I’m jumping onto the meme a little bit late. I go offline for 24 hours and when I come back at least half of Planet GNOME has blue banners.

However, what disturbed me most about Stallman’s speech wasn’t the rabid rant against Mono and it wasn’t even the fact that he showed his incapability to understand the other side. What troubled me a lot more was his sexist attitude and his total lack of political correctness.

It’s easy to deal with Stallman’s opinion on Mono- you simply let the BoycottNovell group scream as loudly as they can and go about your own way without listening. However, the other issues are a lot harder to deal with: For many people, Stallman represents the open source community. Outsiders judge us based on what he says.

I was happy to see that at least one member of the GNOME Advisory Board stood up against it, and does seem like Stallman wont be invited to speak again in the future. However, why is it that no one else thought it worth their time to address the issue? Focusing on Mono might be more practical in the short term, but if we want to increase the number of women in open source software, it’s not enough to simply avoid echoing Stallman’s comments. We need to stand up and make it clear that this is something that wont be tolerated.

STOP sexism by Casey West. License:

I’m not young or naive enough to think that this is ever going to reach meme status, but I wont simply shut up and ignore it. Shame on you, Stallman.

I want the [...] open source [...] communities [I participate in] to be a dignified, respectful, inclusive, and welcoming place. … We’ve all been witnesses to off-color jokes, misogynistic back channel chatter, questionable imagery and unnecessary, trolling comments. I pledge to do better to stand up and call this behavior out when I see it in conferences, online and other public settings. I don’t expect it to go away but I’m not going to tacitly condone it any longer.

(From Nick via Luis via David)