UPDATED Women in open source often harassed, says Docker DevOps guy

Open source not a meritocracy, he claims

Jérôme Petazzoni clarifies his comments to Computing.

UPDATED 10 JULY. This story has been updated after Jérôme Petazzoni contacted Computing to clarify comments he made at Cloud Week in Paris.

Open source development is not a meritocracy, and women "holding prominent, visible positions in the open source community [are] targets of harassment". Those were claims made at Cloud Week 2015 in Paris by Jérôme Petazzoni, 'Tinkerer Extraordinaire' for software container provider, Docker.

"When I was young, I thought open source was a complete meritocracy, but in fact it is the opposite," he said.

Cloud Week is a EuroCloud-run programme of seminars and mini-conferences hosted in historic venues around the French capital.

Writing to Computing to clarify his comments, Petazzoni linked, by way of example, to a 5 July blog entry by Docker software engineer, Jessie Frazelle. In it, she writes: "Ever since I started speaking at conferences and contributing to open source projects I have been endlessly harassed.

"I’ve gotten hundreds of private messages on IRC and emails about sex, rape, and death threats. People emailing me saying they jerked off to my conference talk video (you’re welcome btw) is mild in comparison to sending photoshopped pictures of me covered in blood.

"I wish I could do my job, something I very obviously love doing, without any of this bullshit. However that seems impossible at this point. But I’m not leaving and I’m not going to stop being me."

Petazzoni asked Computing to clarify that he did not say that the harassment of women developers and engineers came from within the open source community itself.

Open source outfit Docker strongly advocates for and supports female engineers. Its SVP of engineering is Marianna Tessel and, while still male-dominated, its June DockerCon event featured a higher number of female speakers than is normal for DevOps events.

One of them, Datametica's Mukta Aphale, spoke on 'MomOps in DevOps', saying, "Some can deliver code, while some can deliver humans. But there are very few who can deliver both."

The sometimes difficult position of women in IT was a theme picked up by another Cloud Week speaker, Rachel Delacour, CEO of French BI provider, BIME Analytics.

She said cloud platforms and social media will "eliminate gender inequality" over the next 10 years. Women will have fewer constraints, because "gender identities will become irrelevant".

Docker's Petazzoni agrees with Delacour's belief that the position of women in IT will improve. He said, "I'll be happy to be proven wrong [on my predictions about the future of cloud computing] if the last one [about improving conditions for women in tech] comes true."