women in open source: revisited

Tue, 30 Sep 2014 07:29:54 -0400

The other day, I posted some thoughts capturing a conversation that happened in the illumos community over the weekend. If you missed it, head over first to The illumos Number That Bothers Me.

The conversation can’t die there. We’ve got to take pro-active steps to better understand how we got into this gender monoculture in the first place, and be catalysts to the change we wish to see in our community. I’ve been looking around a bit since then and found a few resources that should hopefully help to get the ball rolling.

the illumos number that bothers me (and what we need to do about it)

Sun, 28 Sep 2014 07:44:15 -0400

I just got back late last night from Surge 2014 and illumos Day, which immediately followed Surge the next day. There were some great talks going on, which I’m sure I’ll also be writing about. But the first speaker in particular dropped something on me that’s bothering me, and it should bother pretty much anyone that hears it.

Garrett D’Amore, founder of the illumos project, crawled through all of the commits and made a really interesting discovery. This is a four year old project, and remains relatively obscure (though some very visible things have come out of it, like zfs). In those four years, about 150 unique contributors have committed code into illumos-gate, the shared core of the illumos ecosystem that distributions are built on. Now on the surface, this number sounds pretty wicked cool. illumos is a fairly unknown project, sadly, so to score commits from 150 engineers sounds like a really good thing. Or is it?

Womenintech on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

women in open source: revisited

the illumos number that bothers me (and what we need to do about it)