My Hero

After reading Larry’s post about contributions of women in open source, I was reminded of a great hero and inspiration to us all.  Grace “Amazing Grace” Hopper was both an early pioneer in the world of computing and an outstanding Naval officer, reaching the rank of Rear Admiral.  Realizing that FORTRAN and ASM were very cumbersome, she decided to make her own programming language.  This eventually became COBOL, a language still widely used today because of its power and simplicity.  Unlike more complicated languages (C, FORTRAN, GW-BASIC), COBOL has a syntax structure very similar to spoken English.  This advantage opened the door for many who would otherwise be intimidated by the more mechanical structures of other languages.

So…If any men try to tell you that no woman has made a significant contribution to the world of computing, remind them about Amazing Grace, our Amelia Earhart!

Introduction

I just thought I’d introduce myself. My name is Jessica Hartwell. I am a business major at a rather good university. I was introduced to Linux a couple years ago by my boyfriend (a computer science major) and I just love it. It not only looks pretty, but it’s so much more functional than Windows. My boyfriend is currently teaching me C, so I will be posting code snippets from my projects in this blog. I hope to one day contribute to the Ubuntu community that has given us so much to look forward to. 🙂

Contributions of women in open source

Much has been made of the contributions of women in the open-source community. There have been notable contributions to documentation, wiki formatting, graphic design, community organization, translation, enthusiasm and bureaucracy. However, there is a notable lack of any actual worthwhile contributions of open-source code.

Despite the large community of women who are enthusiastic and supportive of open development, there are almost no actual women developers who contribute anything worth mentioning to the community at large. There are no female Guidos, Linuses, Stallmans or Kernighans, there are only Django programmers like Leah Culver and “evangelists” such as Mena Trott (and they happen to work at the same place now).

I can’t paste this link enough:

• http://web.archive.org/web/20070504110113/www.leahculver.com/2007/04/19/star-ratings/
• http://web.archive.org/web/20070504110113/www.leahculver.com/2007/04/19/star-ratings/
• http://web.archive.org/web/20070504110113/www.leahculver.com/2007/04/19/star-ratings/

For every one hundred women claiming to “contribute” to open source projects, you will be hard-pressed to find even one with a respectable changelog. If you ask them what IDE they prefer they will respond with Visual Basic for MS Word or wikipedia. I am sorry but simply installing ubuntu because you are too poor to afford a mac or a legitimate copy of Windows does not make you a “contributor.” Buying a stuffed animal so that Mark Shuttleworth can get more coke for his stash on his yacht does not mean you are a valued member of the development community. Writing open-source code that performs a useful function is what we are about. Please get off the fucking wikis and pick up a K&R book.

Hi I have low self-esteem and use Freebsd, am I contributor?

Please note that I wrote this entire article without even mentioning Randi “Freebsd Tsarina” Harper.