society

There’ve been a lot of posts on various blogs recently about the problem of discrimination in the Free Software community—especially sexism (geeks in general seem to have little tolerance for discrimination in most areas, but sexism often appears to be a special case). (I’ll link to the posts I know about at the end of this one.)

My personal stance is that, other than a few biological differences (a few between men and women, a few between younger and older people, more obvious ones between able and disabled people) that need to be accounted for, there’s no difference between people; treating people differently because of their appearance, gender, or anything else is (in most but not all cases) silly. Even those few differences should be accounted for on a case-by-case basis—just because men are generally more suited to physical labour than women doesn’t mean that all men are more suited than all women.

Hopefully in future I’ll be more active in discouraging discrimination, rather than just not discriminating myself.

Lisa can certainly write about this better than I can; maybe she will do once her workload decreases.

Links

• Melissa Draper—Open Letter to the Open Source Community
• Jono Bacon
• Richard Johnson
• Mark Van den Borre
• Danial Robitaille

Starbucks have signed Paul McCartney to their music label. Actually, I don’t know whether this is reason to hate Starbucks (for supporting McCartney) or to hate McCartney (for supporting Starbucks), so I’ll go with both.

In other news, Elton John has been fighting for gay rights, telling the Australian Prime Minister “Up yours!” after the federal government overturned a law legalising gay marriage (or civil unions) in the Australian Capital Territory. He also claims that “organised religion lacks compassion and turns people into hateful lemmings”.