Feminism, co-option and open source software

Oh dear. It looks like I’m a relative latecomer to an unfortunate tale of sexism and co-option in the open source software development world.

It started with Richard M Stallman, founder of the Free Software movement that eventually produced stuff like Linux, making some sexist remarks, and a blogger calling him on it. (This isn’t particularly surprising, unfortunately – he’s well known to be both sexist and unpleasant.) Now, the blogger criticizing him for it is a good thing, right? Well, I thought so at first, but then I smelt a rat.

You see, one of the other things RMS did in his speech was strongly criticize Mono, a very controversial piece of software. Though he attempts to pretend otherwise, the author of the blog, David "Lefty" Schlesinger, is a strong Mono supporter. In fact, his previous blog post is a fairly vicious attack on both a specific anti-Mono individual and on everyone who’s anti-Mono. This is an area where Stallman’s views have some actual influence, mainly because he has an annoying habit of being right about this type of thing. Oh, and Lefty hasn’t shown any interest in the issue of sexism in the open source world before, but is suddenly launching a campaign against it (main target: RMS). Finally, it appears he may have form when it comes to trolling.

So, I’m confused. On the one hand, sexism is a big problem (particularly in software development, which is heavily male). On the other hand, it feels like this is less about fighting sexism and more about destroying someone’s reputation to win an entirely unrelated dispute, which makes me more than a little alarmed. I’m not even sure if using it as a political weapon in this way is good or bad for the fight against sexism. (I suspect Stallman is not the place to start; he’s a slightly eccentric irrelevance for the most part.)

Any thoughts? When does fighting sexism justify joining the campaign of someone whose motives are less than pure?