[nycbug-talk] Re: Women in Open Source (fwd)

[Marc Spitzer]

On Mon, 02 Aug 2004 20:30:58 -0400 (EDT)
Dru <dlavigne6 at sympatico.ca> wrote:

> 
> A few months ago, I was asked to partake in an email survey, the
> results of which are to be officially published tomorrow (and later in
> a print magazine) at:
> 
> http://pyre.third-bit.com/wios/
> 
> My final feedback to the surveyor (and their response) follows.
> Personally, I find the results alarming and am interested in hearing
> the perspective from the group.
> 
> While it won't come out in the article, it did bring up another slant
> that should be pursued (though I don't know how yet...) The uninformed
> perception re: open source and geekdom seems to be unfairly tainted by
> slashdot moronics and programmer tantrums. I've found the perception
> of BSD to be far more mature. Sounds like some sort of opportunity
> here.

One of my opinions on BSD vs Linux mindset is as follows:

BSD is old school, aka MIT AI koans.  Where the student is trying to
impress the *Professor*.  So the reward, recognition, comes from
thinking about hard problems and then implementing the solution.  The 
fact that you wrote lots of code is besides the point, its a given.

Linux is new school.  The students are trying to impress the other
students. And these people are not yet wise enough to realize that
coding is all things considered the easy bit.  This leads to the
fascination with reimplementing the designs of others, instead of
writing 1/5 the code and spending 10X the effort to do something NEW.

> 
> Comments?

>From the subject I thought you were selling a calender.

marc