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I hate to start a post with hate. Sometimes it's got to be done because it's the background we work against, but here's some hope beyond the hate. Many women who work on open source software have been the target of hateful threatening emails and comments by a guy calling himself MikeeUSA over the past five years. Last week his software code was thrown off a large open source code archive, Sourceforge. He cried censorship and said his creative work had been destroyed. Meanwhile, a group of women associated with geekfeminism.org obtained copies of his code, edited it to take out the misogynist statements, and republished it.
We did more than that though, we added ponies. Personally, I made quite a lot of his game maps hot pink, also replacing some dull graphics with Creative Commons licensed images of toy ponies.
The "creative work" itself was very bad, barely functional code, and was mostly to generate extra maps for a game called Crossfire. It was laughable. You can look at some of the ongoing changes to the code here in our public repository. It had fairly random exhortations like "Death to Women's Rights" and anti-feminist ranting. In short, it was stupid and yet not anything I'd call the FBI over.
MikeeUSA's writing elsewhere has called for men's rights to rape women and girls to assert their property rights over them. He also has called for other men to go out with automatic weapons, assassinate political figures, and massacre random women at "women's shelters or rape crisis centers". As I read through his more vile rantings I did end up feeling that it was crucial to notify the FBI tip line that he is a possible danger to people around him.
Over the weekend as this unfolded, there was interesting tension brewing between people who wanted to defend extreme cases of free speech, and people like Beth Lynn who want to exclude hate speech from our professional lives and from open source developer communities.
Because of the GPL license, once we had the code in our hands, we could legally copy it, modify it, and re-publish it as long as others in future are also free to copy, modify, and use it. So that's what we did. Basically, we treated the hate speech like it was a software bug.
That was an elegant way to address a nasty situation brewing - likely not a great way to defuse MikeeUSA, who needs serious help, but definitely a good way to demonstrate we are part of the FLOSS world and here to stay, following in the footsteps of all the others who have been pointing out this jerk's activities and resisting him despite scary threats.
If you've been in that kind of situation, you may know what it's like to think over your commitment to public speech and resistance, and to continually evaluate what risk you and your associates or family may face. It is very helpful to have support. There are so many of us to get each other's backs now. It feels to me that we are continuing to decentralize as a movement and at the same time are more visible to each other.
Meanwhile in other blogs by women in open source and free software:
* Several women from the Free Software Foundation gathered for a summit on women working in free software. Fantastic! Here's their minutes on the Women's Caucus meeting.
* Hilary Pike and Diane Curtis blogged about the Systers code sprint at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.
* The entire Grace Hopper Conference Blog is fantastic and inspiring! I'm resolving to go to this conference for women in computing, next year no matter what. Recent conference reports: Motivación e Inspiración: Latinas en GHC09 by Natalia Villanueva-Rosales, and Cross-Cultural Communication Challenges Faced by Women in Computing and The Fight or Flight Moment: Understanding Why We Leave or Stay in Industry by Barbora Dej.
* Clara Raubertas blogged beautifully about Software Freedom Day.
* Adria Richards videoblogs about Blogalicious with description of the Saturday keynote on marketing and women of color who blog, on blogging conferences in general, and finally the last couple of minutes she advises all of us who blog to go to blogging conferences and dive into learning about our blog software!
* Sarah Allen onUltrasaurus reports back from the Berkman
