When will women be taken seriously in the FOSS community? That's a question that needs to be asked after the Debian GNU/Linux project garnered headlines earlier this month over an offensive mailing list post that had at least two women considering whether they would continue their involvement in the project.

On various women's mailing lists, a subscriber has raised the idea of a distribution developed "for and by women." So far, the idea has met with a cool reception. It might even be a troll. However, if such a distro ever gets underway, it would be very much in the spirit of the community, and might give more women the background and confidence to reduce the gender gap in free software.

Archana Raghupathy of Chennai started LinuxChix-India in 2005. It is the Indian chapter of the global women techies' network Linuxchix.org, and "tries to empower Indian women to use, develop and contribute to the world of free and open source software (FOSS)."

The Software Development Times has published an in-depth look the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) attempts at breaking down barriers for women in open source. It highlights the recently released report by the FSF's Women's Caucus, a mini-summit held last year to address issues in the FOSS community that some say prevent more females from participating.

This Tuesday (October 16th) there is an opportunity to attract more women contributors to technology in general and KDE in particular. Tuesday is Ada Lovelace Day; we are using the occasion to invite women to discover KDE. We want to help another generation of women be part of KDE. During the day, we will offer tutorials on different topics to give you a running start.

Women in Linux (or technology in general) has always been a rare breed. I have been very unsuccessful trying to make my female friends or family members getting interested in linux. So in my quest in getting more women interested in linux I have made this list of women who have actively contributed in linux community.

The KDE Community participated in the Outreach Program for Women (OPW) for the first time this year. It was more successful than expected. KDE got many great applications and mentored 4 students contributing to Free Software. The Outreach Program for Women encourages women to get involved in free and open source software.

The Women's Caucus is seeking an intern to assist with its work to increase the number of women involved in free software.

Although still very much in its infancy, FOSS LGBT is my little pet project for the LGBT GNU/Linux and FOSS users to come out of the woodwork and band together to help maintain diversity any acceptance in the FOSS community. The goals are similar to the Ubuntu Women project.