Re: [ATTEND] How to act on LKML

Ingo Molnar
2013-07-19T12:08:41Z

* Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com> wrote:

> [...]
>
> Anyway, through the discussion it has been established that swearing is
> rare, most of often directed to the code, and on exceptional occasions
> directed to people, when they *deserve* it. And you seem to be implying
> that women can't tolerate that, so a change needs to be made in order to
> attract more women to the project. Is that correct?

While I don't talk for Sarah, the way you have put it is broadly correct
(although your formulation is adversarial and leading): most communities
dominated by women are hugely offputting to males and communities
dominated by males are hugely offputting to women.

Open communities dominated by one gender (males in most cases) that want
to essentially double their creative brain capacity by attracting the
other gender are well advised to try to figure out a solution to that
problem.

> Personally I don't believe that. Essentially every other open source
> project out there, except the Linux kernel, has some kind code of
> conduct, whether it's implicit or explicit, and yet they don't have many
> developer women either. But fine, let's suppose what you say it's true.

Code of conduct is unfortunately not enough - there's many conscious and
subconscious dimensions to a community that make it offputting to one
gender or the other and once a community becomes a mono-culture by one
gender (due to historic gender bias or due to sheer luck) it's (very) hard
to change it.

> As Linus already pointed out, not everybody has to work with everybody.

That's not the point though, the point is to potentially roughly double
the creative brain capacity of the Linux kernel project.

Even if you don't care about gender fairness, that kind of bona fide
benefit to the project is worth a try or two I think ...

Thanks,

Ingo