Leader News

Open source needs sex education

Leader ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 01 Aug 2006 14:05 BST

Open source development is about communities as much as it is about writing software. At their best, those communities can be highly effective meritocracies, encouraging exceptional people to produce exceptional code. More often, though, they can be forbidding places for those who don't fit in. Ask the wrong question in the wrong way, and the scorn will eat through your screen like acid.

There's nothing unique about this aspect of open source development: any tight clique responds to outsiders in this way. Display near-Japanese levels of self-deprecation, slip in some good ideas, defer to the hierarchy and you can in time be accepted. Or you could go away and do something else: a popular option to those who don't have the male tendency for hyper-engagement with technology. This is reflected in the figures: while nearly 30 percent of proprietary developers are female, that falls to less than 2 percent of open source participants.

It is very unhealthy to exclude half the world from any enterprise – an attitude which still holds back entire nations. There is no good solution: even where the will and the power exists to encourage participation among the excluded, accusations of preferential treatment can poison the minds of the very people who most need to be converted to the cause.

The least bad approach is to identify and nurture an environment with two important attributes. It must be somewhere that members of an excluded group want to be, and it must create something unique of value to the whole. There are many areas where open source is much poorer than its closed, commercial sibling: marketing, usability, documentation. These are also areas where proprietary concerns have less of a gender imbalance than in other aspects of IT – no coincidence.

Nobody wants to see women ghettoised within open source: the target must be a wholesale change in attitude that sees the community become more accessible, less confrontational and better tuned to accepting contributions purely on their worth. Fedora Women will follow in the footsteps of the successful Debian Women, which has been effective by establishing non-exclusive mentoring schemes with the aim of humanising the entire process.

The acceptance of such ideas can only be enhanced by the establishment of beachheads of excellence; high-status groups producing necessary contributions that help open source not only meet the standards of proprietary software but exceed them. We know that open and free development has this potential: only by combining it in new ways with the potential of bright, engaged people hitherto excluded can it prove itself the best way to move computing forward in the 21st century.