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Women, Feminism and Free Software
As many people, I came into the technology world by chance. I was granted
access to technological tools, but I was unaware of the multiple existing
alternatives. When I learnt the open software philosophy, I immediately fell
in love and I understood the importance of using technology which promotes
knowledge, access to information and freedom of use; a technology
with coherence with justice and social equity. Only one point disturbed me:
why aren’t women appropriate for this kind of technology?
In the current society of information and knowledge, the technology plays a
key role, as it’s the way the information is broadcasted, opinion is created
and individual and collective thinking is formed. However, this technology is
not neutral and it’s dominated by masculine parameters that pretend women
to adapt to them, without taking into consideration that their configuration
corresponds to a masculine symbolic world.
Because of this, there’s a need to think and question ourselves: Is there a
need of a gender perspective in the ICT world? Are technologies neutral in
gender matters? Does it exist a gender digital divide? If it exists, how
should it be taken into account? I have tried to answer these questions
through the analysis of cyberfeminist tendencies and uses, feminist and
woman inclusion in open technology communities’ hacktivists.
Feminism and Open Source Software
When talking about Communication and Information Technologies (CTI),
the main reference is a computer and Internet a small part of this big technological
world. The computer has become a primary tool in the current
society, but only people with some technical and engineering background
understand the structure of this type of machines and the required programs
to make them work. Most people know very little about the existing
variety of operation systems to make these computers work and the political
framework where these software are placed.
Around the operation systems, there are two totally opposed technological
models. The first one is the proprietary software managed by big corporations
which restrict the access to the information (souce code) of how that
software was built. The main goal of the software development is its commercialization.
The other model is the open source software promoted by
hundreds of people, companies, hackers and programmers worldwide,
which allow to access to the information of how it was built, to modify it
without restrictions and to freely distribute it.
Proprietary software generates technology dependence and turns us into
technology passive users. We simply cannot go beyond what it is allowed