3 years ago

Category: github

Advocates of open source inclusiveness felt sidelined this March when the Free Software Foundation (FSF) reelected Richard Stallman to its board of directors. And this week, the FSF doubled down on this controversial decision in a statement on the election of Stallman.

In this piece, we chronicle the response over the last three weeks of the tech community to this decision and talk about the very large steps the open source world still has to take to improve its governance, inclusion and openness.

There’s no disputing that the free and open source community, which remains significantly more predominantly white and male than the tech industry as a whole, continues to grapple with diversity, equity and inclusion problems, Add to this, while recessions see a boost in open source adoption, FOSS continues to have a retention problem, with DigitalOcean citing a 63% drop in participation in 2019 and another 47% sink in 2020.

She said, “We believe in the potential of open source, and seeing all the great strides that have been made in the technology industry because of open source, it’s too important to leave it to the Silicon Valley elite and malicious actors.”