the movement to those who have created the technologies that structure our FLOSS ecosystem, take a look at the Usenix lifetime achievement awards: you’re at least missing Radia Perlman (whose writing in her technical books is incidentally among the clearest and most enjoyable I’ve ever studied) and Deborah Scherrer of the Software Tools Project. (Now I hope I haven’t overlooked anyone when I checked if there were other women.)

I would add Jude Milhon, who coined the term “cypherpunks,” and Carrie Anne Philbin of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Are there open source projects that have done better at attracting contributors who don’t share the common FLOSS inessential weirdnesses? If so I’d like to see what they are doing.

Uncovering “what might have been erased from our intellectual heritage due to sexism” is a great project. There’s also “what our intellectual heritage might have been if not for sexism.” Concerning FLOSS, I wonder if it might have valued collective action more and been better at it. The existing narrative is largely about individual heroic developers choosing to save the users, and berating users who don’t accept the salvation offered. Developers choosing the right license and then very rarely and heroically enforcing said (copyleft, about which you wrote last time) license is part of that narrative. If it were really in service to users, wouldn’t the height of FLOSS politics concern organizing users, not saving them? Note by far the most successful FLOSS project in terms of directly gaining end user adoption and in building a diverse, worldwide community is Mozilla, led by a woman for its entire history and pre-history. Maybe Elinor Ostrom would’ve been appreciated early in FLOSS history and been seen as laying the intellectual framework.

In Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators, which I haven’t finished yet, he details the major, major role of women in the development of the computer, especially on the programming side. And he starts things off with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, and her key role, especially in the 1830s.

Major names in the development of programming: Grace Hopper, Betty Snyder, Jean Jennings and the women of ENIAC, to name just a few.

Alan Turing, of course, was surrounded by women at Bletchley who were essential in his quest to break the Enigma code.

Side note: Discovered Vienna Teng some time ago and love her music. She has a beautiful voice, and her songs are intelligent, graceful, soaring.

This is a very thought-provoking piece, with so many interesting topics raised.

Regarding the inessential weirdness and some aspects of the programming community, I find myself wondering to what extent this reflects the gender imbalance (you seem to believe it might be a lot) and to what extent it reflects the fantastic magnifying power of online communities: because online communities building tools (newsletter, forum, discussion groups, blogs…) multiply thousandfold the ability to interact with people sharing your interests, they multiply and diversify enormously the actual interests of people (and allow a variety of legitimized social capital in the Bourdieu sense impossible to imagine without them). This process will also simultaneously magnify the weirdness of the community thereby built (with the obligatory nod to https://xkcd.com/1095/).

My own experience with this phenomenon is mostly having been part of a then extremely active online community of people discussing (or more accurately obsessing other) the Harry Potter series (there, I said it). In terms of sociological composition, top users were overwhelmingly women, yet all the usual inessential weirdness features were very present (convoluted acronyms, intricate personal references, subtle hierarchical patterns, extremely steep learning curve…). On the other hand, the level of aggression was indeed very low, incommensurably milder than here on CT for instance, and it seems safe to attribute this mainly to the gender of the participants.

Regarding your second post, what do you think about the stackexchange galaxy of websites? Rather impressive communities dedicated to helping each other (albeit in very specific ways) have been built in this way these last 5 or 6 years and I have the feeling they sometimes manage to draw the best of both the world of fandom and that of technical professionals (sometimes of course, they managed to attract the worst of both world as well).

“I wonder if it might have valued collective action more and been better at it.” This, 1000x this. The narrative of the heroic programmer would likely have been much less influential.

(I don’t think it would have gone so far as to value Ostrom; even among female programmers my experience is that knowledge of outside non-engineering theoretical influences is low.)

Maybe this post rubbed me the wrong way, but my response to the repeated “What ifs” is “I don’t know, why don’t you try it?” Some of those ideas sound like good ones, some sound like bad ones, and all will have trade-offs, but the only way to test and make sense of these ideas is in their concrete and specific application. Or, to put it another way: I really liked your previous post because of the reflections about trade-offs, and how different FLOSS groups are going to have different norms, because they have different goals and purposes. There is no “we” here.

My own view is that FLOSS is a bit like how Ibn Khaldun describes the Desert; a leader can only create standards that are mutually acceptable to disputants, because otherwise people will just fork. So those standards are going to be specific to the participants. But at the same time, those standards aren’t arbitrary, because if those standards can’t, say, protect the group from free-riders, then the project will fail anyway. And there’s nothing to say that there is necessarily any compatible standard that can bring or hold a given group together. People may just be too far apart. So whatever our ideas may sound like, unless you can bring people with you, in practice not just in platitudes, they don’t really matter. And there’s nothing to say the “nice” ideas will win out in this competition. Maybe nasty-sounding, exclusionary-sounding ideas do a better job in binding the ingroup together, even if it comes at the expense of the outgroup. Asabiyyah is a double edged sword, after all.

For my own part, I doubt whether a FLOSS community that prizes a specific vision of a community, rather than a product, can hang together in the long term. It seems to resemble nothing so much as those atheist pseudo-religions which like the idea of a cohesive community meeting in a big hall and saying pleasant things, but don’t like the God business. They don’t seem to last, and no wonder, because what is such a group for? Successful communities seem to come together incidentally, as part of a larger shared purpose (whether that be religion, or politics, or an open-source DNS client), and can’t just be willed into being ab initio. But that said, the joy of FLOSS is that you don’t need my permission or approval, and I wish you luck.

TheRaven @15:

The mostly-male leaders of the movement alienated women with their manners, attitudes, and in some cases formally stated philosophies from the very beginning.

Not just women. As someone highly involved in the foss world for the last 25+ years, and also equipped with a Y chromosome, they alienated me too with their manners and attitudes. There’s a lot more that could be said, but ultimately the discussion needs to be at least in part about the “gender spectrum” (in which there are 13 or 17 or 26 genders, not 2).

This post and the comments below make it obvious that liberty is a male political value, while safety and inclusiveness are female ones. That viewpoint is officially rejected, of course. It’s wrong and sexist except when it flatters women, then it’s true and empowering.