Very frequently, we get asked "What have geek feminists ever contributed to open source" (... "except for whining about sexism" is the implicit, or quite often explicit, addition to that). We seldom dignify these questions with an answer, because they are generally not intended in a serious spirit of inquiry; if they were, we wouldn't get them so much from anonymous trolls. These questions are intended as a silencing tactic, and are not generally asked of non-feminists (even those whose activism far outweighs their contributions).
It's also worth noting that Geek Feminism is not specific to open source, and covers other fields such as the tech industry at large, science fiction fandom, gaming, skepticism, and other geek fields. The question of open source contribution is even less relevant to our contributors who aren't even in that field.
However, in the general spirit of decreasing the amount of ignorance in the world, as well as a reminder to ourselves when we're under attack, here is a list of things that Geek Feminists have contributed to open source.
When adding contributions, please only list Geek Feminism contributors (blog, wiki, etc); elsewhere on this wiki we have a more general page about FLOSS, a List of women in FLOSS and a List of women-dominated projects in FLOSS.
List of contributions to open source
- Valerie Aurora
- wrote the ChunkFS Linux file system architecture
- Mary Gardiner
- served on the papers committee for Linux.conf.au, one of the world's foremost open source conferences, for several years
- was the lead documentation author for Twisted
- Liz Henry
- bugmaster for Mozilla, and helps manage test plans for the Firefox browser
- founded Orange County Perl Mongers in 1998
- open source community manager for Socialtext and Socialcalc (precursor of Ethercalc)
- Alex Bayley
- founded Melbourne Perl Mongers in 1998
- wrote the perlintro manpage which is distributed with the language
- wrote the influential Perl module WWW::Automate, which formed the basis of WWW::Mechanize, used for screen-scraping and automated website testing
- leads the Growstuff project, an open source app to track planting and harvesting of home-grown food, and 3000 Acres, an open source project to help people find land to grow food
- Tim Chevalier
- worked on the compiler, library, and tools for the Rust programming language
- Sumana Harihareswara
- was Engineering community manager for the Wikimedia Foundation, running dev days worldwide and facilitating open source contributions to Mediawiki, and is now a technical writer for Wikimedia
- edited and wrote for the GNOME Journal and was Release Marketing Manager for the GNOME 3.0 release
- worked as project manager for open source software company Collabora
- Matt Zimmermann
- was technical leader of the Ubuntu project, chairman of the Ubuntu technical board and CTO of the project
- maintained the "apt" package management tool for Debian Linux
Award recipients
- Mary Gardiner received the Rusty Wrench award for services to the Australian Linux community in 2012
- Valerie Aurora received the O'Reilly Open Source Award for edication, innovation, leadership and outstanding contribution to open source in 2013