Over at Linux Magazine,
Bruce Byfield wrote quite reasonably about the abuse he received for taking a pro-feminist line in discussing sexism in the FOSS community. Among the comments is one from somebody calling himself "MikeeUSA" which includes this choice paragraph:
Nina Reiser chose to become an enemy of Hans Reiser, one of the Men of the Free Software Movement. She committed adultery against him with his best friend, then she divorced him and stole his children (whom he loved), then she went after his meager wealth (most of which he had been using to fund opensource development so that we all might benifit), then after doing all this she visited him (perhaps to articulate legal threats to him and demand payment)... that was too much for him to stand there and do nothing. Now we are less one great developer and contributor to the opensource movement: he doesn't get to code while in prison, nor can he allocate monies towards developer's salaries (because he has none: prison doesn't pay well).
Just in case you've been living under a rock,
Hans Reiser is in prison for murdering Nina. What sort of idiot do you have to be to blame the victim for their own murder? This is the equivalent of blaming Nicole Brown Simpson for depriving show business of a great actor.
Read the whole thing if you want to be amazed, shocked, possibly distressed.
Now what does this have to do with Postgres? Nothing much, except that Postgres is a FOSS project, and I for one am acutely aware of the imbalance of genders in our community, and wish it were otherwise. Count me among the Bruce Byfields and not among the MikeeUSAs.
As far as I am concerned, people like MikeeUSA need to crawl under a rock and stay there. If I found such a person in our community, I'd be inclined to make their life so uncomfortable that they left. We don't need bigots and sexists, and we do need far more women. And we need more people to say so.
