A Techno-Feminist Perspective on the Free/Libre Open Source

This paper tries to analyse the FLOSS development from a "techno-feminist" perspective (Wajcman 2004). Staying away from a reductionism that simplifies the gender issue in the FLOSS community to the level of a fight between men and women, the issues I attempt to address include not only the inequality that women face in computing, but also other inequalities that other users face mainly emerging from the power relationships between expert and lay (namely, developer and user) in software design.