THAWTELESS, West London, Monday (NNGadget) — Canonical, Inc. has announced the release later this month of Ubuntu Linux 9.10, “Karmic Koala,” to men.
Project founder Mark Shuttleworth explained that “this stuff is difficult to explain to girls” and thought they’d have gotten the hint when he called 8.04 “Hairy Hardon.” “Worrying about sexism in open source just detracts from the battle for Linux. So we’ve put the tits back into the default desktop. And arses.”
Crime-fighting geek Shuttleworth, who dresses as a billiionaire playboy by night, swore that plenty of women liked him lots and that he obviously wasn’t unable to get laid or anything, having gotten seriously rich in the dot-com era, not to mention having gone into space. “Chicks dig that stuff. Trust me, I’ve met lots of girls. More than five!”
Canonical Community Manager Jono Bacon echoed this sentiment on his blog. “We just don’t understand how come women are 15% of all computer programmers but only 1% of open source programmers. It must be a bit complicated for them. That’s why I’ve written this spontaneous blog post, completely unrelated to anything my boss may or may not have said, on all the fantastically talented women in free software, even if none of them seem to work much on Ubuntu any more. Also, I’m absolutely confident that saying I’m in a computer geek heavy metal band will get me lots of chicks too, even if their pretty little heads can’t understand Linux.”
A special women’s edition of Ubuntu 9.10 will be released on a bright pink CD. “It doubles as a makeup mirror!” said Shuttleworth.
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As far as I know not a single Ubuntu hacker has ever tried to sell stuff using booth babes, unlike a certain Perl hacker who shall remain nameless unless you know how to use Google. (He did eventually apologise, affterwards, when about forty million people told him this had been a seriously bad idea. But he still didn’t exactly seem to understand *why*.)
It’s an endemic problem. But “hey, other guys are obnoxious too” is hardly an excuse.