Researchers and journalists have found a higher gender disparity and lower racial and ethnic diversity in the open-source-software movement than in the field of computing overall, though a higher proportion of sexual minorities and transgender people than in the general United States population. Despite growing an increasingly diverse user base since its emergence in the 1990s, the field of open-source software development has remained homogeneous, with young men constituting the vast majority of developers.
Open source software is a non-traditional model of software development where source code is created by a number of volunteers and can be modified by other members of the community. [1] The number of developers working on an open-source project can range from few to thousands, but in many projects only developers deemed trustworthy by the project maintainers will have the privilege of making additions to the main repository. [2] The software developed as open-source is usually freely available to use, with the number of users varying from few to many millions. [2]
Since its inception in the 1990s, as open-source software has continued to grow and offer new solutions to everyday problems, an increasingly diverse user base began to emerge. In contrast, the community of developers has remained homogeneous, dominated by young men. [3]
In 2017, GitHub conducted a survey named the Open Source Survey, collecting responses from 5,500 GitHub users. Among the respondents, 18% personally experienced a negative interaction while working on open-source projects, but 50% of them have witnessed such interactions between other people. Dismissive responses, conflict, and unwelcoming language were respectively the third, fourth, and sixth most cited problems encountered in open-source. [4]
Another study from 2017 examined 3 million pull requests from 334,578 GitHub users, identifying 312,909 of them as men and 21,510 as women from the mandatory gender field in the public Google+ profiles tied to the same email addresses as these users were using on GitHub. The authors of the study found code written by women to be accepted more often (78.6%) than code written by men (74.6%). However, among developers who were not insiders of the project, women's code acceptance rates were found to drop by 12.0% if gender was immediately identifiable by GitHub username or profile picture, with only a smaller 3.8% drop observed for men under the same conditions. Comparing their results to a meta-analysis of employment sex discrimination conducted in 2000, the authors observed that they have uncovered only a quarter of the effect found in typical studies of gender bias. The study concludes that gender bias, survivorship and self-selection bias, and women being held to higher performance standards are among plausible explanations of the results. [5]
The more recent entering of women into the movement has been suggested as the cause of their under-representation in the field; of all women who had contributed to open-source software up until 2013, 38.45% of them began doing so from 2009 to 2013, in comparison to only 18.75% of men. [6]
The gender ratio in open source is even greater than the field-wide gender disparity in computing. This was found by a number of surveys:
In an 2013 article for the NPR, journalist Gene Demby considered Black people and Latinos to be underrepresented in the open source software development. [12]
Among the respondents of GitHub's 2017 Open Source Survey 1% identified as transgender, 1% as non-binary, and 7% as lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, or another minority sexual orientation, [4] while according to a Gallup poll in conducted in the same year 4.1% of the United States population identify as LGBT. [13] [11] A 2018 survey of software developers conducted by Stack Overflow found that out of their sample of 100,000, 6.7% in total identified as one of "Bisexual or Queer" (4.3%), "Gay or Lesbian" (2.4%), and "Asexual" (1.9%), while 0.9% identified as "non-binary, genderqueer, or gender non-conforming". [14]
LinuxChix is a women-oriented Linux community founded in 1999 encouraging participation in Linux and open-source software by creating conflict-free and nurturing environments for women to do so. [15] [16] Open-source projects and organizations such as Arch Linux, Bitcoin, BonitaSoft, Debian , Drupal, Fedora , FreeNX, GNOME , KDE , Mozilla , PHP, Ubuntu have or had initiatives directed to women to support their participation. [17]
BitKeeper is a discontinued software tool for distributed revision control of computer source code. Originally developed as proprietary software by BitMover Inc., a privately held company based in Los Gatos, California, it was released as open-source software under the Apache-2.0 license on 9 May 2016. BitKeeper is no longer being developed.
Open-source software (OSS) is computer software that is released under a license in which the copyright holder grants users the rights to use, study, change, and distribute the software and its source code to anyone and for any purpose. Open-source software may be developed in a collaborative, public manner. Open-source software is a prominent example of open collaboration, meaning any capable user is able to participate online in development, making the number of possible contributors indefinite. The ability to examine the code facilitates public trust in the software.
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OpenSSL is a software library for applications that provide secure communications over computer networks against eavesdropping, and identify the party at the other end. It is widely used by Internet servers, including the majority of HTTPS websites.
Git is a distributed version control system that tracks versions of files. It is often used to control source code by programmers who are developing software collaboratively.
Poedit is a shareware and cross-platform gettext catalog editor to aid in the process of language localisation. According to WordPress developer Thord Hedengren, Poedit is "one of the most popular programs" for editing portable language files.
In software development, distributed version control is a form of version control in which the complete codebase, including its full history, is mirrored on every developer's computer. Compared to centralized version control, this enables automatic management branching and merging, speeds up most operations, improves the ability to work offline, and does not rely on a single location for backups. Git, the world's most popular version control system, is a distributed version control system.
GForge is a commercial service originally based on the Alexandria software behind SourceForge, a web-based project management and collaboration system which was licensed under the GPL. Open source versions of the GForge code were released from 2002 to 2009, at which point the company behind GForge focused on their proprietary service offering which provides project hosting, version control, code reviews, ticketing, release management, continuous integration and messaging. The FusionForge project emerged in 2009 to pull together open-source development efforts from the variety of software forks which had sprung up.
Mercurial is a distributed revision control tool for software developers. It is supported on Microsoft Windows, Linux, and other Unix-like systems, such as FreeBSD and macOS.
The history of free and open-source software begins at the advent of computer software in the early half of the 20th century. In the 1950s and 1960s, computer operating software and compilers were delivered as a part of hardware purchases without separate fees. At the time, source code—the human-readable form of software—was generally distributed with the software, providing the ability to fix bugs or add new functions. Universities were early adopters of computing technology. Many of the modifications developed by universities were openly shared, in keeping with the academic principles of sharing knowledge, and organizations sprung up to facilitate sharing.
GitHub is a developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git software, which provides distributed version control of access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous integration, and wikis for every project. Headquartered in California, it has been a subsidiary of Microsoft since 2018.
Virtaal is a computer-assisted translation tool written in the Python programming language. It is free software developed and maintained by Translate.org.za.
The open-source software movement is a social movement that supports the use of open-source licenses for some or all software, as part of the broader notion of open collaboration. The open-source movement was started to spread the concept/idea of open-source software.
translatewiki.net, formerly named Betawiki, is a web-based translation platform powered by the Translate extension for MediaWiki. It can be used to translate various kinds of texts but is commonly used for creating localisations for software interfaces.
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Visual Studio Code, commonly referred to as VS Code, is an integrated development environment developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, macOS and web browsers. Features include support for debugging, syntax highlighting, intelligent code completion, snippets, code refactoring, and embedded version control with Git. Users can change the theme, keyboard shortcuts, preferences, and install extensions that add functionality.
Coraline Ada Ehmke is an American software developer, open source advocate, and Founder and Executive Director of the Organization for Ethical Source, based in Chicago, Illinois. She began her career as a web developer in 1994 and has worked in a variety of industries, including engineering, consulting, education, advertising, healthcare, and software development infrastructure. She is known for her work in Ruby, and in 2016 earned the Ruby Hero award at RailsConf, a conference for Ruby on Rails developers. She is also known for her social justice work and activism, writing the Contributor Covenant and Post-Meritocracy Manifesto, and promoting the widespread adoption of codes of conduct for open source projects and communities.
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