

GitHub Graciously Helps Female Programmers Cower In Fear - glazemaster
http://www.thepowerbase.com/2013/04/github-graciously-helps-female-programmers-cower-in-fear/

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msy
Github is providing a space where women can store code they're working on and
get feedback from select peers before releasing it publicly and they're being
vilified for it? This is absurd, I've done exactly this with every piece of
code I've ever released and I know many other devs who do the same, most OSS
projects do so at some point in their lifetimes.

Github providing a private repo for free simply lowers the bar to getting
started a little further and that can only be a good thing. Against the
principles of open source? What the hell does that even mean.

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MetaCosm
They are getting vilified for two reasons.

#1. It implies women are delicate breakable flowers who can't take any
criticism.

#2. It implies men are tough and not delicate and don't need this protection.

Both of those things are judging people only by their gender and ridiculous.

EDIT: Also, creating an anonymous github account is easy, and use the name Pat
Smith. Let there be a million Pat Smiths... then you won't be judged by your
gender, just your work.

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samatman
For any male software developers who may be feeling left out, bitbucket
provides unlimited private repositories for free.

The headline strikes me as inflammatory. The move by GitHub is a bit like
slapping a tar baby in the current sociopolitical environment, and is most
likely going to lead to GitHub offering a limited number of private repos to
all accounts.

Which would be a net win, unless it affects GitHub's financial viability,
which I doubt it would.

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potatolicious
Hurray, yet another snarky headline that borders on the edge of slander.

Can we, like, have a _conversation_ about issues like this instead of leaping
for the linguistic equivalent of a bunker buster? There are real people behind
Github trying to do good, verbally lynching them does no one any good.

I'm so very sick and tired of how this community cannot disagree with one
another without practically eviscerating each others' entrails.

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nsmartt
Offering women free public repositories will expose more women to the open-
source community. The idea is, of course, that they will slowly become more
comfortable with the community and begin to open their work.

This could go either way, but I suspect this idea is correct. IMO, this was a
good move by GitHub.

~~~
krapp
The idea may or may not have been correct, but it seems to me the
implementation also reinforces negative stereotypes about women. The Ada
initiative blog is quoted as saying that fear is a real impediment to women
approaching the open source community, so this probably will help. But it also
implies that female coders as a group have a reason to be ashamed of the
quality of their work, and that they don't _really_ belong in the community.

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krapp
Why not just offer one free private repository per account to everybody?

It would 'solve' the same problem this attempts to, without the attached
stigma, _plus_ it would keep a lot of people from moving to bitbucket just to
have a private repo.

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thera
I don't understand this - doesn't github already provide unlimited _public_
repos? Can't someone (female or male or anything else) create a new,
anonymous, account for stuff they are shy about sharing with the world? Then
no one can know it is them, or what the account owner's gender is, etc.?

And if at some point they feel more comfortable, they can rewrite git history
and change the authors in their commits, and push that to their official repo
if they so choose?

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cheez
So if I am a woman I am supposed to be free from harsh criticism? Isn't this
the OPPOSITE of feminism???

~~~
wmf
People saw that public harsh criticism doesn't work, so now they're trying
something different even though they know it isn't "right".

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lake99
I already use bitbucket for that. But if I felt compelled to use this feature
on GitHub, without paying their monthly fee, there's not much preventing me
from pretending to be female.

~~~
krapp
Which brings up the question of who is going to do gender validation, and how?

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general_failure
The underlying premise of the article (about women wanting to hide their code
in fear) is pure garbage.

TG;DR (Total garbage; didn't read)

