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Mozilla Open Source

Self Serving Sausage Fest?

Does that title accurately describe open source? Via Valleywag I found this blog post from Psychology Today which I’d recommend reading. This is really the most interesting part:

First, there’s street cred: People want to garner approval from their peers and build their reputation. Second, there’s self-actualization: Working on these projects is enjoyable in and of itself, and it also provides the opportunities to practice your skills, collect feedback, and grow as a geek. Third, there’s pure altruism: Let’s save the world, one squashed bug or “[citation needed]” at a time.

Interesting stuff. I definitely fall in the “practice your skills, collect feedback, and grow as a geek” category.

Also noteworthy: 97.8 percent of open source programmers are male. Like there was any surprise that it’s somewhat of a sausage fest on #developers. Anyone ever check the ratio on about:credits? Come up with an automated way to do that’s licensed under MPL/GPL/LGPL and you’ll earn some serious street cred not to mention save the world and practice your text analysis skills.

I guess this is even more extreme than the Dave-to-Girl ratio.

2 replies on “Self Serving Sausage Fest?”

Anyone ever check the ratio on about:credits? Come up with an automated way to do

This isn’t possible, given just a list of names. Far too many names are ambiguous in the first place (“Chris”, for instance) or flip sexes in different countries (“Andrea”). And asking people to declare is a bit obnoxious.

– Chris

@Chris Cunningham: True, but you can get 2 numbers on each extreme.

The more advanced approach would be to datamine bugzilla, since virtually all names will be referenced in there somewhere, and look for a “he”, “she”… but that’s a much more complicated process since it requires much more understanding of grammar (though I recall a lib out there for that type of stuff).

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