Manoj Srivastava wrote:
On Thu, 04 Mar 2004 06:03:43 +0000, Adam Majer <adamm@galacticasoftware.com> said:
What? Irredeemable? "Few bad apples"? What are you talking about? AFAIK, people in the Debian project are quite progressive. It is even part of the DFSG (#5).Currently most of the developers in the western world are men. Currently most of the new teachers in the USA are women. DPL can't be asked to change that. [Normal] Governmental policies can't even change that.Even if the DPL can't, raising awareness of the issue so people themselves can change is certainly something the DPL can do. Or do you really think that as a whole the debian developers are irredeemable? That we can not take care of the few bad apples in the basket that are poisoning the table?
Unless I'm completely off the wall here, most DD *donate* their time to Debian. Just like people can volunteer to work at a local hospital, library, etc.. There is a certain percentage of the society that does volunteer.So in a nutshell, I think that this point in moot. DPL can't really affect the DD demographics - it is up to the actual societies (ie. the world *outside* Debian and GNU :)Oh yeah, we in Debian can't possibly be any different from the societies we live in. Hmm. How much is my hourly rate to answer questions oin -user now?
Now, there is a certain amount of people in a society that are "computer savvy". Last time I looked, the majority of these are (still) men. A percentage of that use Debian and a percentage of these can do at least some sort of coding (eg, shell scripts). Then there is a certain percentage of these are people that volunteer. And a certain percentage of these volunteers will join Debian. So, unless there is discrimination allong the way, most of the volunteers that can pass the NM process will be men. The only way to actually change it is to have more women that are "computer savvy".
Any demographic change like that can take *decades*. It *will* change, but it takes a lot of time.
BTW, my def. of "computer savvy" would be people that can actually use a computer slightly beyond the basic things like word processing and e-mail. This demographic is changing, (look at the last 10 years), but it will take time until the change gets "filtered down" to the DD level. In 50 years 50% of DD might just be women. And yes, I said 50, not 5 :)
PS. Just a small note; since the Internet is rather anonymous, if a woman would feel apprehensive in posting a bug report, whatever, due to the fact the she may be identified as a women, well, just change the name to 'Bob' or something. No one will know!Yup. Just hide yourself. Buy a burka while you are at it, we men just can't bring ourselves to change our behaviour in any way -- did I mention beetling brows?
Well, you missed that point *completely*. - Adam