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Debian Women

Following a brief thirty minute interlude that passed for dinner hour, BOF sessions began for the evening. Among those that I attended was one entitled "Debian Women: Encouraging Women Without Segregation" hosted by Felipe Augusto van de Wiel (not a woman, incidentally).

The Debian-Women project started around DebConf 4 following a Debian Project Leader (DPL) election debate question around how the DPL hopefuls would handle attracting more women to the Debian project. The question enticed a lengthly mailing list debate, as nearly anything in Debian can, at the end of which a new group was born called Debian-Women, with its own website by the same name.

Some research into open source projects found that the highest percentage of women in a major project appeared to be about 1.6%. At the time of the start of the Debian-Women project there were just 3 female Debian developers, but in the year since there have been 10 added to the New Maintainer Queue (NMQ, in Debian lingo).

Van de Wiel made the point repeatedly through the session that the Debian-Women project is inclusive of men and not an exclusive club. Their list and IRC channel provides a good place for people seeking help to get it, regardless of gender.

The Debian-Women project's goal is to encourage and educate the Debian community on the topic of equality and encourage women to volunteer in the free software community.

The project is seeking to help show off the accomplishments of its members, with its profiles website and is offering information on how to get involved through its involvement site.

Van de Wiel explained that he was running the session rather than one of the Debian women as many of them are currently at DebConf 5 in Helsinki, Finland and could not attend OLS this year.

The discussion touched on a recent flap at Debian over a package called hotbabe, which featured an animated woman taking off a percentage of her clothes based on the activity of the system's CPU, until, at 100%, she was completely naked. Some complained that there was no option to have the virtual stripper be male and after a lengthly flame-war on the Debian mailing lists, the project was eventually dropped as not providing anything new that Debian needed to the Debian project.

The point of this discussion though was the lack of awareness of males in the community to the sensitivities of the women around us. These actions don't serve to encourage female participation in the development process.

An issue in a similar vein to this one is the issue that a good deal of documentation in Debian refers to hypothetical developers as a male, rather than in a gender-neutral sense, further adding to the implicit bias found in the development community.

Van de Wiel went on to discuss some of the things women in Debian are now doing, including working on translations into 8 languages for the project's own website and the assistance being provided to Debian Weekly News.

Outside of Malaysia, where it was pointed out around 70% of IT workers are female, there is a general cultural bias in favour of males in the field. One attendee noted that a recent study in the US found that American families typically spend four times more on their male children as their female children on IT-related investment.

Another point made is that guys tend to enjoy studying Linux in their free time, perhaps instead of their homework, while women tend to follow their curriculum more precisely and thus are more likely to be familiar with a dominant platform.

Ultimately, more can be done to encourage more female developers to join the community, as they are certainly out there.

GOSLING/Canadian copyright

The final session I attended on Friday was a BOF session led by Russell McOrmond on the topic of Canadian copyright law, entitled simply "GOSLING/Canadian copyright update".

GOSLING stands for "Get Open Source Logic Into Governments".

To start, McOrmond suggested Canadians in the room who have not yet done so sign a petition on the topic of copyright law in Canada asking the Canadian government not to damage copyrights with a law they are proposing. He suggested that if MPs receive signatures on a petition on an issue like this, they may realise that there are actually Canadians who care about these issues other than the business people who stand to profit from them.

Bill C-60, currently before the House, would cause the author of software to be legally liable for copyright violations carried out with the help of the software they have written. It would give copyright ownership to people who take pictures, regardless of the circumstances, including giving the copyright of a picture of tourists taken by a friendly passer-by being handed a camera to that passer-by. Photos contracted to be taken would remain under the copyright of the photographer who took them. The act to amend the copyright act, bill C-60 is 30 pages, translated, and amends the 80-page Canadian Copyright Act currently in effect.

McOrmond noted that IBM has a lawyer in Canada named Peter K. Wang actively fighting at the Canadian government for software patents in this country. He suggested that an internal debate needs to take place at IBM about whether or not they actually support software patents, especially as some IBM employees at the conference had earlier expressed their displeasure with the concept.

McOrmond referred to several URLs people interested in the copyright issue in Canada should refer to: flora.ca/A246, goslingcommunity.org, www.cippic.ca, www.creativecommons.ca, www.forumonpublicdomain.ca, www.efc.ca, www.digitalsecurity.ca, and www.softwareinnovation.ca. Some American sites that deal with similar issues he listed are: www.eff.org, www.ffii.org, www.centerpd.org, and www.pubpat.org.

A point McOrmond made a number of times is that Canadian copyright law is being influenced by a large subset of business-people in the copyright-concerned community who would prefer that the Internet not exist. But with the Internet clearly here to stay, we should be working on ways to deal with copyright in a way that is beneficial to as many Canadians as possible, not just a few.

The province of Quebec has long been a stronger defender of its culture than most of the rest of Canada and McOrmond suggested it would be beneficial to the case of killing bill C-60 if the province of Quebec and its dominant party in the Canadian parliament, the Bloc Québecois if they realised that the choices they are facing is between the copyright system we know and the one we see in the United States. Quebec is usually the first to act on this kind of thing and it may need to before the rest of the country catches on.

A caution McOrmond had for the library community in Canada is that asking for copyright exemptions for certain circumstances hurts everyone more than it helps the libraries. As one example, allowing libraries to exchange copyrighted information electronically as long as the information self-destructs after a set amount of time would require running on a platform that would enforce that self-destruction, and likely lock the library system into a version of Windows capable of the task.

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