I'm surprised to see you giving Mark Guzdial so much credit. He's a vehemently anti-Free Software activist who downplays the sexism in general computer science at large so he can make Free Software seem worse by comparison. I wrote a blog post about this a long time ago.

Bradley M. Kuhn at 2014-10-11T16:20:52Z

@bkuhn, I think seeing the truth in this specific bug report that Guzdial makes is a totally reasonable thing to do.

Sumana Harihareswara [on Mastodon] at 2014-10-11T18:01:22Z

I think it's somewhat dangerous to give political credibility to an opponent by giving them credit like that. Other people have made the same criticism, haven't they? I know I've seen that stated before about projects not taking documentation seriously and relegating new contributors to the "place they can do the least damage — documentation that non of us care about".

I saw the same darned problem at the propreitary software companies I worked with: it was not uncommon for the lesser skilled employees to be put in charge of documentation back in the 1990s. So, the problem has existed in the entire software world for a while.

This is fundamentally the problem with Guzdial and his criticisms. He takes well known problems found in the software world generally, and then tries to argue they only appear in Free Software, in an attempt to push his pro-proprietary-software agenda. I hope you won't give him credibility, even if his arguments have a certain surface accuracy to them.

Bradley M. Kuhn at 2014-10-13T17:07:34Z

@bkuhn in your old post you write "the place where my disagreement with Guzdial begins is that [he claims] this sexism problem is unique to FLOSS" (inserted [he claims] as I think that's what you mean). Looks like an exaggeration to me. Guzdial's article says "At a time when we are trying to broaden participation in computing, open source development is even more closed and less diverse than commercial software development." Worse != unique to. I think it is very dangerous to attack the motives of critics rather than embrace the criticism. This is a long game, and short-term politics like you're engaging in right here are self-defeating.

Mike Linksvayer at 2014-10-14T03:14:25Z

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