On September 19th, the GNOME Foundation and the Free Software Foundation will host a mini-summit on how to increase women’s participation in the free and open source software (FOSS) communities. The summit is probably an effort to repair relationships between the two foundations after Richard Stallman was pilloried for sexism after his keynote in Gran Canaria a couple of months ago.
However, regardless of its reasons, the summit represents one of the first official recognitions of an open secret: sexism is systemic in FOSS, and has been for years.
Of course, that is not what the official mythology says. Officially, the FOSS community is a meritocracy, where characteristics like gender don’t matter, and everybody is judged only on their contributions…
