A feminist perspective on FLOSS development

Yuwei Lin Though taking a feminist perspective, I am not going to simplify the gender issue in FLOSS to the level of a fight between men and women. Staying away from reductionism, the issues I attempt to address include not only the inequality that women face in computing, but also other inequalities emerging from the power relationships between expert and lay users in software design. Instead of splitting women and men in FLOSS development, this analysis helps motivate both men and women to work together and improve the disadvantaged status of women in the FLOSS development. Introduction I found a hate email titled ‘Death to Women’s Rights’ on the [Debian-women] mailing list in the third week of June 2005. In this email, a male software developer expressed his hatred for women and claimed that they always complained about lack of opportunities for women in male-dominated fields. This certainly was not the first time for such a message to appear on the [Debian-women] mailing list. Messages looking for female mates, messages complaining about women liberty/rights/freedom movements appear more than often on the list. But this message reinforces the unfriendly environment women usually face in the on-line free/libre open source software (FLOSS) world. At the same time, hate e-mails should not be seen as a blanket representation of male attitudes in the FLOSS world. Fortunately, there are also quite a few sympathetic male software developers who are quite open towards mutual cooperation with their female counterparts. In order to not succumb to the stereotypical gender debates when it comes to the issue of FLOSS development, we need to go beyond the numbers that depict the current levels of women’s participation in the generation of free software. It is a well-known fact, that the number of female software developers remains low. The right question to be asked is why and what can be done to create a more welcoming environment for women to join the FLOSS development and also come up with a better way of encouraging both sexes to collaborate with each other. This paper will elucidate on how FLOSS can make a difference in today’s information society, and present some successful examples of implementing FLOSS in developing countries. The paper will further attempt to deconstruct the myth about programming skills and discuss ways to increase female membership in the FLOSS world. How can FLOSS make a difference? FLOSS allows users to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve softwares. The essential element of FLOSS is ‘freedom’. The cheaper cost of purchasing/ acquiring (and the very often misunderstood ‘gratis’) such software is just a fringe element. FLOSS is a matter of ‘liberty’, not ‘price’. Once the source code is available to the public, interested users or developers can study and understand how the software is written, and if competent, they can change and improve upon it as well. In other words, apart from serving as an alternative choice for consumers, FLOSS helps open up the black box of software technologies, facilitate the practice of participatory design, and provide an opportunity for breaking down the hierarchy of professional knowledge. This could further lead to improved security and usability because users can configure the software to fulfill their local requirements and secure it against vandalism, user errors and virus attacks. Due to these opportunities, FLOSS has been adopted and implemented in several developing countries and rural areas. Several European governments and companies have also gradually switched from costly operating systems made by companies like Microsoft to FLOSS-based operating systems, like Linux for example, Munich, Barcelona, Bergen, Paris, and Deutsch Bahn. (Blau 2004; IBNNews 2004; Kerner 2004; ZDNet UK 2004; McCarthy 2005). Believing that FLOSS serves as a better technological tool to bridge the digital divide, Brazil, for example, has also made it mandatory for any company or research institute that receives government grants for software development, to license it as opensource, meaning the underlying software code must be free to all (Benson 2005). In this age of localisation and customisation, a group of volunteers in India has started the IndLinux1 project to create a Linux distribution that supports Indian languages at all levels. The Simputer2, a low cost portable alternative to PCs, has spread the benefits of ICTs among the common people in India. These examples are just a few out of the many ongoing projects around the world. They demonstrate that FLOSS provides a better platform for wider access and more effective usage, and also offers the potential for long-term growth and development as compared to scaled-down versions of proprietary software. The myth of programming skill and knowledge However, such FLOSS-based technologies have not yet engaged with a diverse range of people. So far, the freedom of FLOSS seems to be enjoyed only by those who are capable of manipulating these technologies. We see imbalanced population distributions in FLOSS knowledge-based demography, and unbalanced gender distribution figures at the top. We observe a strong programming culture in FLOSS development and implementation these days- if one does not programme, he/she seems to be left out of the FLOSS movement. In other words, instead of breaking down the hierarchy of professional knowledge, a new boundary and barrier of accessing ICT knowledge seems to be established. Abbreviations such as RTFSC (Read The Fine Source Code) or ‘RTFM’ (Read The Fine Manual) demonstrate how strong this hegemony of software knowledge is. This worship of programming knowledge is the point I would like to strengthen here as a primary cause of gender inequality in FLOSS, along with other reasons (see Henson 2002; Lin 2006). To be involved in the FLOSS development, one need not be a programmer (see Rye 2004); one could write documentation, report or trace bugs, improve graphic or text content, translate, submit feature-requests, or teach others how to use FLOSS. These activities are equally important to programming in the software innovation process because software is not ready to use just as it is written. It needs many efforts to make it user-friendly, implement it in different contexts, and to maintain it overtime. To make FLOSS successful, we need not only a Richard Stallman or a Linus Torvalds, but also a large number of volunteers for reporting and fixing bugs, writing documentation, and more importantly, teaching users how to operate OpenOffice.org and the Mozilla Firefox browser. When thinking of an approach of including more women and improving the representation of women in FLOSS, these activities should be considered as essential. The claim that there is a need to encourage more women in programming does not imply a lack of competence on their part. Not at all! There is no genuine biological difference between men and women programmers. It is just that given the history, and the cultural and educational backgrounds, not many women currently have exposure to software programming, and thus we need an alternative way of including women in FLOSS. These efforts are key to allowing more people (regardless of gender, class, race and disability) to participate in the FLOSS movement. While some people try to degrade the skill of writing documentation, an experienced female FLOSS user, Patricia, emphasised the importance and challenge of writing documentation on the Debian-women mailing list, claiming that: Documentation can be a means of quality insurance, and this power is far too seldom used. The people, who write the best code I know, write documentation alongside or even before coding. The code has to follow documentation, otherwise it’s a bug. Documentation and code are never allowed to get out of sync. This means documentation is an integral part of software development, not just something subordinate. In a scenario like this, documentation and usability are not just nice-to-have but an inherent part of development and equally important as writing code. It finally leads you to better software, to software that is aware of its users and tasks and not just aware of how things are easiest, smartest to implement. But it requires a paradigm shift. Coders are no longer allowed to see documentation as a nasty add on, as something subordinate and documentation people don’t simply have to follow the software they get but are allowed and required to intervene. Software isn’t released as long as the people who document don’t give it a go. Patricia’s message demonstrates that coding is neither the only nor the foremost activity in the FLOSS innovation process. Programmers do not play a more important role than other contributors in the FLOSS development. The FLOSS community is comprised of diverse people from different social worlds, and each member should gain equal respect for what they do. FLOSS might not be spread wide enough without people writing documentation, reporting bugs and mentoring. The value of the FLOSS development is embedded and embodied not only in coding and the resulting code, but also in its built-in process of collaboration. FLOSS offers us a chance to observe the co-construction of social and technical activities in a socio-technical innovation process. Through a feminist perspective, the socio-technical complexity in the FLOSS community can be observed more deliberately in the power relationships: the haves and have-nots in programming. Strengthening this gap would transpose the problem to all the members involved (regardless of gender, race, class, and disability) in the FLOSS movement, moving away from the traditionally gender based segregations. This would also serve to clarify the myth of feminism: feminism cares not only about the inequality between the genders, but it seeks to address all inequalities in the society. Examples As explained earlier, FLOSS has the potential of being an able platform for both men and women and expert and lay users; for developing and implementing software together. But realising this potential asks for more conscious efforts to be made. Many women-led FLOSS groups have been tackling the knowledge gap between expert and lay (not just men and women) users and challenging the ‘masculine’ culture in the FLOSS community. I will introduce three groups here. LinuxChix LinuxChix3 is a community for women who like Linux and for those interested in other aspects of computing as well. The membership ranges from novices to experienced users, and includes professional and amateur programmers, system administrators and technical writers. It aims at creating a more hospitable community in which people can discuss Linux, a community that encourages participation, that doesn’t allow the quieter voices to be drowned amidst the more vocal members. Presently, LinuxChix has several branches around the world including LinuxChix Brazil4 and LinuxChix Africa5. Debian-Women The Debian-Women6 project was initiated in May 2004. It seeks to balance and diversify the Debian7 Project by actively engaging with interested women and encouraging them to become more involved with Debian (an operating system). Debian-women promotes female involvement in Debian by increasing the visibility of active women, providing mentoring , and creating opportunities for collaboration with new and current members of the Debian Project. Both male and female members are welcome. Presently, the Debian-women is running a mailing list for the discussion of related issues, along with an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel. Debian members also organise discussions at Linux conferences, to promote the discussion of the issues facing women programmers. Women’s Information Technology Transfer (WITT) Women’s Information Technology Transfer 8 (WITT) is a portal that links women’s organisations and feminist advocates for the Internet in Eastern and Central Europe. It aims to provide strategic ICT information to all, and supporting, in a collective manner, Central and Eastern European women in using the web as an instrument in their social activism. WITT is committed to bringing women’s actions, activities and struggles into the spotlight, promoting the use of free software as a way to highlight women’s voices. Women members can publish on the website in their own language. Eight languages are available to be used and more will be added as the site develops. Conclusion The features of FLOSS have the potential to challenge the power equations of the society: between experts and lay users, developed and developing countries, rich and poor etc. Features like low development cost, modularised characteristics, transparent information are particularly celebrated in a knowledge-based society. Even though FLOSS is re/presented as a weapon to fight against proprietary software companies such as Microsoft, its current set-up suffers from several inherent biases that restrict the creation of equal opportunities for all. The women-led FLOSS groups facilitate networking amongst members’ participants and help maintain a pool of women who will not only promote ICT use but also promote a feminist analysis of ICT use. Today, when we criticise the level of women participation in the FLOSS social world, we must not forget that a feminist critique not only applies to the gender issues but challenges all kinds of power inequalities in the world. It is time for the likes of us to question the assumed hegemony of programming and designing skills that overlooks the requirements of having user-friendly technologies. It is exactly such misconceptions about the coding skills, as elucidated upon in the paper, that create an imbalance in the composition and structure of FLOSS system. End Notes 1http://www.indlinux.org 2 http://www.simputer.org 3 http://www.linuxchix.org 4 http://www.linuxchix.org.br/ 5 http://www.africalinuxchix.org/ 6 http://www.debianwomen.org 7 http://www.debian.org 8 http://www.wittproject.net/ References Benson, T. 2005. “BRAZIL: Free Software’s Biggest and Best Friend”. The New York Times, 29 March, 2005. Blau, J. 2004. “Munich Makes the Move to Linux”. IDG News Service, 18 June, 2004. URL (consulted on 18 June 2005) http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/ 0,aid,116568,00.asp Henson, V. 2002. “How To Encourage Women in Linux”, URL (consulted on 18 June 2005) http://www.tldp.org/ HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/index.html IBNNews. 2004. “Barcelona cambia al software libre”, 21 July 2004. URL (consulted on 18 June 2005) http:// iblnews.com/news/noticia.php3?id=111924 Kerner, S. M. 2004. “Big Strides For Civic Linux”, Enterprise 17 June, 2004. URL (consulted on 18 June 2005) http://internetnews.com/ent-news/ article.php/3369931 Lin, Y.-W. 2006. “Gender issues in the Free/Libre Open Source Software Development”, In the book edited by E. M. Trauth Encyclopedia of Gender and Information Technology. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Inc. McCarthy, K. 2005. “World’s largest Linux migration gets major boost”. PC Advisor, 03 February 2005. URL (consulted on 18 June 2005) http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/ index.cfm?go=news.view&news=4514 Rye, J. B. 2004. “I am not a programmer” (IANAP – JBR Disclaimer). URL (consulted on 18 June 2005) http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/linux/ianap.html ZDNet UK. 2004. ‘”Norway’s second city embraces Linux”, 15 June, 2004. URL (consulted on 18 June 2005) http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39157677,00.htm Author: Yuwei Lin is a Research Fellow in the Department of Information Systems, Marketing and Logistics at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

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