Unacceptable behaviour

gwright@kde.org (George Wright) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 22:38:00 +0100

I’m not usually one for jumping on flamewar bandwagons, but after seeing this, I felt I had to say something.

After having skim read the comments (there are a lot and most of them repeat each other), I did notice one disturbing thing; the people backing up the original post tend to be male, and the people objecting to the image are female. Or at least, that’s what I can muster from the usernames.

This is a horrendous rift in the community. There’s a big debate taking place on the original post’s comments section which basically involves two disjoint arguments, but I think that the majority of them are missing the point entirely.

Most of the supporters are simply pointing out that it’s legally fine, whereas the opposers are pointing out that morally it’s unacceptable. In the end, neither of these matter because whether you feel it’s acceptable or legal or not, this is pushing women away from the open source community and the comments in the post reflect this. If you don’t believe me, ask a few women how they feel about the post and I’m sure you’ll find the majority will find it offensive.

I’m not going to get involved with giving my opinion on the picture or the surrounding text as, quite frankly, the opinion isn’t what matters. How we perceive it is irrelevant; how the rest of the world perceives it is what really matters, and being a public blog that represents the community, this matters to us as a whole.

George Wright's Blog: Category Rants

Unacceptable behaviour