Monthly Archive for August, 2009

F*m*n*sts

I’ve been watching this trend with amazement. Now, as LinuxMagazine writes, “The Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GNOME Foundation are targeting higher women’s participation in the community”.

Why, and I’m absolutely serious about this, why do you want that? Why do you care if it’s male or female brain that excellent ideas come from?

You write: “Individual projects have found ways to make women welcome…”. What the heck? No, really! Show me a single FLOSS project that blatantly refused to welcome women. Or the one that pointedly ignored their contributions. I’m really curious.

You write later: “The report from the summer of 2009 layed out some U.S. educational figures: in 2006 only 20% of computer science students were women going for their bachelor’s degree”. Well, I feel sorry for you. If you come to visit Moscow State Technical University you’ll see that about half of students there are women. YMMV.

At my previous job practically all girls in cluster/data centre department were either studying at MSTU or Moscow State University of Aerospace Technologies or Moscow Engineering Physics Institute or have had graduated from either of them. YMMV.

We’ve already been through discussions about stupid people and their “show me your boobs” requests. We don’t have issues about women not being welcome. We have an issue of having dicks in the community who do not respect other people.

I’ve been to many forums for designers and even though offensive jokes towards women are so rare there that people would queue up to read them for novelty sake, women usually don’t make above 15% of presence there. While in fact making 1/2 of designers community (at least where I live). And I daresay most interior designers here are women. Again, lots of women in photographers communities while at the same time really few of them when it comes to discussing some bloody 1:1 crops with different interpolation methods.

Somehow a lot of women just don’t feel like joining techie communities or discussing techie things. So why do you want them to do it? Because you want it? And will you drag them kicking and screaming into the bright new Century of Women in FLOSS if they refuse?

So if you make women a special case in FLOSS, here is an idea. We need more dwarfs in FLOSS. And trolls. And while at that, why not get more werewolves? :) There really are so few of them. Since you care :)

It’s really amazing how some people cannot twist their heads around a very simple idea that equal rights does not actually mean equal interests.

LGW unveiled

Back in May during Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 Alessandro, Cedric, Melissa and me sat down 20 meters away from the roaring official LGM supper to talk about ways to make more buzz in designers community re. free/libre tools. We defined major pitfalls and came up with a number of ideas.

The first of them shoots now: Libre Graphics World. We intend to make this website THE host for news, articles, interviews and so on. We tried to cover most questions about LGW in the FAQ. Feel free to ask more :)

Most technical work was done by sK1 team (kudos, guys!).

We start with all interviews I did over the years, a review of Fontmatrix 0.6.0 (released a month ago) and a couple of Inkscape tutorials. The website is by no means complete, but I was so tired of keeping the project to myself, that here it is :) My own short-term goals are:

  • fill the gaps in the Web Links section
  • finish FAQs for main products
  • finish translation of Photoshop-to-GIMP migration guide
  • translate Illustrator-to-Inkscape migration guide
  • translate and publish my own GIMP and Inkscape tutorials
  • finish and publish the bloody LGM’09 report :)

A number of reviews (Inkscape 0.47, Scribus 1.3.5, GIMP 2.7.0) are already written and just wait for actual software releases to happen.

There is a lot of work on wiki to be done, and we actually are missing the logo. I have a preliminary version which I’m not quite happy with and I’d be grateful for help on that.

Last, but not least. One of the points of this project is collecting information about libre graphics related activities. So we have a shared Google calendar. There is an open thread in forum where you can comment to tell us about events that are related to libre graphics software, and then we’ll add them. I’m talking about conferences, workshops, courses etc.

And, like I said, this is just one of the planned projects. Expect something else soon :)