A Linux for women?

That's what they're talking about. Pro and con.

In case you didn't guess, the "pro" viewpoint is from a man (Bruce Byfield), the con from a woman (Tina Gasperson).

He says:

As I see it, the benefit of a woman's distro would be largely for the participants. It would be a place where women could learn how to package software or test a distribution for quality without having fear of being derided or distracted from the task at hand by the irrelevancies of gender or mistimed expressions of attraction.

I'm not a great believer in the idea that women are less aggressive than or interact differently from men. Yet even I have to admit that most of the regulars on free software mailing lists for women are politer and more supportive than the average poster on general lists. Perhaps a women's distro might develop forms of governance that are as democratic as Debian's, but less outspoken or rude. Possibly, too, their supportiveness would lead to more emphasis on documentation and the user experience. Just possibly, a women's distro could teach the rest of the community a thing or two about organization.

She says:

What would we include in this distro? Pink butterfly themes? Shopping calculators? Does that sound insulting? It should. So I ask again, what exactly would we include in a female version of Linux? The longer you think about this, the more ridiculous it sounds.

...

The fact is that most women I know outside of the IT industry are more tech-savvy than the men in their lives. They are the ones who have embraced the Internet and the gadgets that accompany it. They are the ones who communicate mostly by email, and their husbands and boyfriends and fathers and brothers are still stuck on the phone and can't boot the computer without someone holding their hand. According to Nielsen, women make up the majority of Internet users, and they spend a lot more money on technology than men do. Just because most of them do not choose to make a living at it doesn't mean that women are somehow lacking in the ability to understand and absorb the concept of technology.

Creating a special Linux distribution as though it were a delightful surprise that we can use Linux at all is not going to help our image. Special Linuxes are for people with USB keys and religious sensibilities. We women are doing just fine, thanks.

Expect more opinions to make themselves know in the blogosphere in the next few days.