[Apologies for the initial bounce - I'd forgotten I'd unsubscribed while
travelling!]
Copyleftmedia News
www.copyleftmedia.org.uk/news.htm
The GIMP And Sex
(Seriously...)
Some months ago I was encouraged by Richard M. Stallman to join the
GIMP-devel, among other Free Software developer's mailing lists, to
contribute and comment on its usability and functionality from a
professional graphic designer's point of view. I also wrote an article
for Linux User and Developer magazine (www.linuxuser.co.uk) around the
same time, commending both the GIMP and Inkscape highly. Initially I was
welcomed to the discussion, but when I objected to the posting of a
half-naked female body to demonstrate a bug when any other photo could
have substituted, I was chastised like a child, accused of 'policing the
mailing list' and called a 'religious freak', among other names, by the
list admin, when my request was perfectly reasonable and was met with
reasonable discussion and eventually dropped by other list members. It
is noteworthy that the only other female developer on the list does not
download binaries and asked me to send her a link to the photographs. An
article follows on the 'little boys clubs' that F/OSS development lists
seem to degenerate into - or even 'little girls clubs' in the case of
Linuxchix, a list which I briefly joined, and left due to its exclusion
of and chastisement of men.
The final straw which lead me to publicise what could be considered a
minor issue was the list-admin's accusation that my contributions as a
writer and tester were of far less value than that of a coder. This was
in stark contrast to my initially warm welcome to the list a year ago,
and to the more mature attitude of Bryce Harrington's Inkscape team,
whom I shall be rejoining and supporting. It seems a little maturity is
needed in the Free Software community - Harrington certainly separates
the boys from the men in this regard. The Inkscape project has the
potential to far supersede the once-famous GIMP even if only due to its
versatility, and the attitude of those on-list has always been welcoming
to testers of usability and interface design - an area of considerable
importance if one is to attract users of Adobe and Macromedia packages
towards Free Software.
The Madonna Remix Project Lives On
A couple of new remixes have been posted to the News page, one by Torben
Müller, and another site (unrelated to the project) by Marcin Dolecki.
Regards,
mC~
-- "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." -Voltaire ~ www.iriXx.org ~ www.copyleftmedia.org.uk ~Received on Tue Jan 3 04:15:07 2006
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