Name: Anonymous 2015-04-17 3:05
To all who thought feminism would just go away, they're doubling down and trying to take ownership of major FOSS projects such as BSD and Linux. Things are about to get really bad...
http://blog.anthrobsd.net/046.html
To bring readers up to speed: on April 8, 2015, a Twitter user named @LadySerenaKitty posted a graphic designed to promote FreeBSD as being inclusive to all peoples. The graphic featured the FreeBSD logo (a translucent red sphere with a set of devil horns) with the following text:
FreeBSD does not care:
about your race or ethnicity
about your sexuality
about your gender
about your sex
if you are cis
if you are trans
FreeBSD only cares that you know what you are doing and if you don't, there's a huge community willing to help you learn.
First, a tiny bit of honesty. Free Software, Open Source Software, whatever your politics deems you call it, is feminist. Free software owes Feminism. Internalize it, embrace it, use it to make those who would deny it sweat just a little. By doing so, you open up all the feminist theory to work for creating a better culture. It opens up the doors to the excellent work of notable STS scholars such as Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway.
To take just one example, standpoint theory "articulates the importance of a group's experience, of a distinctive kind of collective consciousness, which can be achieved through the group's struggles to gain the kind of knowledge that they need for their projects" (Harding 2004: 36). That is to say, it is not enough simply to have minority group members around. Kristen Intemann (2010: 790), in comparing feminist empiricism with feminist standpoint epistemology, states it as "feminist empiricists have advocated for scientific communities comprised of individuals with diverse values and interests" while "[s]tandpoint feminists, on the other hand, maintain that it is diversity of social position (as opposed to diversity of values and interests) that is epistemically beneficial." I am throwing my weight behind feminist standpoint epistemology here: it will make a better science, a better technology, and a better *BSD.
We can start asking good questions such as "what would a truly inclusive FreeBSD look like?" This is a form of undone science and we can and should begin to put pressure on the community to begin asking these questions.
We ought to wrest away all claims towards inclusion and respect from Linux and their community. You could work with that community but it is a community that denies its intellectual heritage and goes out of its way to silence minority group voices. Or you could come to the *BSD community who are actively working to make this space congruent with the ideals on which it was founded and is awaiting its opportunity to embrace you and your standpoint into making this technological artifact into the best thing we all, together as equals, know how. *BSD ought to be the place all newcomers arrive first, not last. Because we have a better culture. A culture without patriarchy. A culture where it's not just white angry men.
http://blog.anthrobsd.net/046.html
To bring readers up to speed: on April 8, 2015, a Twitter user named @LadySerenaKitty posted a graphic designed to promote FreeBSD as being inclusive to all peoples. The graphic featured the FreeBSD logo (a translucent red sphere with a set of devil horns) with the following text:
FreeBSD does not care:
about your race or ethnicity
about your sexuality
about your gender
about your sex
if you are cis
if you are trans
FreeBSD only cares that you know what you are doing and if you don't, there's a huge community willing to help you learn.
First, a tiny bit of honesty. Free Software, Open Source Software, whatever your politics deems you call it, is feminist. Free software owes Feminism. Internalize it, embrace it, use it to make those who would deny it sweat just a little. By doing so, you open up all the feminist theory to work for creating a better culture. It opens up the doors to the excellent work of notable STS scholars such as Sandra Harding and Donna Haraway.
To take just one example, standpoint theory "articulates the importance of a group's experience, of a distinctive kind of collective consciousness, which can be achieved through the group's struggles to gain the kind of knowledge that they need for their projects" (Harding 2004: 36). That is to say, it is not enough simply to have minority group members around. Kristen Intemann (2010: 790), in comparing feminist empiricism with feminist standpoint epistemology, states it as "feminist empiricists have advocated for scientific communities comprised of individuals with diverse values and interests" while "[s]tandpoint feminists, on the other hand, maintain that it is diversity of social position (as opposed to diversity of values and interests) that is epistemically beneficial." I am throwing my weight behind feminist standpoint epistemology here: it will make a better science, a better technology, and a better *BSD.
We can start asking good questions such as "what would a truly inclusive FreeBSD look like?" This is a form of undone science and we can and should begin to put pressure on the community to begin asking these questions.
We ought to wrest away all claims towards inclusion and respect from Linux and their community. You could work with that community but it is a community that denies its intellectual heritage and goes out of its way to silence minority group voices. Or you could come to the *BSD community who are actively working to make this space congruent with the ideals on which it was founded and is awaiting its opportunity to embrace you and your standpoint into making this technological artifact into the best thing we all, together as equals, know how. *BSD ought to be the place all newcomers arrive first, not last. Because we have a better culture. A culture without patriarchy. A culture where it's not just white angry men.