![Sumana Harihareswara [on Mastodon]](https://identi.ca/uploads/brainwane/2017/6/2/H9wgXw_thumb.jpg)
Sumana Harihareswara [on Mastodon] at
New post: http://crookedtimber.org/2015/05/21/where-are-the-women-in-the-history-of-open-source/ what ideas might have been erased from the #opensource intellectual heritage due to sexism?
Aaron Wolf, olm-e, Charles Stanhope, Mike Linksvayer and 1 others likes this.
Mike Linksvayer shared this.
Enjoyed this post and eager to read the next one!
My idiosyncratic comment for the pump.io crowd copied below:
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.
My idiosyncratic comment for the pump.io crowd copied below:
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.
Mike Linksvayer at 2015-05-22T04:53:37Z
Aaron Wolf, Tyng-Ruey Chuang, William L. Anderson, Claes Wallin (韋嘉誠) likes this.
THANKS!
"hospitality over liberty!" Yes! Well, both are nice though…
Anyway, the key here is that this is not about gender, in that gender is more of an indicator, a means… Diversity is good but especially in the values it brings. We suffer greatly for lack of women in the free/libre/open world — because we're missing the perspectives and ideas that more women would bring.