Fropen source community demographics

I've always thought most open source projects (in their vast multitude) like game projects were big on ego, ambition, and pretty web-sites and short on talent, application, and success. Over-confident incompetence is (culturally) a male thing.

For example, a core element of geek culture is a focus on "hard technical issues, such as operating system internals and network stacks, with a corresponding scorn for "human issues, such as usability and user interface design.

The first problem with women programmers (according to these guys) is obviously that they aren't equipped to tackle hard technical issues, and aren't willing to embrace geek culture—even its asexual aspects like concern about hard problems. Remember, hardness is both partners' problem.

They quote

"You would hack and you would live by the Hacker Ethic, and you knew that horribly inefficient and wasteful things like women burned too many cycles, occupied too much memory space.["] Twenty years later, FLOSS has become a haven for the antisocial singular-interest geek: a club where they are safe from the jeers of high school jocks and the pity of college peers who actually have something to do on Friday nights. Challenges to this culture are often taken very personally; anyone who points out that it's an unwelcoming environment for most people (male as well as female) is flamed or simply dismissed. This makes anyone who doesn't fit the geek profile feel unwelcome.

And I gotta say: people who want to change a culture so that they can belong to it are not trying to join a culture, they are trying to change it. If you change that one word "women" to "significant others" in that quote, it makes perfect sense.

And then you have to deal with the uptight, inferiority complex of "safe from the jeers of high school jocks and the pity of college peers who actually have something to do on Friday nights". Listen Bub or Babe: if you got something to do on a Friday night that is more fun than hacking, go fucking do it.

The truth is, the people writing this article are complete losers: not only do they have nothing to do on Friday night, not only have they been left off the hottest and coolest techie bus to leave the station in twenty years, but they are too weak-livered to embrace their inner nature and become nerds.

I don't entirely agree. Note first my position as a very geeky woman currently employed writing software. I am not offensensitive.

• The ultra-nerd obsessions of the fropen source community are not to its benefit. Widening the community to include people interested in human factors will help it write acessible software. When your user interface sucks, your internals don't matter. (And vice versa.)

• Some of the aspects of this fropen source culture are not relevant to its self-proclaimed goals of writing software. Your goal of implementing a better memory allocation algorithm is not impeded when you are prevented from pasting hard-core pr0n all over your presentation slides.

Some aspects of the culture are harder to separate from the programmer mindset, I'd agree. It would take nuclear weapons to get the average hacker to give up puns or Douglas Adams. The point is that changes to unimportant aspects of the culture are likely to make the culture more welcoming to valuable potential contributors.