Women in Open Source: the Definitive Resource

A couple of months ago, I was asking "Where are the alpha *female* hackers?" I received various helpful answers, albeit rather few of them. Here's a rather fuller answer to my question: the June 2009 edition of Open Source Business Resource, devoted entirely to Women in Open Source:

Whether you look at industry studies, online articles, or perhaps even around your own company, you'll see that women make up a small percent of the people working in free/libre and open source software (F/LOSS). Over the years there's been a growing interest in why so few women participate in this rapidly growing community and, more importantly, what can be done to help encourage more participation. Fortunately, members of the community - both male and female - are actively ramping up their efforts to attract more women to the F/LOSS community.

Resources such as LinuxChix.org, the Geek Feminism Wiki, as well as publications, blogs, and articles written by and about women, draw attention to this growing, influential group of F/LOSS participants. Events, such as the Women in Open Source track at the Southern California Linux Expo, help women network and connect with other members of the F/LOSS community, while also increasing their visibility.

In this issue of the Open Source Business Resource, innovative, energetic women discuss their specific projects, what other women in the field are doing, and their efforts to promote F/LOSS to people within their communities and internationally.

Without doubt, this is now the best place to begine exploring this area: great work.

Where are the Alpha *Female* Hackers?

Today is Ada Lovelace Day:

Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines. Entrepreneurs, innovators, sysadmins, programmers, designers, games developers, hardware experts, tech journalists, tech consultants. The list of tech-related careers is endless.

Recent research by psychologist Penelope Lockwood discovered that women need to see female role models more than men need to see male ones. That’s a relatively simple problem to begin to address. If women need female role models, let’s come together to highlight the women in technology that we look up to. Let’s create new role models and make sure that whenever the question “Who are the leading women in tech?” is asked, that we all have a list of candidates on the tips of our tongues.

Not surprisingly, my first thought was: who have we got in the world of free software? There are certainly some big names like Mitchell Baker, Chief Lizard Wrangler of Mozilla and Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation.

But notice that both of these occupy executive positions: they hack business/legal/social systems. And while there are plenty of female coders contributing to free software projects, I can't think of any high-profile ones that might stand alongside the obvious alpha males in the coding world.

Now, this is probably due to my ignorance as much as anything. So I'd like to put out a call for names that I ought to know in this context - women who code at a high level, and whose names I should be mentioning more often. And as a pendant I'd also be interested on people's thoughts as to how we can nurture more top-flight female hackers.

Update: Just come across this great List of women in Open Source.

Er, Yes, But What Do You *Do*?

More fascinating info on what exactly the increasingly-important foundations do - or, rather, what their directors do:

I get asked a lot what I do, exactly, as executive director of the GNOME Foundation.

First off, I want to say I'm really glad I work for an organization where people feel comfortable asking "what do you do?" It shows they care about the organization and are not afraid to ask tough questions. Have you ever asked your boss what they did, exactly?

Secondly, I have to admit that when I first got asked, that first day on the job at GUADEC, I wanted to go "I don't know!! What do you think I should be doing?" (I did ask the "What do you think I should be doing part" of a few people and I'm always interested in hearing anyone's answer to that question.)

Ok, so to the point, what do I do? I'm going to answer in three parts.

Ah, like Gaul.

Brainstorming with GNOME's Stormy Peters

As I wrote last week, foundations are playing an increasingly important role in the development of free software. I cited Mozilla Foundation and GNOME Foundation - although Matthew Aslett rightly pointed out that Eclipse is a leader, too - but in one respect Mozilla and GNOME are somewhat different. We hear a lot about Mozilla's plans, articulated by Mitchell Baker, now ably abetted by Mark Surman, but GNOME is rather less high profile. The same goes for the head of the GNOME Foundation, Stormy Peters, so I was delighted to come across this very full interview with her....

(On Open Enterprise blog.)

DRM as Freedom-Eating Infection

I've often written about DRM, and how it is antithetical to free software. But here's an interview with Amazon's CTO, which provides disturbing evidence that it actively *reduces* the amount of free software in use:

InformationWeek: Amazon is known as an open source shop. Is that still true?

Vogels: Where in the past we could say this was a pure Linux shop, now in terms of the large pieces of the e-commerce platform, we're a pure Amazon EC2 shop. There's an easier choice of different operating systems. Linux is still very popular, but, for example, Windows Server is often a requirement, especially if you need to transcode video and things that have to be delivered through Windows DRM [digital rights management], so there is a variety of operating systems available for internal developers.

Another reason to fight the spread of DRM. (Via @storming.)

A Good Foundation for 2009

If I had to pinpoint major open source trends in 2008, one of them would be the rise in the foundation as a major force in free software. The best-known examples of these are probably the Mozilla Foundation and GNOME Foundation, both of which have expanded their ambitions recently. Here's what each has to say about its aims...

On Open Enterprise blog.

GNOME Gets Stormy...

On Open Enterprise blog.

Those Altruistic Aussies

Despite frequent speculation that corporate financing is dangerous to the ethos of the open source software (OSS) community, most Australian open source developers don't see payment as a primary influence on their contributions, a straw poll of attendees at Linux.conf.au in Melbourne suggests.

During her conference keynote presentation, Stormy Peters, the director of community and partner programs for OpenLogic, asked how many audience members were currently working in a paid position to develop OSS projects. Around one-third raised their hands. Almost exactly the same number said they would continue to work on OSS even if they lost their current position.

No surprise there. (Via A Chaotic Flow of Open Source Ideas.)

The Joy of Code

Thankfully we seem to be moving beyond the simplistic idea that code written and given away for nothing is worth nothing. But not everyone has gasped the corollary: that the you get better code if you *don't* pay for it. Why? Because passion is a better motivator than pounds and pence.

If you're sceptical, trying this post that reviews the growing evidence that external rewards demage intrinsic motivations:

As many of you know, I'm really interested in the question of "Would you do it again for free?" If you take developers that are working on open source software for free and you pay them, if you stop paying them, will they still work on open source software? This was the topic of my keynote at GUADEC and will be the topic of my keynotes at LinuxConf Australia and SCALE - the story continues to evolve as I learn more. One of the things I started with was a search to see if there was any relevant data out there. I found the following five studies that explore how external rewards affect internal or intrinsic rewards

Those studies tend to suggest that rewarding people for doing something produces less good results than relying on their personal passion or altruism. Creating something and giving it away is not only better for those who receive, it's also better for those who give.