Newsforge: GNOME and Google reach out to women

Gnome is mostly developed on the internet. On the internet, you're just a handle, you don't have a sex, your skin doesn't have a colour, your eyes don't have a shape. You are merely the product of what you have said and what you have done. The electronic shrowd masks us until a 40 year old police man and a 10 year old girl cannot be distinguished.

That is what makes this program so obscene, what is a woman or man on the internet? What we have here is a double blind test to see what demographics are interested enough in working on Gnome to do it for free. When the shrowd of anonymity is lifed, what do we have? Some pretty interesting data I guess, about who is interested in this field of participation.

It turns out that when sex is not an issue, those most interested in pouring countless hours into OSS are almost exclusively men. But that doesn't fit with some individual's preconceptions that men and women are interested in exactly the same things the exact same amount. I suppose that means that the problem is sex should be an issue. A world with no predudice or descrimination didn't work out the way we think it should, so we better introduce some.

Gnome doesn't need more women. Gnome needs more email addresses on CVS commit logs. If one of those is a women is real life, then good on her. If one of them is another member of the countless male mass, then so be it, it doesn't make any difference from where I'm sitting. Bring in the most interested, passionate and skilled, don't just bribe people because of where there gonads are, because in the darkness of cyberspace we are all the same.