Re: Support for RMS and criticism of the bottom-up/social contract power grab attempt.

[Alexandre François Garreau]

Le lundi 4 novembre 2019 10:50:56 CET, vous avez écrit :
> * Federico Leva <nemowiki@gmail.com> [2019-11-04 09:02]:
> > Alexandre François Garreau, 01/11/19 18:30:
> > > Though women participate in GNU,
> > > are any of them fortunately software package maintainer? Unfortunately,
> > > I’m
> > > not sure about this :/
> 
> LibrePlanet media is good place to see that it is not male society:
> https://media.libreplanet.org/
> 
> There is no discrimination. Package maintainer are not looked upon
> because of their gender.

I think people may be worried about either internal inconscious, unwilling 
discrimination, either about external discrimination that might make women 
dislike that place.

Personally I just have the impression GNU is pretty closed circle and almost 
nobody, man or woman comes to know it that easily, except from external 
companies that work on any part of the toolchain.  The question then fall on 
these companies, as said before, more than on rms (we would have to get 
history of women leaving these because of rms).

> Finally, without women there would be no male package maintainers.
> 
> Do you really think that long night sessions of programming and larval
> stages[1] can be survived without our grandmothers, mothers, sisters,
> wives, girlfriends, daughters and female friends? Impossible.
> 
> The sole question is why women do not enter programming subjects may
> be easily expressed in being simply smarter for the sake of life
> style. They don't want to do to them what males like to do to
> themselves.

I strongly disagree (to both assertion), and hope we are quite a bunch to 
disagree too, so I hope nobody will believe that kind of thought is what keep 
women out, because that’s just a (wrong) descriptive statement (tailored to be 
initially negative about men) rather than a normative one.

> Do you really think that long night sessions of programming and larval
> stages[1] can be survived without our grandmothers, mothers, sisters,
> wives, girlfriends, daughters and female friends? Impossible.
> 
> Footnotes:
> [1]  http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/L/larval-stage.html

What about asocial hackers leaving in celibacy, in cold with their family, 
like I know a bunch of?  On the contrary, I consider loneliness, if well 
lived, can help.  ESR too, says that.

> The sole question is why women do not enter programming subjects may
> be easily expressed in being simply smarter for the sake of life
> style. They don't want to do to them what males like to do to
> themselves.

This (life style expectation) is arbitrary (you’d have to back that with more 
facts and observations), and “smartness” is a blurred notion, hard to define, 
not really relevant.

Love of abstraction and computing is, to me, something that must be inherent 
to the human condition.  It’s a highly intellectual thing.  And women and men 
brains are no different at the base.  So it must be a cultural thing.  Either 
inside women, either inside men, either because of GNU, companies, IT, the 
rest of the society, etc.  A lot of people already take this theorical ground 
for granted.  What divides is “from what” and “how”.